Christine Taylor's Core Copywriting

Don't Forget the Small Stuff

I was checking out a sales letter generator software, not for my clients but for a couple of my own niche sites. I input my email address which brought up the developer's sales letter... which showed a misspelled word right smack dab in the middle of his big red headline.

How fast do you think I abandoned that site and that software? You got it. Pretty fast.

You wouldn't think that corporations are guilty of the same glaring mistakes, but in my work as a journalist I ran across many misspellings and grammatical errors in press releases, email pitches, and web pages. And these were corporate materials, not one-man-shops! It only takes one  misspelled word to turn off a busy journalist. Just be careful.

(And you can bet that I spell-checked and proofread this post a few times over.)

Selling to Non-Tech Execs

Clay Cocalis, VP TowerGroup, makes a good point about selling technology to executives instead of the IT department. Those executives don't care as much about the details of the technology as they do the bottom line goals of their company.

"Most sales people in the tech area do a good job of talking tech with the IT department, but they also have to understand the surrounding business issues that are keeping the line of business executives up at night."

I believe you need buy-in from both groups: non-tech executives and IT. Are your marketing communications and collateral fashioned to reach both groups? If not, they should be.

Your Marketing Collateral Needs a Checklist

1. Is your product or service clear in the collateral? It's easy to assume that readers know what you're talking about; when unbeknownst to you they don't have a clue.

2. What are the features that will interest your audience the most? There is a huge dependence on "benefits" in marketing writing. This is a mostly a good thing, but in technical marketing collateral you have to get your features across too.

3. How are you different from your competitors? Unless you're doing a competitive positioning piece you might not mention your competitors by name, but you had better not be doing a second-hand echo of their positioning, especially if they're a lot better-heeled than you are. (Avis may have developed their tagline in response to Hertz, but that tagline has made them billions.)

4. What are your customer's pain points? Mentioning them is critical in a white paper, but even in other formats you should know why your audience is going to care about your offering in the first place.

5. Do you know who your prospects are? Small, medium or large enterprise; large mid-range; small mid-range; SOHO; data center managers; CIOs; etc. Know who you're trying to reach with what collateral.

6. Is your collateral easy on the eyes? IT staff and engineers want technical collateral, but that doesn't mean they'll wade through writing that is dull and dense. And executives won't stand for it. Design your collateral for logical and headache-free reading, and write using strong words, a clear structure, and an active voice.

7. Involve your sales team. You just know they're going to change things around anyway.

Marketing in High-Tech, or the Lack Thereof

jay Lipe of Emerge Marketing is right on the money when he says:

"Today, many tech companies enjoy a reputation, deservedly so, for being on the cutting edge. Faced with a cutthroat market, they excel at inventing and rolling out new technologies and products. Yet when it comes to marketing, they take a decidedly low-tech approach.

From too much techno-speak in brochures, to vague positioning, to the doomed view that marketing just spends money, these high-fliers run the risk of disappearing as fast as they appeared."

Haven't I said this very same thing? Yes I have. I am frequently appalled at the inability of newly minted technical CEOs to grasp the "Why should I care?" factor of selling. Nobody cares how cool your technology is. I came out of IT, believe me, I know. When a neophyte salesperson would sit across from my team and blather on about how many great features their technology had and how advanced it was and blah and blah and blah... we surreptiously checked our watches, wondered what was for lunch, and when he said he was leaving.

Even when you're selling to engineers, even when you're selling to people who LIKE the bells and whistles, even when you're writing a technical white paper; you have still got to tell them how the product will make their lives easier and better. Otherwise there is no point. No point at all.

Marketing Collateral vs. Cool Tools?

Here's a quote from an otherwise  good CMO article called "Tech Takes Back the Market."

Third is the transformation of marketing communications from one-way broadcasting about features and functions to interactive dialogue about business solutions. The current hype in the marcom world revolves around online tools like blogs, podcasts, RSS, and vertical search. Cool tools may well have a place in tech marketing's next iteration, but the more important innovation is recognizing the need for a new mindset that embraces the idea of participatory marketing.

I'm not convinced that I agree with this one. I make my living writing marketing collateral that do not depend on blogs, podcasts, or RSS. Vertical search maybe, in terms of content syndication for white papers. Writer Rob Leavitt  does go beyond the "cool tools" by saying that the important innovation is a new mindset based on participatory marketing. Maybe it's just me, but when I was in IT for 15 years the IT/engineer personalities I knew didn't want to participate with marketing beyond reading the marcom and acting on it if they wanted to. Now, I can see the value of using creative new approaches to providing marcom based on a prospect's needs. I can see the prospect entering project parameters and/or business needs online and being served up highly targeted and information marcom. (And of course a sales rep's contact if wanted.) I just don't want to lose sight of collateral as an important type of marketing communications.

I liked Rob's article, I would just like  a clearer idea of what he means by "participatory marketing" where collateral is concerned. 

PR and the Editors

Pushing-the-edge-blogs may be trumpeting the demise of the press release in favor of the blog, but they're just pushing-the-edge-of-insanity. Press releases are still an important part of getting your client's name out there. Not the best way mind you, but a valid way and you need to know how to do it. I should know, my background is in technology journalism. This bears repeating: please don't call a broadcast list of press contacts; you'll just get variations of these two messages:

(Polite) "I'll look for it, and if it fits in with articles I'm doing I'll give you a call." Right.

(Less-than-polite) "I get 200 releases a day. Don't call." Bang!

Well, you knew that. So what do you do? Editors are so swamped with information that they must work with tunnel vision -- like horses with blinders on. They only see the messages that impact their work right now. So help them out:

• Watch the ed cals and suggest relevant interviews. Be prepared to explain why you think it's relevent. "This is the next big thing in block-based storage!" won't cut it with an editor.
• Build a relationship with the editor so they're glad to hear from you. Yes, it can happen. I'm still friends with several of the PR people who haunted my telephone door during my editorial years.
• Think way beyond the press release -- offer to write contributed articles if the magazine takes them, and query with your ideas if the magazine does not. The more the magazine depends on contributed content, as many trade journals do, the more likely you are to get a good response to your offer.

Writing bylined articles is a really good idea for a vendor to do. Listen to this: "Over 90% of engineers report that trade magazines are their number one source for getting information about suppliers." Don't depend on a hit-or-miss mention from your press release, offer to write the darned article. Read on for more on how to do this and why it's so valuable.

Does Transactional vs. Consultative Matter?

I recently read about segmenting prospective technology buyers into two different camps: 1) transactional and 2) consultative.

The transactional prospects know what they want already -- for example, they have decided to buy 50 laptops with set specifications. They were looking for price, speed of delivery, support options. They didn't need to know what they needed, they already decided that. This camp needs sales collateral like informative brochures (really informative I mean), web copy with specs and support options clearly laid out, ROI calculators, product briefs, etc.

The consultative prospects know that they have a problem but not how to solve it and they're looking for ideas. The prospect is farther back in the selling cycle but can quickly move forward to a close with a vendor they trust and who feels understand them and their problems. Classic  marketing collateral works with them: white papers, articles in trade journal magazines, case studies.

I would add a third camp: prospects who THINK they know what they need, but don't. These are the IT folk who have decided on a solution... but it's wrong. These prospects need careful handling since the last thing an IT person wants to feel is that they've made a major mistake on an already long proposal process. These people need marketing collateral that points them in a different and better direction, emphasizing how much better a different solution will be for them, and why. A mix of marketing and sales collateral is best here, since these prospects are ready to buy once they are clear on what that should be.

The B2B Collateral Difference

David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the report "B2B Ain't What It Used to Be" remarked that:

The key differences between consumer marketing and B2B marketing are that business targets are harder to segment, they typically need far more details about a company's products or services prior to purchase and they usually take a longer time to reach a purchasing decision. Another key difference is that far more B2B purchases are finalized offline.

My conclusion: this is exactly why B2B marketers, especially when they're in complex sales cycle industries like technology, need to depend on long-lived marketing collateral. Collateral can offer many details about features, usage and benefits, act to keep a vendor top-of-mind during a prospect's decision cycle, and are useful both online and printed. Collateral like white paper, articles and case studies are the gifts that keep on giving.