If every sentence of your marketing copy isn’t selling me on technical benefits or business benefits, why are you bothering to put it in front of me?

Worse yet, if your copy is sprinkled with drivel and fluff, why put it on your website where the entire planet can see it?

I saw a couple of examples of really bad copy this week, and they’ve got me thinking about how technology companies struggle to tell their story in a meaningful way.

Ad out: Marketers

We hire marketers to start our conversation with people outside the building. We tell them our technology story and we expect them to filter it into something appealing to different audiences. For example:

In order to deliver the type of user experiences enabled by these innovations, software must keep pace – otherwise we will fall painfully short of capitalizing on the opportunities presented by these unprecedented hardware achievements…It’s the next great challenge faced by an industry with a history of meeting and surpassing high consumer expectations.

No engineer would ever say that. I’ve written meatier content than that and had engineers tell me it was fluff.

Ad out: Engineers

So should we let the engineers do the writing, like this?

With up to 3-stream MIMO and 900 Mbit/s radio performance, our 802.11n APs deliver Ethernet speed without the wires. Multi-radio, multi-channel mesh routing and automatic mesh failover offer fault tolerance, and provide fast coverage in hard-to-wire areas.

Engineers aren’t right about everything. They understand the tech, but they don’t always understand the need to appeal to different audiences. They know how to appeal to other engineers, but rarely to journalists, analysts and C-level prospects.

Drop the confetti and pick up the razor

Frankly, I’m not impartial. I may get mildly annoyed when I see ham-handed geek-sell, but I get downright cranky when I see lousy marketing copy masquerading as technical sales material.

Marketers, try your hardest to tell the story the way the engineers want to tell it. Just be sure to edit it first.

Engineers, quit looking down your noses at the marketers. You can’t do their job any more than they can do yours, so educate them.

Let’s see whether we can do better, shall we all?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Sakarias Ingolfsson

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Leon Sterling of Compelling Concepts wrote last week about the blurred (or missing) distinction between Marketing and Sales in the minds of most people in a given organization.

True, Marketing is strategy and Sales is execution, but even that nuance is lost on, say, a draftsman or a QA lead or the bloke who runs the warehouse. Many of these people think that the main difference between Marketing and Sales is that Marketing lies and Sales lies even more.

I spend a lot of time with software engineers, and my rapport with them is important.

• Why? Because I need to get information out of their heads and into marketing content.
• Do they care what it’s for? No.
• Why not? Because they don’t realize that I need to feed the strategy (Marketing) beast so that the company can have some execution (Sales).
• Would it be better if they cared? Yes, I think so.
• Why? It’s possible to show these people that their contributions to Marketing can help move the Sales needle. That will resonate with some of them, and they will participate more actively.
• What should we do? I’m glad you asked.

Show them the marketing science

Consider that the reason that your co-workers don’t honor your work is that they don’t see the science in it.

You’re a marketing manager; do you feel the science in what you do? Is your organization helping you to promote that science?

You know what I mean by “science”: the data you collect that helps you justify your marketing spend.

Try starting conversations with your co-workers and subject matter experts with sentences like these:

• “81 percent of physicians online visit sites with content expressly for health care professionals. These physicians are our target market, and that’s why I need your expertise to help me develop the pieces we’re going to place there.” (Marketing metrics)
• “We get about 12 percent conversion based on the keyword ‘IT service management’ and over 22 percent conversion based on ‘service catalog.’ That’s why I want to interview you on customer requirements for the catalog.” (Web analytics)
• “In April we posted once a week to our blog. In May and June we posted two or three times a week, and three new analysts started following us. These people are influential, and I need you to help me keep blogging good content so we can ride and support that influence.” (Content frequency)

You know the data are there. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t have a job. Savvy marketing managers realize that they can turn the data not only outward, to help the sales effort, but also inward, to evangelize their co-workers.

They have solid marketing data and they’re not afraid to use it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Rob Ireton

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1. Marketing = Starting the Conversation

Writing for diagrams

Graphics and diagrams are at the heart of good marketing communications, but your writer can’t always make them work for a written piece.

The deadline loomed, and still I had no more than an outline from the writer. “What’s taking so long?” I asked.

“I think I have writer’s block,” replied the writer.

“You don’t believe in writer’s block,” I said. “Your Website says so.”

“I’m having trouble wrapping the business-benefits message and the graphical overviews and everything you want me to cover into a single package that somebody will bother to read,” she said. “There are several ideas you want me to describe, and the presentation diagrams from the engineers are not conceptual enough. They dive into platform repositories and toolsets without explaining overall workflow, let alone business advantages.”

I hate it when that happens.

“So, what is slowing you down?” I asked.

“The diagrams describe only the front of the elephant,” she answered. “This paper has to describe the front, back, top, bottom and middle of the elephant. I’m trying to do that with the diagrams I have, but it doesn’t work.”

“Do you know how you want the diagrams to look in order to fit with your text?” I asked.

“I need some time to flesh them out.”

The writer took about 4 hours to redesign the diagrams on pencil and paper, then met with the engineers who had designed the graphics. “I’m telling a different story from the one you told,” she explained to them, “but I need to make sure that I’m getting it right. It won’t match your story, but it needs to be consistent with it.”

The engineers dutifully looked at the drawings. “That’s not how we would explain the workflow,” they commented, “but it’s not wrong.”

While the writer modified the draft around the updated diagrams, we had a designer polish them up. The mixture of the two was a better fit for the ideal readers: technically advanced people to whom we were introducing mid-stream changes (and trying to convince them to get off the dime and adopt).

The moral: Hire a writer who is not afraid to pull out a pencil and paper and say, “I can’t explain it to fit your drawing. Let me show you how I can explain it.”

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: gigile

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Are you trying to nudge your engineering company into social media? Are you having trouble getting the engineers to go along with you?

Whaddya mean by that?

Social media marketing: Participating more or less actively on Twitter, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups, wiki pages, blogs, videos, podcasts and the like. This is an effort designed to engage customers in a fast-moving, at times alarmingly public channel.

Engineering company: One that is known (both internally and externally) more for its technology than for its level of customer engagement. Your cell phone and computer are filled with the products of these companies, so if you look at the stamps on the components, you discover names like Broadcom, Seagate, LSI, Altera and countless others. Unlike Intel, which came out of the closet years ago by branding itself noisily with “Intel Inside,” most of these companies are pretty nameless and faceless, and may never see the wisdom in marketing through social media.

Get it: Devote internal resources to an organized effort at meeting customers in social media marketing channels, if only for a limited period of time to test the waters. “Getting it” should provide for ongoing activity once it has become obvious that customers are awake in these channels and paying attention.

Having defined it that way, here’s a suggestion as to how frame the debate:

Why engineering companies WILL be the last to get it

1. “Social media marketing” includes the word “marketing,” and engineers don’t much like or understand marketing.
2. Companies run by engineers still associate the entire category with MySpace, teenagers, and bored people letting the rest of the world know that the drive-thru line at Burger King is moving slowly today.
3. “Our customers and prospects are more enlightened than that. They’re not in those forums anyway.”
4. You can’t measure the ROI, and you won’t be able to for a long time.
5. Marketing didn’t create the Internet; engineers did. But the watchword for engineers on the Internet has always been “Stay anonymous,” so they’ll never embrace the element of self-revelation essential to social media.

Why engineering companies WON’T be the last to get it

1. You don’t just post plain text on a Web page somewhere; developers are coming up with hot, hip, engaging tools around these platforms. Real engineers like to hack around in such tools, or at least try to game them.
2. Google gets it, and they are an engineering company.
3. No engineer likes to be left out forever. As long as one self-respecting engineer is posting to some company’s blog somewhere, eventually others will try it.
4. If you don’t engage with your customers and prospects, your competitors will. Engineering companies don’t have trouble seeing that.

So, if your job is to boost your engineering company’s online presence and customer engagement in these forums, maybe you should give the process a different name:

“Social Media Engineering”

Do you think this will resonate better with your engineers? “I need you to help with our social media engineering this month. Can you man the Twitter account and see what’s going on?”

Between Bing and Google, there are under 1,000 occurrences of this phrase, and nobody has the domain yet (although Linda Skrocki at Sun Microsystems has it in her job title).

Do you think this will fly, or is it just a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

photo credit: jurvetson

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“Write a series of technical articles to help evangelize the technology,” we said, “two to three pages each. They should introduce developers and customers to the new features they can use in programming on the platform. We need to get the word out about this, so we’ll put the articles on the developer Web site. We’ll give you the topics, and you do the rest: interview the engineers, talk to the product managers, write it up, circulate drafts, edit it and submit it to the Web team.”

That was about all we told him, and he did all of that, for several months. He delivered reliably and on time.

Turns out that what we told him to do is not what we wanted him to do.

“There’s too much fluff in the articles,” observed the VP of Engineering. “We need more meat instead of muffins.”

The writer was perplexed. “I’m doing what you told me to do, but if you want me to turn up the technical heat, I will. But I assume that, if you just wanted pages of technical language, you’d have the Documentation group do this. You hired a technical marketing writer to help persuade people to work on the platform, right?” He underlined it.

Right.

“Can you give us something more technical, yet not turn the content into a user guide?” we asked.

“Sure. I just need to know whether you want meat, muffins, or meaty muffins,” he said. A good way to put it. Must be why he’s in marketing.

The articles got deeper and the VP of Engineering became more pleased. People started reading them more, and spending more time on them, according to our Web logs.

Moral: When you hire a writer, be sure to explain how shallow or deep you want the content to be. Meat or muffins. Corporate cheerleading (I always enjoy envisioning that) or something that a developer will pass on to a colleague, maybe even retweet.

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1. To persuade or not to persuade…

Few people outside of the discipline understand marketing, though most of their perspectives fall into a few buckets:

• “Marketing is advertising.” Actually, that’s not a bad starting point, although “advertising is a form of marketing” is more accurate. My father worked in advertising for centuries, and only a few years ago did I realize that it had to do with marketing.
• “Marketing is Sales.” Many people confuse the two; I call them “engineers.” Marketing and Sales are complementary functions, but not all marketers can sell, and not all salespeople can market.
• “Marketing is throwing parties.” In some organizations, that’s true, even if people sound cynical when they say it. Some industries rely on trade shows and large, splashy events to get attention; the auto industry comes to mind.
• “Marketing is public relations.” Again, PR is part of marketing, but it’s not the whole thing. PR is one way – a rather expensive one anymore – of getting attention.
• “Marketing is starting the conversation.” Now that…that’s an idea.

When you hire a marketing writer, does she know that her job is to tell a compelling enough story to start a conversation which, if all goes well, somebody in Sales will monetize?

You assign a white paper or a case study to a writer. What do you get back: a surgeon’s report or a conversation-starter? What will the ideal reader do after reading it: close the browser window forever, or give you a call? (Or better yet, retweet it?) What else do you have in the campaign if the first piece doesn’t work? What else do you have in the campaign to keep the conversation going?

You need to think about marketing as a conversation. What’s more, you need to ensure you work with writers who think about their work that way as well.

If you need to mull this over some more, have your aunt and uncle invite you over for dinner more often.

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It’s not easy to make everybody happy when you’re in Marketing and public relations. Engineers, VPs, execs, and firebrands in Technical Support all want to publish content to make their lives easier. Some of them don’t really know what people in Marketing do, so when they’re facing deadlines or customer pressure, they don’t put up with very much delay before they run around the end and figure out their own way to get content written and published.

So for example, the project director inside a large government institution has a remarkable story to tell, but he’s got only a few weeks to use his budget or lose it. The public relations manager tells him, “Yes, we can hire the ideal writer for your project, a person who knows your specialty inside and out. We can also publish the story for you.”

Two weeks go by, and he doesn’t hear from them. The clock is ticking, so he spends some time on the search engines and article sites, in case he needs to hire the writer himself.

Another week goes by, and the PR manager calls to ask some “preliminary” questions about the project. The director starts making phone calls to find a fallback writer.

Finally, he realizes the only way to get the piece done is to hire the writer himself, which he does. The paper ends up a bit late and a bit over budget, but he has it in hand.

Now, if you’re the project director, do you take the paper to the PR manager and ask him to publish it?

If you’re the PR manager, will you work with the content, or be upset by the end-run?

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1. Tell the writer about the interviewee’s specialty and personal characteristics, the kinds of information to elicit, and what you want out of the interview. If I know that I’m trying to get information from an engineer on how the company’s technology was developed, I’ll steer him/her away from discussions of product marketing and trade shows. When you provide this kind of background, you save yourself time and money in the long run, even if you have to brief the writer a bit.
2. Tell the interviewee what you’re trying to accomplish in the interview and in the written piece. Most interviewees never get this picture. The writer can provide it during the conversation, but it’s awkward, and you as marketing manager are in a better position to describe the goals in terms that will mean something to your co-worker or customer.
3. Take part in the meeting or call. It’s a good idea to be part of the conversation yourself, especially with a new writer or a new project. If your writer has done six case studies with your customers already, and you’re confident about the work product, then there’s no need to attend. But if you’re asking your press release writer to interview an investor, you should plan to be a fly on the wall to keep the conversation going the way you want it to go and help the writer through unfamiliar territory.

Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense. But so does flossing your teeth, and a lot of people don’t do that either. This is really cheap insurance on the project for which you hire a new writer.

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One of our engineering managers had a vision for a user networking site and a budget to get content written for it. You need the content to tell people your story, of course; otherwise, they have to guess what you’re up to. The engineering manager chose the writer.

One of our marketing managers, however, has ended up “owning” the site, with responsibility for how it looks, what’s on it and the extent to which it succeeds with the user base.

When these two managers agree on a topic, the writer generates content, then has it approved by both managers and posted to the site. Up to that point, everybody is winning.

The problem is that the engineering manager thinks the content is getting buried and misplaced on the site, where users can’t find it or where it’s out of place. The marketing manager thinks it’s good, creative content, but his bosses and other execs have yet to make clear their vision of what the site needs to do and how it needs to attract visitors. Until he knows that, he wants to focus more on usability and flow than on promotion of text and content. The first one keeps buying the cake, and the second one keeps putting it in the refrigerator for later.

“Figure something out,” both of them tell the writer. “You know the product, you know the technology and you know how to write. Keep coming up with new ideas for different kinds of content we might be able to use in the near term.”

In other words, “Fail.”

From the wings, I’m watching the writer squirm between the rock and the hard place. She’s a freelance writer with plenty of talent (and other clients, for that matter), to whom these two managers have handed a problem she cannot solve because she has neither stick nor carrot. Not only that, but this is more than she hired on to deal with.

I think it’s a temporary problem, but I hope we resolve it while she’s still available to write for us.

Ideas, anyone?

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Figure out which one you want before you award the project.

One of our engineering directors has funded a series of news articles on a technology platform we’re rolling out. (Actually, a marketing manager is funding it, but the engineering director got to pick the writer and is picking the topics for most of the articles.)

In a meeting yesterday over a draft of the seventh article in two months, I saw the light begin to go on for him.

“You know, we need to stop and think about these articles,” he said. “My boss tells me the ones so far have been a little bit ‘too slick,’ but this latest one is a much deeper dive into interfaces and newfuncs and libraries. This is a really different kind of thing, isn’t it?”

Uh, yes. It is.

I kept hearing the f-word – fluff – applied to the first six articles, usually from people with an engineering background. (In fact, I posted on it.)

• I looked at it as technical marketing content; they looked at it as confetti.
• I was being mindful of the role of persuasion in getting people to adopt the platform; they want to dive in and start writing code.
• I’m focusing on the external audience that doesn’t know what the platform is for; they’re thinking about people who breathe the same exhaust as they do and want to reduce memory footprint while enabling statically linked window management.

“I need you to strategize some more about these articles before we do any more writing,” he said to me. “We need to start answering a couple of basic questions, like ‘Why should I want to register and download the kit?’ and ‘Why should I move to the new platform from the old version?’”

I wish I’d thought of that.

He told me that the marketing manager had wanted to hire a writer who was a a real writer, but he had wanted somebody who knew the platform and knew this building and the people in it, which is how we ended up with our current writer. I think we’re all bouncing back and forth between wanting a technical marketing writer and a technical writer, between needing to persuade readers and assuming they’re already convinced.

Have you run into this? Do you cut it with the same knife?

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