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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There’s something about spring that prompts marketing managers in technology companies to generate as much content as possible in as little time as possible. The marcomm writer’s workload spikes wildly.

It might have to do with abruptly awaking from the content doldrums of winter, or perhaps with late spring-early summer trade shows, but “these go to eleven” at this time of year. White papers, case studies, blog posts, newsletter articles…marketing managers suddenly want it all.

I’ve posted before about not having much use for writer’s block, and it’s more of a luxury than ever in seasons like this. In fact, posting to a blog becomes a luxury at times like this.

Mind you, there are plenty of lessons to relate with this much volume (just not much time in which to write them all up):

• Always provide an outline for anything longer than 2000 words.
• Write out the summary in your white paper outlines so the reviewers can see that you understand the message they’re trying to convey.
• Funnel all reviews through a single client-side contact.
• Everything takes longer than it takes. And then some.

I once had a former cook as a roommate, and he told me that waitresses sometimes conspire to “sandbag” the cook, by buffering their orders and then suddenly posting large amounts of work at once. Marketing managers aren’t that mischievous, but at this time of year, if feels as though the consumers of their content might be.

Marketing communications writers have reason to wonder.

How’s your spring going?

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: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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“It’s a solid case study,” said Dan. “Too bad we can’t use it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I sent it to the customer last week, but they said we can’t publish it due to pending litigation.”

That seemed silly to me, but I’m not the lawyer. I guess that a deep freeze on publishing anything is a company’s way of circling the wagons when the arrows begin flying.

Dan had paid a lot in time, money and face to get the case study written, and it grieved both of us marketers not to be able to use it.

“Can we run it and not mention the customer’s name or any particulars?” I asked.

“Maybe. Wouldn’t it lose a lot of its value, though?”

“It would lose some value,” I answered, “but it would be better than not using it at all.”

Anonymous case studies

True enough, some of the value in a case study or customer success story is tied up in brand equity (usually somebody else’s brand). When your sprinkler heads are keeping the greens at Pebble Beach verdant, or your encoding algorithms make Vimeo work, you want to be able to drop customer names.

But any marketing manager knows that, the bigger the name, the harder the approval process. Press releases and case studies have to run marketing and legal gauntlets in large companies, and sometimes even the most fantastic case studies die a long, painful death of terminal inbox.

Of course, you can try to strip particulars out of the piece to get your point across without using names. Here are three tips for doing this:

1. Remove or replace details that would allow an outsider to figure out the phantom customer. This may include rewriting bits of it to change geography, gender, application and more. Get as far away from your customer as possible while still describing the success.
2. Turn the study into a “caselet;” here’s an example in a life sciences context. These focus almost entirely on the problem you’ve solved, and the customer fades into the background. The marketing communications writer must emphasize the story and even add conflict to distract the reader from wondering who the customer is. Caselets are business-focused, and their audience is the decision-maker.
3. Turn it into a technical use case by focusing on the how-did-they-do-it. Include specifications, schematics, dimensions, quantitative data and programming code. There is still a role for persuasion in this, but you’re trying to persuade the technical people who will influence the decision-maker. You want them to say, “If they can do that for those guys, let’s find out whether they can do what we need done.”

Once you’ve played one of these cards, you’re in the clear – strictly speaking – and may do with the piece as you please. Still, in the interest of a good relationship with your customer, you should grant them a courtesy review of the neutered product. You should also run it by your own company’s counsel.

Doesn’t always work

Sometimes the named endorsement in a case study is omnipotent, and anonymizing is pointless. A business development manager for one of my Asian telecom clients told me:

There are only about 15 companies in the world who can use our technology. We have two of them so far, and the decision-makers in both cases asked to see a success story, then asked for the phone number of the person named in it.

But for a typical B2B sale, the anonymous case study still likely has value. After all, a good story is a terrible thing to waste.

How have you dealt with case studies when you couldn’t name the customer?

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: Ben Schumin

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Marketing communications writers try to tell the story of the company that hires them. We should focus on customer problems instead.

Most of the time, I like David Meerman Scott of WebInkNow renown, and agree with what he has to say. I think he has come to “believe his own stuff” and go on a bit, but most of his observations about marketing and PR are cogent and valuable. I was working on the rewrite of a white paper about a telecommunications technology last month, when one of Scott’s posts came to my aid.

The original paper was a real chest-thumper, filled from cover to cover with a technical marketing manager’s concept of what the company does best, and why everybody reading the paper needs it. There was a technical dimension to the paper, which was an opportunity for an under-the-hood look at how the product works, but even that was wasted in a tangle of techno-doggerel:

• end-to-end turnkey solution
• scale horizontally across platforms and channels
• robust, frictionless infrastructure driving the business model of the entire ecosystem

It was easy for me to see what we needed to throw away, but I didn’t have a clear picture of how to replace it.

Until I read the Scott post that evening, “Single most essential PR pitching tip:”

So here’s the single most essential media and blogger pitching tip for PR people

Don’t pitch your product.

Most journalists don’t care about products.

Instead…Tell us how your organization solves problems for customers.

Here’s a guy who used to work as a PR manager, and who now gets pitched six ways from Tuesday. He’s tired of uninspired pitches, but knows a good one when he sees it, because it loudly proclaims, “This is the problem, and this is how we solve it.”

I gutted the outline the marketing communications writer had begun to put together and turned it inside out to focus on the problems the reader might face, and how this technology would solve them. The managers who commissioned the paper liked the idea and told me as much.

So, I decided to push my luck.

“Let’s collect some competitive intelligence and put it into this paper,” I ventured. “Put yourself in the place of the people reading this: you’re investigating half a dozen products, including ours. Wouldn’t you like somebody to save you time by helping to assess the fit of each vendor, even if it’s not a completely unbiased perspective? As long as we’re not slinging mud, I think we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

They had misgivings about it, but I convinced them to give it a try. We’ll see how the paper turns out, and how it’s received.

I suspect that, after “Which problems do you solve for your customers?” Scott would probably ask, “What do your competitors do that you don’t?”

I would.

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.

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“We’ll need a white paper to explain the advantages,” said one. “We need to get existing customers to upgrade, but they won’t do it without a good overview. They’ll just be confused and ask us a jillion questions.”

The other agreed. “You’re right. We also need to get the attention of people using competing products, though, and prospects new to the space.”

“I think it’s a really compelling technical story. If the paper’s done right, Sales could probably use it for lead generation, we could hand it out at trade shows, maybe get some trade magazines to pick it up.”

“There’s a lot we could do with it. We could use excerpts in blog posts and collateral, follow up with case studies and syndicate it.”

“Good idea. So, when are you going to write it?”

“I’m not going to write it. Why don’t you?”

“I don’t have the time.”

“Neither do I.”

Silence.

“I know: let’s have the tech writers do it. Let’s talk to Tech Pubs and see whether they can cut us a writer for a few days. We can push them some graphics and text, and they can re-purpose some of the product documentation.”

“OK. Then we can do a technical review on it and get it out there.”

- – - – -

These two engineers have noble goals. They understand the value of a good technology marketing piece – in this case, a white paper – and how it can help them explain their technology to prospects. They’ve even been kissed by the marketing muse, judging from the way they want to use the paper.

So, what’s wrong with this picture?

They’re forgetting about the important difference between a technical publication and a technology marketing piece:

Persuasion

Both groups of writers need to inform, and they need to deliver technical information and details accurately. But technical writers don’t need to persuade anybody of anything; the customer has already bought the product. Marketing writers work long before the purchase has taken place; their stock in trade is persuasion.

These engineers require a writer who is able to deliver information in a balanced way – so that the reader doesn’t feel insulted – yet simultaneously unveil the advantages of the company’s product and persuade the reader to take the next step: pick up the phone, register for a demo, subscribe to a feed, pull out a credit card.

It isn’t that technical writers don’t know how to persuade like this; it’s that they’re unaccustomed to doing it in user documentation.

The moral: Leave your documentation to Tech Pubs, and your persuasive pieces to Marketing.

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