Notes from 49th International STC Conference
Nashville, Tennessee, May 5-8, 2002

Can You Help Us Sell It?
A Crash Course in Marketing Writing for Technical Communicators

Jack Massa
Guidance Communications, Inc.

Jack Massa is president of Guidance Communications, Inc., an Atlanta consulting firm that focuses on online marketing and technical communication, has over 17 years' experience as a marketing writer, technical writer, and online information developer.

Session Description: This workshop examined strategies, writing styles, and building blocks used to create technical marketing documents. Participants analyzed real-world examples: print and online, excellent and awful.

Slides: Available at STC's Conference Web site

Note: The author published a paper in the Proceedings to this conference. For an electronic copy or a hard copy (depending on availability), contact Dan Voss.

• Focus is on the writing in marketing writing and on marketing writing for technology.
• Approach
   
• How do you teach an entire profession in 90 minutes or less?
• High level view of the territory, and zoom down from time to time to examine the details.
• Adult learning: read, study, analyze, practice.
• Why marketing writing?
   
• Add to our skills sets
• Do something different
• Work more creatively
• Make more money
• "Anyone who can help sell something can usually make more money."
• Marketing writing vs technical writing
   
• Different purposes
• Different strategies and writing styles
• Different cycles
• Purposes of technical writing
   
• Inform
• Teach
• Impart information
• Purposes of marketing writing
   
• Inform, teach, impart information (still apply)
• Attract attention
• Excite interest
• Persuade
• Some technical marketing documents and their purposes
   
• Direct mail, sales letters, and e-mails: announce new products and special offers
• Newsletters/"e-zines": Promote an organization and its products over time. Build an ongoing sense of community.
• News releases: Announce corporate news, new products, or upgrades.
• Brochures and Web brochures: Introduce a product or a business and motivate the reader to take the next step in the sales cycle. (Usually this means to contact the organization for more information or to arrange a demonstration.)
• FAQs: Answer detailed questions and possible objections to purchase.
• Spec sheets/data sheets/product slicks: Support the sales effort by providing details and specifications for a technology product or servce.
• Customer success stories/case studies: Illustrate the success of the company's solutions by showing how it has helped real customers.
• White papers: Demonstrate the author's or organization's expertise by providing in-depth details and commentary.
• Strategies and writing styles
   
• Grab attention
• Appeal to emotions
• Use vivid, sensory, concrete language
• Write in a conversational tone
• End with a clear call to action
• Grabbing attention
   
• Convince me to keep reading
• Key challenge for marketing writing: cut through the clutter
• Study real world examples
• Techniques for grabbing attention
   
• Put a new twist on a familiar phrase ("We like to stay close to the cutting edge [without skating off].")
• Connect two key ideas with a repeated word ("Online Learning: Bottom-Line Results")
• Ask rhetorical questions
• Appeal to the reader's current business concerns
• Appealing to emotion
   
• Rational appeal vs emotional appeal: both work!
• What does your audience really want?
• Use emotional appeal especially for ads or other writing that must attract attention or introduce something new
• Study real world examples.
• One example: "Submittal due tomorrow. 500 CAD drawings to print.
You're stuck late at the office, again.".
• Vivid, concrete, sensory language
   
• Evoke the physical world and senses (works in technical writing, too!)
• Even more important with marketing writing
• Picture the moment the buyer is buying
• Study real world examples.
• One example: "And with our credit card-sized remote control, you can control this award-winning sound from the palm of your hand."
• Write with a conversational tone
   
• Short sentences and sentence fragments
• Write clearly and to the point
• Jargon is OK, if it's the right jargon
• Avoid fluff; shun hype
• End with a clear call to action
   
• The something you want the reader to do
• Immediately, if not sooner
• Take the next step in the sales process
• Emphasize the reason to act
• Study real world examples.
• One example: "So if you're tired of working late because your printers took the afternoon off, call SwiftPrint Corporation today."
• Seven building blocks for marketing documents
   
1. Attractor
2. Purpose statement
3. Features and benefits list
4. Supporting facts
5. Specifications
6. Testimonials
7. Call to action
• For successful marcom (and any business concept)
   
• Overt benefit: What's in it for the customer? Quantified.
• Real reason to believe: What's the evidence that it's true?
• Dramatic difference: How is it different from the competition? (Discriminators)
• Taken from Doug Hall's Jump Start Your Business Brain.
• Direct mail, promotional letters, and e-mail
   
• Huge volume, both paper and e-mail
• Purpose is to generate business by delivering an offer
• The offer may be a new product or service, an upgrade, or a special pricing promotion.
• Note: Using the word "FREE" in a headline resulted in a 40% greater response rate.
• E-mail notes can easily be personalized.
• Newsletters and e-zines
   
• Exploded with rise of e-mail, because the cost is near-zero
• Purpose is to promote a business by fostering an ongoing awareness of it
• Constant need for fresh content
• News, customer success stories, how-to tips, company announcements, etc.
• Initial e-newsletters were text-only, but there is a trend to add HTML graphics as more e-mail systems provide that feature.
• Can be customized to each user's areas of interest by tagging news items and pulling just those keyed to a user's interest. Thus each e-mail is individualized to the recipient's needs.
• There is an element of dialogue and a need for candor, even if it comes to product bugs and workarounds.
• Press releases/news releases
   
• Primary purpose is to generate news coverage by communicating with media.
• Today, every company pus them on the Web for all to see.
• Many in the technology fields are awful.
• Brochures (print)
   
• Purpose is to introduce a company, product, or service the reader knows nothing about
• Importance of layout and design: the writer normally works with a designer
• Brochures (Web)
   
• "Brochureware" has its place
• Most companies need pages that identify who they are and what they do (i.e., establish their "brand.")
• Writer works as part of a team.
• FAQs
   
• On Web pages or in brochures
• Real purpose, often, is to sell
• Raise and dispose of buyer objections
• Spec sheets/slicks
   
• One-page "brochure" often produced for technology products
• Describes the product and provides its specs
• Features and benefits
• Success stories/case studies
   
• Short "articles," posted to Web and delivered as printed documents
• Purpose is to demonstrate how the technology as helped real customers.
• Often have a standard format.
• Importance of telling the story.
• White papers
   
• Substantial documents with technical or industry-specific content
• Purpose is to share information and to demonstrate the author's expertise
• Raise problems and show solutions
• Recommended structure:
   
1. Problem statement
2. Elaboration
3. Possible approaches
4. Your solution (and why it's best)
5. Contact info.
• Technical writing development cycle
   
• 1-6 months
• Some time for audience analysis (maybe)
• May have multiple reviewers and reviews
• Content often changes; info is delayed
• Marketing writing development cycle
   
• 1-6 days
• Less time for audience analysis, but still critical
• Draft-review-revise-done!
• Whole projects often change, are delayed, cancelled, restarted in a new form.
• Resources: Books
   
• Bowerman, Peter, The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Freelance Writer in Six Months or Less, Fanove Publishing, Atlanta, George, September 2000.
• Coleman, Chris, The Green Banana Papers: Marketing Secrets for Technology Entrepreneurs, St. Barthelmy Press, 2001.
• Godin, Seth, Permission Marketing, Simon and Schuster, 1999.
• Hall, Doug, Jump Start Your Business Brain, Brain Brew Books, 2001.
• King, Janice M., Writing High-Tech Copy That Sells, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995. (out of print, 2nd edition in the works)
• Levine, Rick; Locke, Christopher; Searls, Doc; and Weinberger, David. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Normal, Perseus Books, 2000.
• Levinson, Jay Conrad, Guerrilla Marketing, Houghton Mifflin Company, 3rd Edition, 1998.
• Nielsen, Jakob, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, New Riders Publishing, 2000.
• Williams, Roy H., Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, Bard Press, 1999.
• Resources: Online
   
• STC Marketing Communications SIG.
• Business Marketing Association.
• MarcommWise.