The most common question we get from technology clients is how to simplify their messaging. Each client will have different needs but at the core of it they want to explain who they are and where they are going in the fewest words possible. They want their prospects to instantly get what they’re about and how they can benefit from working with them.
Our approach is to step back, examine the audience, the aspirations of the business and look at exactly the value you it delivers to customers. This means examining not just what the company says they do but taking it a step further an examining how they are already perceived and how they’d like to be perceived.
Where technology companies are often challenged is that their messaging can get muddle in either technical detail or marketing fluff. Both are the enemy of clarity.
Technology is at the core of these businesses but often the technical detail isn’t what will drive interest or get prospects picking up the phone. It is what may close the deal but not the spark to begin the conversation.
On the other hand, marketing jargon doesn’t serve the prospect either. After attending a Cloud Computing event in London and reading the marketing content, I was sure that each business was “agile” or “offering agility”. This new crop of cloud players was delivering “reliable solutions that innovate in the cloud”. When reading this through the marketing content raised more questions than answers.
With a fan of brochures, company magazines, fact sheets and presentation decks laid out in front of me, each piece of content had me asking, “What do you actually do?” It’s the marketing equivalent of someone introducing themselves as head of change management. What could that mean and am I interest enough to find out? No matter what, it requires that the listener do the hard work of exploring the detail.
We recommend that technology companies be able to explain what they do in no more than two sentences and that those two sentences contain no marketing jargon. “Innovation” gets cut so does “solutions”. The foundation of a business’s messaging can be explained in two solid sentences that remain true to what the business does while wasting no words.
Technology companies that deliver clear concise messages punch far above their weight and see the return in prospects picking up the phone.
If you’d like to talk about how we approach messaging and the kinds of content we create to deliver solid messaging, let me know.
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