Five Ways to Keep It Simple

Most engineering minds love to delve into the details.  They want specs.  They want operating parameters.  They want exceptions.  They want to know how you handle unusual bizarre situations.  After all, that’s what coding is about.  That’s what industrial design is about. That’s what Murphy’s Law is really about.  How do we stop someone from screwing everything up? So you overspecify.  You catch errors. You do QA testing to find the loopholes.  You try to anticipate every odd combination of circumstances that might cause a problem.

In marketing, you need to do the opposite.  A positioning statement, a key message, an expression of a benefit — all of those are examples that require you to simplify, simplify, simplify.  To get into specifics is to go down a rat hole.  To discuss the details is possibly to waste 50 minutes of a 60 minute pitch meeting.  All to cover something that only 2 of 10 people in the room actually care about.  You waste people’s time.

“But wait,” you say.  ”The customer should know about this.  And this. What about this?”  This is the kind of thinking that gets you option dialog bloat in software.  Tabs upon tabs of different categories of what-if’s and gotcha’s, all of them important when you need to make that tiny yet meaningful adjustment to the software’s behavior so that it does what you really want it to do.  Arguably that sort of thing is useful for an option dialog.  It has no place in most marketing collateral and sales tools.  You can’t be explicit and cover all possibilities when you’re trying to ram home a marketing message.

In many ways, marketing is about not wasting people’s time.

You often don’t have time for that when you’re in marketing, because you only have so much time to communicate your message to your prospective customer.  Consider:

• In a lead generation situation — like an email blast or webinar — you need to get to the point quickly because you’re interrupting someone and may only have a few moments of a person’s attention to get your point across and pique his or her interest.
• In an inbound marketing situation — like a blog or web copy — you need to express yourself persuasively but succinctly, so that a person reads what you have to say and doesn’t glaze after the first few lines, and you’ll be intelligible when you come up on search engine excerpts.
• In a B2B sales situation — like an opening presentation to an interested prospect — you need to get the basics out about your message as quick as possible so that you can establish a “that’s nice, but what I *really* need” conversation with your potential customer and not dwell on the minutiae of what your product can do.
• In a B2C sales situation — like box copy on packaging — you may have to meet an economy of space as well as avoid the same glazing that someone reading your website might do after the words start swimming before their eyes… “blah blah blah robust blah blah unique blah blah easy to use blah blah.”

How do you simplify?  Here’s five suggestions for ways to take a step back and simplify whatever you’re trying to communicate.

1. Un-jargon. Are you needlessly inventing new terminology or acronyms? You’re going to have to explain each one.  And if you’re spending time explaining terms, you’re not spending that time answering “so what” for the customer.   Save that level of detail for a person who’s holding you up for comparison to competitors and is really investigating what you have to offer. And even then, simplify, simplify, simplify.
2. Drop the word count. Are you using too many words to say something?  Get rid of the wishy washy.  You’re not “trying to solve”, you’re “solving.”  You’re not providing “one of the many ways to,” you’re providing “a way to.”    You may be surprised how many “this is exactly the kind of thing that” phrases collapse to simply “this is.”  And drop the passive voice.  It’s just another grammatical pitfall that unnecessarily lengthens your writing.
3. Ditch the marketing gobbledygook.  Why do people think all marketing communications must have that formal, stilted style of doubletalk?  Stop being pleased to announce that you’re focused on a unique, world class, robust solution.  So what?  Or better yet:  NO.  ONE.  CARES.
4. Stop talking about everything. But everything is so important, right?  You need to cover all the bases!  No, you don’t.  Stop it. Pick at most 3 topics to convey.  Find commonalities between topics and combine them.  Better yet, find some overreaching theme and just focus on that.
5. Adopt your customer’s point of view. Does your customer really care about the fact that you have 5 different variations of your core engine?  Does your customer need to know that you have a piece of connector software that you give away free with your solution?

Look at Seth Godin’s blog.  It is amazing how well he can communicate a deep thought with only a few sentences.  He keeps his lessons clear, simple, and to the point.

Here’s a more relevant example to high-tech product marketing. Today, a colleague and I were talking about an introductory slide deck for one of our products.  The fourth slide in was titled “Types of Outbound Notifications” and proceeded to discuss four different flavors of notifications under two separate categories.  It started introducing all these extra terms like “power dialing” vs. “preview dialing” or “proactive notifications” vs. “precision notifications,”  all valid terms that were associated with various product features and had been used at least once by our sales force.  In each case, the two options typically differed by only one or two features.  So why distinguish between them?  At this stage, you’re happy if the prospect remembers the name of your company by the time you leave the room after a presentation.  If you were in a technical meeting, dealing directly with engineers who had already finished a deep dive analysis of your product, then I could see drawing some of these finer distinctions.  At the business level presentation — the level at which most of your marketing communications should probably be aimed — you’re trying to get a talking point across (“we can offer this either on-premise or as a service”) without blinding your prospect with options (“We have four add-on modules, each with a unique pricing plan, and a new separate name for you to remember.”)

So, to simplify: take a look back at whatever you’re trying to say. Focus on your key message and cut away the cruft that stops your customer from understanding it. Put that engineering mind to rest: stop trying to be factually complete and exhaustive.  Instead, make sure you’re not wasting anyone’s time.