↓
 
  • Home
  • About SSM
    • Guy Smith – Chief Strategist
    • Vision and Values at Silicon Strategies Marketing
    • Your size company
      • Start-ups – Setting a Good Foundation
      • Mid-sized Companies
      • Enterprises – Aligning Teams and Leading Marketing Initiatives
  • Services
    • Market Research
    • Marketing Strategy Development
    • Marketing Communication and Materials
    • Marketing Operations/Execution
    • Mentoring and Coaching
    • Seminars & Sessions
      • Marketing Strategy Seminars
      • Mentored, One-day Strategy Development for Startups
    • Interim Marketing Executives
  • Clients
    • Selected Silicon Strategies Clients
    • Client Case Studies
      • SuSE/Novell
      • DeviceAnywhere
      • Private Social Networks
      • VA Software
      • Foreign Exchange Translations
      • FundNET
      • Rubric
      • Telamon
  • Contact

  • Technology Marketing
    • Market Definition
    • Market Segmentation
    • Buyer Genotypes/Personae
    • Whole Product Definition
    • Positioning
    • Branding
    • Market Messages
  • White Papers

Post navigation

← Interviews and Lectures
November Talks →

Stupidly Simple

Posted on 2012/10/23 by admin2017/10/07

Simple declarative statements communicate most effectively.

Kinda like the one above.

Marketing messages need to be simple, yet marketing “pros” routinely make them complicated. Nowhere is the situation worse than in tech marketing. Perhaps lingering “feeds and speeds” mindsets pervert messaging. Or worse yet, maybe marketing types are budding authors who use marcom materials to practice their literary skills (there is a novel in every marketing director, which is a damn good place to keep it). Weak marketers rely on buzz words when copywriting skills and product differentiation do not exist.

Even I suffer from an alienating allegiance to alliteration.

Complexity sucks, and sucks the life out of messaging. People don’t have time to think, and forcing them into unsupervised thinking is dangerous. Keeping messages simple, even sparse, leads buyers rapidly to cognition, self-qualification and motivated interest. Slowing them down with needless and distracting verbiage does the opposite. Yet tech marketers love to ramble, spewing endless product prose without delivering the essential information:

  • What do you sell?
  • What is the value?
  • Why I should care?

Think about any PowerPoint torture session you have endured. Most begin with several slides discussing who the company is and why they are great – and none of that is on the three-question-list customers ask. Most landing pages are the same way. Some landing pages fail to communicate any of the three essential items, forcing folks to hunt for links that may (but typically do not) reveal the important info.

Your job, after editing yourself, is to edit any marketing copy created by staff, PR agencies and even your CEO (I once created a keynote for the chairman of Novell. It was a model for clarity and thought leadership. He immediately turned it into unintelligible muck.) To be effective, watch for the major sources of marketing sludge:

  • No value statement, especially missing in headlines
  • Using unnecessary words
  • Substituting massive text for meaningful information
  • Talking about your company and your product, not the customer and his needs
  • All buzzwords and regurgitated phrases (anyone caught saying “market leading” will be sacrificed … Aztec style)

This is marketing, not a presidential debate. We don’t need to fill our allotted time limit. We need to give customers a reason to care and do it quickly before their digital ADD takes over. Keep it simple to avoid being stupid.

Posted in Advertising, Communications, Messaging, Promotions permalink

Post navigation

← Interviews and Lectures
November Talks →

Sidebar Area

  • Add Some Widgets!
    This theme has been designed to be used with sidebars. This message will no longer be displayed after you add at least one widget to one of the Sidebar Widget Areas using the Appearance → Widgets control panel.
    You can also change the sidebar layout for this page using theme options.
    Note: If you have added widgets, be sure you've not hidden all sidebars on the Per Page options. You could switch this page to One Column.
  • Log in
Copyright © 2001-2025 Silicon Strategies Marketing — Marketing Consulting | Silicon Valley, Asheville NC
The infamous Facebook Non-Support Saga
↑