He was a writing professor for many years.
He taught in the 1950’s, but his guidance is as true today as it was then.
His students used too many words to say too little, we marketers often make the same mistakes.
Paul McHenry Roberts wrote a funny and informative essay for college freshmen that he called How to Say Nothing in 500 Words. You can find it online here, or in the book Writing for Readers. His main points apply equally well to marketing.
Well, you may ask, what can you do about it? The subject is one on which you have few convictions and little information. Can you be expected to make a dull subject interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you are expected to do. This is the writer’s essential task. All subjects, except sex, are dull until somebody makes them interesting. The writer’s job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording that will take the reader with him. This is seldom easy, and it is particularly hard in subjects that have been much discussed: College Football, Fraternities, Popular Music, Is Chivalry Dead?, and the like. You will feel that there is nothing you can do with such subjects except repeat the old bromides. But there are some things you can do which will make your papers, if not throbbingly alive, at least less insufferably tedious than they might otherwise be.
Let’s see if we can apply Roberts’ guidance to writing for a business audience.
Avoid the obvious content
When writing about your company, your product, and your customers, start by writing all the obvious arguments (your product has the most benefits, the highest ROI), then discard them. Customers expect you to make these arguments, all your competitors are making the same arguments. Find some new ones. Quickly state the obvious, then get below the surface.
Take the less usual side
Your audience expects that you are going to lead it down a trail of logic that leads inexorably to the purchase of your product or service. Surprise them. Define your market carefully so that it only includes readers who are well-qualified to use your product. Or offer an IF-THEN-ELSE guarantee.
Here’s Perry Marshall’s formula for a guarantee: IF you are [customer meets qualification] and IF you do [customer's part of the deal] you can expect that with my help THEN you will achieve [result] OR [consequence to me, the vendor].
Slip out of abstraction
When you read marketing copy that is dull, it’s often because it’s too abstract. The text tells the reader the benefits in a general sort of way, but fails to bring it to life with specifics and examples. Instead of this:
“Our customer service agents will get back to you within 24 hours.”
Try this:
“Our policy is that customer service takes no more than 24 hours to respond. But the reality is much better. Randy, who runs our customer service group, is fanatic about returning your call quickly. He and his group work hard to keep their average time-to-respond to less than one hour.”
See how the specifics and Randy and his fanaticism are more engaging?
Get rid of obvious padding
Reduce the number of qualifiers, redundancies, unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. Reduce:
“It would seem to me that it’s important, at least I think it is, to avoid the the temptation to expand.”
to:
“Avoid the temptation to expand.”
Call a fool a fool
If he was a fool, then call him a fool. If public tests have shown your competitor’s product to be slower or more error-prone, then say so. When you are timid or beat around the bush or qualify your statement, you dilute the power of your words.
Of course, you have to be a little more careful about this when writing for a business audience than for your college professor. But you don’t have to be so careful that you avoid all controversy. The point is, if you have something to say, say it. Be direct.
Beware of pat expressions
Industry is full of these expressions. Dilbert loves to make fun of them. As writers we hide behind phrases like “harness revolutionary models”, “enable vertical channels”, and “deliver next-generation products”. They add little to your prose and can actually hinder you from thinking clearly and originally about your subject.
Colorful words
Colorful words are “calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion.” This is an area where your business writing has to strike a balance - too colorful and your prose starts to sound like a romance novel. Not colorful enough and it becomes dull. The key is to remember that your writing is intended to persuade. Buyers rationalize decisions on facts, but they make decisions based on emotions. Persuade your readers with words that produce images that include them in the middle of the picture, words that evoke the feeling of experiencing the benefit of what you have to offer.
Colored words
These are the words that have a loaded meaning, positive or negative. Their use evokes associations beyond the literal definition. Mom and apple pie have positive associations, day-trader and PR flack have negative ones. Colored words can be useful in business marketing prose. “Our product is the gold standard by which all others in our industry are measured.” Everyone knows it’s not literally a gold standard, it just means that the writer is claiming that their product is best. But take care not to use colored words in such a way that they substitute for thought. In the previous example, claiming to be the gold standard is ok as long as you then go on to prove your claim and demonstrate that other credible sources think so too.
Colorless words
Colorless words are the ones that we use when we can’t think of anything more specific to say. So we say it’s nice or good, we call it a thing or an object. These words long ago lost their original force. They say nothing and worse cause the reader’s interest to flag and die.
Comments on this entry are closed.