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• Posted March 21, 2012, 12:21 p.m. - 12 years ago

Writing Documents With Messages That Stick

Marketing is about simple messages that stick

The hardest thing about writing marketing documents is trying to get the wording just right, just perfect. You want to get your message across, you want to let the reader know why your company is the one that beats all other competitors and that it is where their business, and their money, should go. But on top of that, you want to make sure that your message sticks with them so that when they are weighing up your options in future, they remember you over everybody else. But how?

 

It’s all about the benefit you can offer to your customer. Benefit is a word that has floated around the advertising world for many years, but what is marketing if not advertising? The benefit is the one aspect that sells and makes a product stand out. To understand the benefit, you need to understand your target audience and understand what it is that they are looking for.

 

The good news is, it doesn’t even have to be something that only your company does, it just needs to be something that only you are pointing out that you do. For example, all washing powders in the 1980s did the same thing; they all cleaned clothes, removed stains and kept the clothes the original colour. But only one company said that their washing powder made clothes ‘whiter than white’ and chances are that you still remember that company name.

 

One you’ve found the benefit, look at your presentation. Here, we’re not talking about anything fancy, just make sure that the spelling and grammar is all perfect, make sure that the layout is consistent and that you proof read it to make sure it makes sense. Make certain your phrasing is clear and ‘catchy’.

 

Finally, make sure that as many people as possible get to read your hard work by producing it in the most accessible format of all, PDF. The PDF can be opened on almost every computer in the world and now on most smartphones. The danger of using a different format is that potential customers may not be able to read it and may look elsewhere. Don’t be put off by people telling you that PDFs are a one shot deal and that once produced, you cannot change them. While this used to be the case, software now allows you to create and edit PDFs as easily as if you were using a word processor – and we should know!

 

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2122110125/

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