In Promotional Writing, Choosing a Receptive Audience Makes a BIG Difference

On the 2004 season of the Apprentice, two teams were asked to create and market an event to sell wedding gowns. Both had similar products, qualities of venues, and budgets, but one team came out far ahead, selling almost 14 times as many products as their competition. The difference between the two events was striking - one had lines of eager customers stretching down the street, and the other barely saw any customers at all. Clearly, one team had effective marketing, while the other team did not.

When one thinks of technical writing, perhaps marketing is not the first thing that comes to mind. At the same time, it is important to realize that the skills that help companies communicate how to use software or other technology are the same skills that companies need in order to sell the products in the first place.

Technical writing is, after all, a form of communication. It is communicating to potential clients, partners, and investors everything about your company that they need to know in order to reach the informed decision that they want to do business with you. It is also about communicating to search engines and other website owners everything they need to know so that they will reach the informed decision that they want to show your site to searchers. Finally, it is communicating to consultants such as ourselves that your company provides viable options that we can confidently present to our clients.

As you will read in the following article, a big part of technical writing is finding the right audience for the message that you wish to send. In other words, given that you would like to sell wedding gowns, who should you talk to?

Marketing to the Right Audience Was the Difference Between Winning and Losing

The losing team was giving flyers out in an area where people were not likely to be receptive to messages about wedding gown sales. In contrast, the winning team spent money to send a well-crafted message to a list of highly qualified buyers, through a service that catered especially to their target market.

Because of search engines such as Google and Yahoo, which direct customers to your pages based on keywords, automated topic categorization, and an analysis of peers (similar pages), often companies simply need to write clearly and frequently about their products and services, and then listen and improve written materials in response to feedback from readers.

Of course, providing free information about products and services is one thing, but it would be even better if the reader would pick up the phone and ask questions, because that would be one step closer to converting the reader into a client.

Advertising Must Convince and Persuade, in Order to be Effective

In the Apprentice, the winning team was able to use its advertising medium to convince and persuade the potential buyers that it was worth their time to go to this event.

While the show did not go into the specifics of technical writing, there are several messages that must be effectively conveyed in order to generate responses. The messages are:

• That the products or services are the ones that the client wants to buy.
• That the merchant is credible. In other words, if the client buys or engage the services of this merchant, will the merchant deliver the right product, undamaged, two weeks before the wedding. And if there is a problem, will it be resolved to the client's complete satisfaction (again, before the wedding).

Presentation Matters

Of course, dropping hand-scrawled photocopies onto car windows, or throwing leaflets at pedestrians in a crowded intersection, will not usually meet the above two criteria. Nor will the work of non-writers usually do the trick, for the following reasons:

• Presenting a persuasive message using printed words is very different than doing so over the phone or in person. The message must be crafted to not only be clear, and understandable, but also short, concise, and readable. Even seasoned writers will revise manuscripts up to 10 or 12 times before the manuscripts are considered finished.
• Convincing readers that you are credible requires attention to linguistic details that may not be obvious to non-writers. While it might seem as if skipping steps or skimping on the quality of message preparation is reasonable, many readers will easily and quickly see flaws, or mistakes, in written materials. Each spelling mistake, run-on sentence, or comma-splice will cause your organization to lose credibility.