Marketing is all about enabling sales, and that means that your prospects need to know who you are, what your products are, and why they should buy. A consistent set of messages addressing those questions is important in leading your prospect into a sale.
But there are different ways of providing the information that answers those questions. The obvious marketing/sales pieces are product brochures and other overt promotional material. But articles and whitepapers are also part of the mix. These latter pieces are about bringing awareness and prominence to your company and its solutions more than they are about straight selling. And yet it’s tempting to drive home your hard sales messages in those as well – you might even think you’re shirking your responsibilities if you don’t.
But there are reasons to use a lighter touch on those pieces; this is one case where nice guys won’t necessarily finish last. There are a couple of different reasons for letting facts speak for themselves. To be sure, you might feel that one of them is imposed on you, but the other brings benefits in its own right.
When you write an article for publication in an edited channel, like a magazine or online pub, you don’t have full control: you have to go through the editor. And most editors of technical material want to focus on technology. And they’re not just being difficult: their readers want to read about technology; they don’t want to read a sales pitch. And so the editors enforce that to varying degrees. Some forbid any product mention whatsoever; others allow sparing use as examples of a larger technology point that the article makes.
The temptation is to make the technical point and then hammer home the bottom line: “We do this better than the other schlubs, so you should buy our part/tool/whatever.” But engineers are smart; if they like what you’ve written, they can read between the lines. If links to your company are provided, you can bet that, if you provide good technical content, a good many of the readers will be clicking through to read more – and there they’ll find your overt pitches.
But there’s another reason to go easy on the sales. And this holds for articles, whitepapers, training sessions, conference papers, or any other vehicle that purports to be about technology. Especially in this Google-everything-first world, you want your piece to become a reference that speaks not just for your company, but for your industry, positioning you as an expert or thought leader. You want as many people as possible to link to your piece as the definitive one. Why? Because they then become a channel for you, and your search rankings go up.
The more your piece addresses general questions that engineers have, the more likely you are to become a reference. A hard-edged sales pitch reduces the value of the piece as a general reference. So again, you need to put just the right amount of product information in there and trust that readers will make their way to your site if they are ready to buy.
Think of it as good cop/bad cop: the technical pieces are the good cops that soften up your prospects, who then go to your sales materials and encounter the bad cops. Except that, if you’ve done a good enough job motivating your solution from a technical standpoint, those sales cops won’t feel that bad.