Andy Parkinson’s World

Make your marketing messages pop tip #2: Avoid the intimidating term paper look-and-feel by keeping your paragraphs brief.

I don’t know about you, but I make an unconscious decision to set aside any reading material that (at first glance) looks heavy or academic. Of course when I set it aside, it’s with the full intention that I’ll read it later when I have more time, but somehow for me, later never comes.

When you give your prospects “heavy” marketing collateral, you’re essentially adding another chore to their to-do list. Worse yet, you just might be scaring off a percentage of your audience by giving them literature that looks too  intimidating to read.

An easy trick to avoid the term paper look is to keep your paragraphs short, my personal rule of thumb being:

No more than five lines per paragraph.

(Of course you might be thinking it’s easy to abide by this rule by shortening up your margins, but let’s put a pin in that thought until the next tip.)

Here’s a really quick example that demonstrates my point. Take a look at the following paragraph, which I randomly pulled from a website that sells an enterprise software suite:

Businesses running on SoftwareCo ProductSuite can populate a single charts-of-accounts across subsidiaries, or use separate charts-of-accounts for each company with postings between subsidiaries such as expense allocation managed via inter-company journals. Local taxes are readily handled across subsidiaries thanks to an embedded tax engine that allows for multiple tax schedules for everything from GST, to VAT, to consumption tax or general sales tax. Revenue recognition, local financial reporting and compliance are also built-in components of SoftwareCo ProductSuite.  And ProductSuite allows for global order management and sourcing with the ability to manage inventory and fulfillment across multiple locations with product items represented globally or on a per subsidiary basis.

Do you find it hard to extract the key messages from this text? I know I did. Now let’s look at this same text, broken out into multiple paragraphs:

Businesses running on SoftwareCo ProductSuite can populate a single charts-of-accounts across subsidiaries, or use separate charts-of-accounts for each company with postings between subsidiaries such as expense allocation managed via inter-company journals.

Local taxes are readily handled across subsidiaries thanks to an embedded tax engine that allows for multiple tax schedules for everything from GST, to VAT, to consumption tax or general sales tax.

Revenue recognition, local financial reporting and compliance are also built-in components of SoftwareCo ProductSuite.

And ProductSuite allows for global order management and sourcing with the ability to manage inventory and fulfillment across multiple locations with product items represented globally or on a per subsidiary basis.

By turning this one big paragraph into four bite-size chunks, the reader can more rapidly scan the content to see if there’s anything in this product that will address their own personal hot buttons, e.g. inventory management, revenue recognition, or tax management.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t make your prospects work to learn about your product. Make it easy for them to skim, scan, and skip, and they’ll thank you with cash.

Next year I’ll continue the skim-scan-skip discussion with more copywriting tricks that will make your marketing messages pop.

Until then, I’d like to wish everyone a peaceful holiday season and healthy and prosperous New Year!