Quite often when I pick up a piece of marketing I don’t get any feel for the person who wrote it. A brochure can seem distant and sterile, nothing but a call for me to buy stuff and nothing about the people who run the business. When I read through the text I don’t get a mental image of who it was who actually sat behind a desk to decide what needed to be said.
I know that there were people behind any kind of marketing venture, but quite often when I see the color printing a company had done, their prose, their images, and even the layouts of their ads can seem distant to me.
There are several ways you can combat this kind of image from ever forming in a person’s mind. The first is by writing in first person any chance that you can. Make sure to emphasize that I if your marketing is appropriate for it.
Think about newsletters and other styles of marketing that allows a person to get a little more personality into it. Sometimes even little changes in the style of the wording can have a rather big impact. Take for instant the use of contractions. Don’t say I will when you can easily saw I’ll. I will sounds very stiff and robotic and something most people wouldn’t actually say in everyday conversation.
Take a moment to step back and listen to the way you sound when you talk and the kinds of words you use and do your best to instill that same kind of personality into your color printing, no matter what form it is.
You should try to write as if you’re talking to someone that you know. Even with something more technical like a brochure, try to phrase things as if you were discussing this with a friend of yours. Don’t go into all the technical jargon when you can just explain it in simple, straightforward and friendly terms.
Never use industry specific terms that other people wouldn’t necessarily know. And this can be a hard one to combat if you’re used to always throwing in certain terms that aren’t widely used outside of your industry. Run what you’ve written by someone else outside your company to see if they understand what it is that you’re writing.
Also, you should keep your sentence structures basic. Don’t throw in too many commas and don’t throw in too many complex sentences. You don’t want people to be confused trying to figure out what your sentences have to say.
If you write in such a way that anyone can easily understand what you’re saying, you’ll be in a much better position to let people get a feel for the person who’s writing, which can help put some additional personality into your marketing material. The worst thing you can do is send out an advertisement that sounds like a machine wrote it. You certainly won’t get people interested in buying your products.
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