Getting technology content right can be tough. You don’t want to simplify everything to the extent that it’s no longer representative of your product or service – but you also don’t want to alienate potential customers with confusing information. Striking a balance is no easy task.
At Woo, we’re a copywriting agency with experience writing for all audiences and brands. Here’s how you can make the most specialised technology products sound like simple concepts.
Examine your offering as an outsider
Imagine an alien landed on earth and you needed to explain their business to them. Could you do it?
It might sound tedious, but to make your content truly accessible, you must look upon your project with fresh eyes, and avoid any assumptions of prior knowledge.
Then, go through your offering step by step as if you were explaining it to the alien. You can do this in a simple form, like bullet points or a flow chart. To begin with, you’ll probably find yourself including too much information or explaining things in a confusing way, but as you continue to hone what you’ve written, it should get simpler.
Lose the jargon
You shouldn’t need us to tell you that using industry jargon in your copy is a bad idea. Do this and you’re sending an instant signal to your leads that, unless they’re already tech insiders, they shouldn’t be reading your content.
As the saying goes, if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself. The good news is that you should understand your service or product better than anyone.
It’s not just web content you need to think about here but also your branding, productions descriptions, and packaging. Would the average person understand them or resonate with them?
If you’re unsure, why not try asking? Even if you don’t have the budget for an official focus group, a few informal interviews or surveys could make a big difference. Checking out a few public forums also helps.
Use the right formatting
It’s not just the words themselves that matter – it’s how you display them. It’s always a good idea to make your content digestible, but this is especially important when it comes to subject matter as complicated as technology.
Instead of presenting your readers with a sea of text, create something they can scan.
First, write a quick introduction. In just a few words, the reader should know what the rest of the article will tell them. With millions of pieces of content fighting for their attention, nobody will read your entire article to find out if it offers them any value.
On the same note, not everyone will want to read through each paragraph. Most people prefer to skip to the specific section that interests them. The best way to help them do this is to provide helpful headings that accurately describe their contents. Of course, keep the language simple!
There are also plenty of simple tricks you can use to keep your formatting simple. Keep your sentences short and your paragraphs shorter – 10 words and two to three sentences per paragraph is an excellent rule of thumb. White space is your friend!
You can even use bullet points or numbered lists to break things down further. Just make sure to keep your lists relatively short so the reader doesn’t get bored before they reach the end.
Depending on the type of content you’re writing, another useful tool is to include a button text that reminds people what stage they’re at and what the next stage is – ‘Continue to set-up’ is one example.
A content writing service can help with incorporating all these useful elements properly.
Make your content visually appealing
Keeping your content digestible is just the start. To hook in your audience, you need to feed them with video aids. This doesn’t just look cool; it’s also a great way to tell a story.
Good writers obey the rule of ‘show don’t tell’: there’s no point wasting words describing something that can be demonstrated with a metaphor or piece of media. All the best copywriting examples obey this rule.
An increasingly popular method for doing this is video.
It’s simple to embed YouTube videos into your content to provide a deeper explanation of certain concepts. Google will also reward you with a greater search ranking if you provide lots of useful media resources in your articles. If you don’t want to film yourself talking, why not try outsourcing an animated video?
Other options you could consider trying are icons, audio recordings, infographics – or even memes.
But remember that everyone digests information differently. Some prefer to soak up information by reading, others like to listen to someone talking. Although we can all put up with our less-preferred learning methods at times, when it comes to difficult subjects (like technology), it’s best to learn the way we learn best.
Test before publishing
You can’t always get things right the first time around. If you’re not sure your content is ready for a hypothetical alien or six-year-old child, there’s only one to find out. Send it to them and give it a try!
Pick out a few people that fall within your core demographic and see how easily they could understand what you wrote. Did it answer all their questions or leave them with more queries? Did they fully understand your product or service after reading it?
If not, a few tweaks are in order.
You might believe your product or service is the most revolutionary item on the market, but even if it is, that doesn’t always guarantee success. If nobody understands what you’re selling or why it’s important, why will they ever decide they want to buy it?
Communicating your value through good copy and content is essential.
If you need some extra help, get in contact. We offer a copywriting service to technology companies who need to get their ideas across in the right way.