What's the Right Reading Level for B-to-B Marketing Copy?

Marketing copy should be easy to read.  Business-to-business copy is no exception.

Who has time for fluffy, convoluted sales materials?

I cringe when I come across sentences like the following (which appear on a software provider's Web site):  

"The PanSoft Analytics Suite’s powerful visual reporting and ad-hoc query applications make it easy to understand and gain insight from operational data.  Operational Dashboards provide everyone—from executives to operations and business managers—with pre-defined interactive visual models and charts that give a point-in-time view of line-of-business activity."

With a little care, this could have been said more clearly:

"By presenting data in charts, PanSoft Analytics Suite makes it easy for managers at every level to understand business activities."

A critic might say my streamlined rewrite sacrificed the credibility of the original version. 

I wouldn't buy it.  

Expressions like "ad-hoc query applications," "interactive visual models" and "point-in-time view of line-of-business activity" are gobbledygook.

What's the right reading level for B-to-B copy?  I recommend 10th grade, the reading level of The New York Times. 

It can't hurt to aim lower, but you should never aim higher.  Unless, at your topline's expense, you want immortality or a prize for literature.

And aiming higher won't guarantee those things anyway. 

Yes, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address at the 15th grade reading level.  But Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird at the 5th grade level.

Why Case Studies Rule

This week, Seth Godin wrote in his blog, "The market is not seduced by logic."

"People are moved by stories and drama and hints and clues and discovery.  Logic is a battering ram, one that might work if your case is overwhelming.  Wal-Mart won by logic (cheap!), but you probably won't."

A stick-in-the-mud B-to-B marketer would react to Godin by saying, "Sure, that's great advice for a B-to-C company, but it doesn't apply to us."

But B-to-B marketers who "get" the power of case studies would nod in agreement with Godin.  What else are well-crafted case studies but stories with drama, hints, clues and discovery?

Case studies woo customers for one simple reason.  People love stories.

Case studies work because customers empathize with fellow customers in plight.  They like hearing that others face predicaments comparable to their own.  And they like learning how others escaped those hair-raising (more likely blood-pressure raising) situations.

Case studies are also a lot more credible than 99 percent of the propaganda a company typically pumps out.

And when products or services are complex or arcane, case studies go a long way in clarifying what a company's actually selling, because they provide examples.   Think about it.  How often have you sought to understand someone by asking, "Can you give me an example?"

Kafka, van Gogh and the Lonely Blogger

Franz Kafka published only seven short pieces in his lifetime. Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting.

Even the most prolific bloggers sometimes feel like they're wasting their time, writing for a world without readers, performing in an empty auditorium, painting pictures nobody wants.  The feeling's understandable.

Thank goodness Kafka and van Gogh didn't give up.  They had what it takes:

Passion.  Kafka wrote, "By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it."

Patience. van Gogh wrote, "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."

Perseverence.  Kafka also wrote, "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."

Do you have what it takes?

Is Your Brand Scary?

I've done a ton of branding work in my time and can tell you with some authority it's no wonder so many brands are a fright.

Sales guru Paul DiModoca offers a white paper, 3 Reasons Why B2B Branding Fails and Scares Prospects Away, that goes farther than anything I've read in explaining in simple terms why so much branding flops so hard, so often.

While he finds most branding fails to drive business performance or create inbound leads, DiModoco says CEOs continue to invest in branding efforts because they believe branding will grow revenue. 

But why does branding so frequently fail to do that?  DiModoca gives three reasons:

1. A lot of branding is ego-driven and inwardly focused.  "This occurs," DiModaca writes, "when a group of senior executives gather together and create marketing messages that talk about how great they are and why the prospect should buy from them."
2. A lot of branding is generic.  "When trying to build a brand message that communicates company value, frequently businesses use their offerings’ product or service category as a prime foundation of the brand description."
3. A lot of branding is copy-cat.  "With the Internet providing easy access to view any company’s marketing and sales approach, brand effectiveness has decreased because so many companies just build their brand positions as an adaptation of their competitor’s messaging."

Branding efforts like these confuse and turn off customers.  What attracts them instead?  DiModica believes, "you need to deploy sales value propositions instead of branding messages."  

Sales value propositions, he says, describe the business results your product or service delivers.

"Branding costs money. Sales value propositions make you money."

Workingman's Dead

Pardon my sexist title, but if you're a hands-on marketer beavering in the trenches, by all means read David Scott Meerman and Brian Halligan's new book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. 

It's a fun read (in no small part due to the book's packaging) and well worth the effort because the teachings are practical and, for the most part, easy to apply.

In keeping with the band's "experimental" style, Meerman and Halligan urge readers to push beyond marketing best practices of a bygone era and embrace continuous trial and error. 

If that advice makes makes you nervous, you probably already feel out of sorts in the new age of marketing.  If so, Meerman and Halligan's book will help you get acclimated.

Here's just a sampling of the lessons you'll find (there are a couple hundred altogether in the 150-page book):

• Organize your marketing team around three accountabilities: lead generation, lead conversion and lead analysis.
• Abandon annual marketing plans in favor of monthly ones.  Each month, execute for 19 days; then spend a day assessing and planning activities for the next month.
• Give graphic designers the freedom to play with your branding elements.
• Involve all your employees in social marketing and teach them how to help your organization through "Lunch and Learn" meetings.
• Delete all content from your Web site, blog posts, and emails that resembles your competitors'.
• Communicate product news to your most loyal customers before you communicate it to anyone else.
• Create an e-book or video about your industry's future and give it away.
• Instead of lashing out at competitors, find ways to strike mutually beneficial deals with them.
• Skip over middlemen (sorry, sexist again) of every sort.
• Identify a cause-related nonprofit consistent with your brand and begin giving part of your profits to it.