In his blog post titled Wasted Words – Why Marketing Content Longer than 3 to 5 Items Does Not Work, Gartner Research Director Hank Barnes makes a strong case to technology vendors for simplifying their story and emphasizing only two or three things that matter most in their marketing collateral.
He goes on to explain how most people he talks to agree that it is a good thing but, in the same breath, laments about regularly seeing exactly the opposite behavior in practice:
- Feature Lists with dozens of features
- “Company Differentiation” Powerpoint slides listing 7 to 10 items, and
- Benefits pages with too many bullet points to count
We call this “content size conundrum” and come across it regularly while providing GTM solutions to IT companies.
According to Barnes, “all that extra stuff might just be wasted words”. To support his contention, he quotes from psychological studies that highlight the limited capacity of the human mind to retain new things.
Per one such study cited in the B2C blog post How to Sell Complexity Beyond the Customer’s Capacity to Understand, “our limited short-term working memory (is) … capable of remembering only 3-4 items of new information at a time.”
As a marketer who is especially passionate about consumer behavior, I readily accept all this psychobabble.
But it’s not going to solve the problem because it ignores the ground reality of the content development in a typical IT company. With my ringside view into how content is actually developed in IT, I venture the following root causes for marketing collateral overcrowding:
- Overarching belief that “more the merrier”
- Fond hope that, if they put in 10 points, the prospect will at least read 3-5
- Misguided notion that it should be left to the prospect to select what’s relevant and ignore the rest
- Nagging feeling that if they take a list of 10 points and remove seven of them, they’re doing injustice to their product / service
- Risk of alienating team members whose points are skipped.
As a result, it’s not so easy for content writers to take a scalpel to long feature lists, differentiator slides or benefits pages.
That said, in an increasingly crowded market, prospects are simply not going to take the trouble to find the most relevant piece of marketing collateral from a content maze, so marketers can’t reconcile themselves with the status quo. Change is a must. And it has to be led from the top.
To drive change, CMOs need to secure the buy-in of their C-suite and sales leaders, who’re respectively the budget approvers and internal customers of the content they’re creating. What’s the chance that the aforementioned cognitive science mumbo jumbo will work with them?
We thought so too.
Our Marketable Items offer a pragmatic way to overcome marketing collateral overcrowding and develop more effective content.
Marketable Items package product features and service capabilities into compelling reasons to buy that resonate strongly with the target market’s pain areas and hot topics.
Each product (or service) will have multiple Marketable Items. Each Marketable Item we create will restrict itself to 3-5 points that matter most for the given target audience. But, collectively, the set of all Marketable Items created for a given product (or service) will convey the whole enchilada of the vendor’s capabilities and credentials. Please find examples of Marketable Items in the following exhibit.
By following this ingenious approach, Marketable Items break the content size conundrum. Please contact us to know more about how to create Marketable Items for your product or service.