How Much Technical Jargon Should You Write In A Software Promotion? Just Enough to Do This…
When writing copy for high tech products like high-end computer software, you have to keep your goal in mind at all times. That goal is almost always lead generation. You want to give your reader just enough of a taste of your product so that he’ll take the initiative to ask for more information. This is a fine line you have to walk. Give your prospect too little information and she’ll pass over your promo. Give her too much and you’ll bore her. So you have to strike a delicate balance…
This balance in your promo copy isn’t always easy to find. Even if you’ve programmed for a living in the past like I have, it can be difficult to give just enough factual content without blowing away the prospect with too much technical jargon. So how do you overcome this?
Let Your Prospect Be Your Guide
The short answer to this question is this: give your prospect just enough technical information to pique her interest, but no more. That means highlighting the strongest benefits of your B2B software product in your promotion.
It also means knowing your prospect well enough to know how much technical jargon it will take to generate the response you want. And that depends on the prospect.
If your target audience is high level decision makers like IT managers and CTOs, you probably won’t want to spend a lot of space talking about granular technical issues. True, CTOs probably started their careers as programmers or support engineers. But if they’ve been in their C-level executive jobs for very long, they probably won’t be able to relate to UML diagrams or engineering charts.
On the other hand, if your product targets development managers or other technical stakeholders, these types of technical artifacts might be just about perfect. Especially if those are the types of things they deal with every day.
I wrote some promo copy a few years back targetted directly at enterprise software architects. I used some UML-specific terminology along with Java code snippets. The reason it worked so well is because I knew the prospects. They live, eat, and breathe that stuff. When they saw the same things in my promo article, they could immediately relate.
It All Goes Back To Your Target Audience
In B2B software marketing, the audience you’re writing to is king. You have to keep in mind at all times who your prospect is and what their problems are. What do they spend most of their 8+ hour days thinking about? What do they worry about? What keeps them up at night?
Find out what that big concern of their is. Then position your software as the answer they’ve been looking for. And give them just enough high-tech marketing content to pique their interest.
Software copywriting isn’t easy. You need to find just the right mix of promotional language mixed with technical terminology. But if you’ve done your job right, they’ll have enough interest to give you the response you want: to indentify themselves as an interested prospect who wants more information about your product.
Tags: B2B Copywriting, High Tech Copywriting, Software Copywriting
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