Technology is defined as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. And in some fields, all those aspects are constantly on the move – the knowledge, the application of it, and the purpose behind it.
You might be in an emerging field like generative AI, an established industry like martech that’s constantly competing for the next edge, or a reactive industry like cybersecurity that’s constantly evolving to meet the next threat. Either way, you’ll probably be selling the future, commenting on what’s next, and trying to keep up with everything that changed yesterday.
It’s a challenge to market in such fast-moving industries. How do you present a consistent brand when you need to constantly evolve? How much do you say about your product roadmap when it’s always shifting? And how do you convince the world you’re still one step ahead of your competitors?
Challenge 01: The industry is changing
You wake up, and suddenly aluminium-sulphur batteries exist. New neural-implants are viable. And, although plenty of companies haven’t finished the build of their last closed loop payment system, open loop solutions are everywhere.
Many of the technology industries move as a kaleidoscope moves. It’s part of what makes these sectors so interesting to work in, and it’s also what makes life so challenging for marketers.
As Deloitte wrote in their 2023 Tech Trends report: “Before the economic landscape of the metaverse changes from fluid to concrete, pioneers will need to make their moves.” That is just as applicable to the fields of XR, embedded finance or haptics as it is for the metaverse – both on a business level and a brand level.
It’s not always about changing your product pipeline today. Sometimes it’s enough to show you’re aware you might need to change it tomorrow. If you’re a mathematical forecasting company, for instance, your brand content might need to address quantum computing. Or if you’re in open payments, you might need to be talking about future government regulation and how your SaaS platform will be ready for it.
The danger is that in an attempt to seem ahead of the curve, technology companies can overreach. Everyone wants to talk about the next big thing so they can catch the attention of those scanning the horizon. But you’ll want to stay within the boundaries of your expertise, otherwise customers with a better understanding of the emerging technology will see through you.
Solution: Talk to your subject matter experts
This is an area where siloed marketers are a bad idea (though to be honest, are siloed marketers ever a good idea?). Marketers are often the ones with their finger on the pulse but they rarely understand the circulatory system of veins and arteries beneath that pulse.
If marketers can work with the experts in their company, and extract their perspective on an emerging subject, they’re much more likely to talk to an audience with the right level of depth, nuance and cautious optimism. In our experience, data scientists, CTOs, and product leads are also more aware of when they shouldn’t comment on a topic at all.
Challenge 02: Your products are changing
You’re used to selling a journey to a destination you haven’t finished laying the rail tracks to. The build might not be locked in, there’s still end-to-end testing to be done, but you have to market what you’re building next – because everyone else is too, and you need to show that you’re ahead.
Of course, this status quo comes with its fair share of high profile vapourware products. Whether it’s Google Stadia simply promoting features they were never able to release, or the extreme 80’s case of Ovation’s office suite programme, which was advertised with a fake demo to try and gain the funding the product team finally needed to finish it (they never did).
Overpromising isn’t an option, but neither is under promising. For a number of our clients it’s a constant balancing act: knowing when to say a feature is ‘coming soon’, using the future-facing words investors want to hear (did somebody say blockchain?), and holding fire when a feature just isn’t ready to be talked about.
Solution: Sell the future but don’t speculate
Marketers here need to keep two hands on two pulses – your audience’s needs, and your product team’s ongoing struggle to build, test and fix according to schedule.
There’s one senior product marketer we work with who is particularly skilled at doing this. As a result they’re very adept at knowing the nuances of when, how and at what frequency to advertise a feature or benefit. At times, we’ve seen them put the hard brake on the company’s content or advertising, and there have been occasions where they’ve suggested winding down the selling of a product altogether.
In our conversations, it’s been important for us to listen to their input but it’s been equally important not to hit delete on a claim unless we had to. Often it’s been a matter of suggesting alternatives and tweaks that position the messaging exactly where it needs to be. That way the brand could still sell the essence of what they’re building towards without slipping into speculation.
Challenge 03: Your customers are changing
Tech is affected more by trends than almost any other industry, with perhaps the exception of fashion. The difference is that in the fashion industry, at least historically, people make impulse, almost-instant purchases. Whereas in the technology industries, product purchases can take months, or even years to complete.
This means that the B2B technology you’re selling when you complete a sale is never exactly the same product as when you first pitched. You need to catch your addressable market’s attention now but you need to anticipate what their wants and needs will be next year. Or possibly the year after, if you’re selling to an enterprise.
A different but related issue: your audience might shift entirely. 73% of technology startups pivot to a different market over time, and even if you stay the course in a single sector, almost inevitably the size and maturity of organisations you’ll be targeting will increase.
Sometimes this change needs to happen suddenly for tactical reasons. One brand we work with has recently switched from just targeting new challenger companies, to targeting long established organisations in the energy market, based purely on new activity of these companies’ sales reps.
Solution: Keep evolving your brand intentionally
Recently, in preparation for a brand voice and messaging workshop with a scaleup, we combed through several documents that detailed the company’s customer personas and brand strategy. Even though they were created in the last 9 months, we were told they were already out of date.
No brand can remain static, and in fast-moving technology industries, you’ve got to be even quicker on your toes. As we explored in our roundtable discussion on how much should brand evolve, your messaging needs to hit the sweet spot between brand consistency and brand relevance. And to do this, you need to be constantly revising your customer personas and reevaluating your brand strategy to match.
Sometimes this is about crafting vertical-specific messaging that speaks directly to the up-to-the-minute ambitions of specific target markets. But you’ll also want to step back occasionally to reevaluate your overall brand and content strategy to make sure it’s going to resonate with your audience as a whole.
The trick is to be intentional. We’ve seen fast-moving technology companies evolve their brands unintentionally – which is a natural outcome of hiring, scaling and trying to swim in bigger ponds.
Maybe the company starts using the same tech-normative language as their new peers, or possibly their values fade into the background as they focus on selling their technology’s bottom line benefits. At this point they often need intentional brand engineering.
In case you missed it, check out the first blog in our series on marketing challenges in the technology industry: Clear as nanocrystal: How to market complex technology.
Most of us learned to write at school, where we were taught to use a fairly formal style. Correct grammar, correct spelling, correct punctuation – there were rules, and there were exceptions, and that was that. You didn’t argue for fear of getting a ‘must do better’ note in the margin of your homework.
Some of us went on to learn other types of writing – fiction, poetry, journalism, copywriting – and with them different styles. As professional writers we learned to use more expressive language, a more conversational tone, to write with an audience in mind.
For many leaders in business, however, that formal style from school stuck around. Not quite academic writing but nevertheless dry, impersonal, often overly complex and difficult to read. And today, that’s no longer always appropriate.
How business language has changed
Language is not static. It evolves as society does. New words are added to the dictionary and old ones go out of fashion. Even rules of grammar shift.
In the past, business communication always erred towards more formal language but there’s no doubt that’s been changing gradually over the last decade or two. Now that virtually every business has a presence on social media, where communication has a deliberately human tone, we’ve remembered that even in B2B, brands have to talk to people as people.
Informal, conversational writing is effective because it feels more personal. As a result, we’re more likely to be drawn in by it and act on it. It’s persuasive in a way that formal writing usually isn’t. Just think about which one you’d rather engage with – a T&Cs document or an email from a friend.
So how do you go about making your writing more informal if it’s not your natural style? Here are our tips for improving your business writing abilities.
Use contractions
One thing you’ll notice if you listen to actual conversations is that we use a lot more contractions when we’re talking than we do when we’re writing.
A contraction is when you literally ‘contract’ or shorten a word or phrase by leaving out one or more letters and replacing them with an apostrophe. So can’t is the contraction of cannot and it’s is the contraction of it is.
The simple act of using more contractions in your writing will increase the conversational tone and reduce formality in a subtle and business-appropriate way.
Switch passive voice to active voice
Clear communication is the goal of any professional writer. Except a professional writer probably wouldn’t phrase that last sentence like that because it uses the passive voice.
Instead they’d write: every professional writer wants to communicate clearly. This uses the active voice, which makes it more energetic and engaging.
Here are a couple more examples:
Passive: Complex dosage instructions are often misunderstood by hospital patients.
Active: Hospital patients often misunderstand complex dosage instructions.
Passive: The waterfall development model is rarely used in startups these days.
Active: Startups rarely use the waterfall development model these days.
Because we’re more likely to use active voice in natural conversation, using it in most types of business writing will create a more engaging and readable tone.
The difference between ‘I wish to write in a more informal way’ and ‘I want to write in a more informal way’ is small but powerful.
Choose the right vocabulary
A key element for impacting formality in any sentence is the choice of vocabulary. The difference between ‘I wish to write in a more informal way’ and ‘I want to write in a more informal way’ is small but powerful.
So the first thing to do is to strip out any words or phrases that are too old-fashioned. Using ‘thrice’ when you could say ‘three times’ is unnecessarily formal. Ditto ‘endeavour’ instead of ‘try’ or ‘make your acquaintance’ instead of ‘meet you’.
And you can go a step further. There are plenty of words that we use in business writing almost without thinking, which could be replaced with more informal language. ‘Require’ could become ‘need’. ‘Request’ could become ‘ask’.
If there are two choices, go for the simpler option – the one you’d most naturally use in conversation. Not only does this make your business writing more informal, it also makes complex ideas easier to grasp at a glance.
Relax the rules of grammar
Formal writing follows formal grammar rules. Natural conversation usually doesn’t. So by relaxing the rules of grammar, your writing will inevitably come across as more informal.
This doesn’t mean you should start making up your own rules. But don’t be afraid to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’, or end a sentence with a preposition if you want to. The last sentence you read did both of these things, and it didn’t feel too casual, did it?
Try rhetorical questions
If you look back at the last sentence in the previous paragraph, you’ll see an example of a rhetorical question, which is something we use a fair bit in casual conversation.
Adding one or two into your writing can make it feel more personal and conversation. After all, if the author of an article asks you a rhetorical question, you feel like they’re talking directly to you, right? Just don’t put too many in or you’ll end up sounding like a broken record.
Use shorter sentences
Those writing with a formal tone tend to use not only big words but also long, convoluted sentences and complex sentence structures. Shorter sentences, on the other hand, make your writing more informal. They also make it easier for your reader to quickly grasp the meaning of what you’re communicating.
You can even use sentence fragments on occasion. Like this one. Or this. Like all rule breaking, just make sure you’re not overdoing it.
Add parentheses
Another way to make writing feel more conversational is to add a parenthesis. This is a word or phrase that is inserted into a sentence in rounded brackets (fyi, these are also called parentheses), almost like an afterthought.
How informal is too informal?
Of course, every organisation is different and there are many types of business writing. You’ll need to judge what is appropriate in your business context. Official letters might need a more formal style whereas day-to-day client communication might take a more informal style. Social media posts are likely to be more chatty than strategic business reports.
That’s where brand tone of voice guidelines or other communication style guides come in handy, giving everyone a framework against which to benchmark whether something is too formal or too informal. These guidelines should set out information about your target audience and how best to communicate with each sub-group.
As a general rule though, if you’re aiming for professional writing – even if you’re going for a relaxed, human tone of voice – it’s best to avoid swearing, slang terms or text speak like ‘lol’ unless you’re doing it deliberately to make a point. Likewise be careful to avoid spelling mistakes and other careless typos.
As with any creative subject, you need to know what the rules are, when you can break them and what effect breaking them will have.
Also remember that it’s not all or nothing. You don’t have to choose between academic writing and the language you’d use in everyday conversation with your mates. There are degrees of formality and you can dial your writing up or down depending on the circumstance. Just take a look at these three sentences:
- I look forward to receiving a response at your convenience.
- Looking forward to hearing from you whenever it’s convenient.
- Get back to me when you can.
If you want to know whether your writing has a conversational tone or not, try reading it out loud. If you feel silly or stuffy, there’s a chance you need to take a more informal approach with your writing style. The phrases that don’t sound natural out loud are the ones to work on. For more business writing tips, follow us on social or subscribe to The Right Words to get a fortnightly dose of creative ideas, content marketing advice and more.
As a founder or in-house marketer, choosing which marketing tactics to focus on is no doubt something of a challenge. There are so many options! Each one has its merits. But will it be the right choice for your business?
In today’s post we’re looking at blogging and trying to answer the question, “When is blogging most effective for business?” Because although there are many benefits of blogging for virtually any business, there are some situations that will benefit from a blog in particular.
When someone is making a considered purchase
If you’re buying a pint of milk, there’s a good chance you won’t think all that hard about it. You’ll nip into the nearest shop, decide between skimmed, semi skimmed or whole milk, pick the bottle size you want and that’s that.
If, however, you’re thinking about buying a new laptop – or car seat for your newborn, or choosing a building company for an extension – you’re likely to spend much more time on the decision-making process.
“The more considered a purchase someone is making, the more effective a blog can be in providing the information they need to make a good decision.”
Ditto in the B2B world. As a marketing manager, you might spend a couple of hundred pounds on merch for an event without worrying too much about it. But if you’re taking on a new copywriting agency (or design agency or SEO agency), you’ll want to do a lot more research.
The more expensive a purchase is, or the more critical it is to get that decision right (remember the newborn’s car seat), the more considered it will be. And the more considered a purchase someone is making, the more effective a blog can be in providing the information they need to make a good decision.
If you’re selling a complex product or service
If a product or service is complex, your audience is likely to need more information in order to make a good buying decision than they would if the purchase were simpler. Blogging can be a useful way to deliver this information in bite size chunks that lead the reader along the buying journey from being stuck to making a purchase decision.
The important factor here is being clear about anything that your reader won’t understand. Explain the jargon. Explore the benefits. Look at options – which one would best suit which type of person or business? Remember, you need to be honest and provide as unbiased a view as possible in order to add genuine value.
Don’t be afraid to explain why your type of product or service may not be a good fit for someone. If they leave your blog post with a sense that you have provided good information, they may well recommend you to someone who is a good fit. The alternative is that you somehow twist their arm into choosing you and they end up unhappy, causing you more problems than the sale was worth.
For businesses with a long sales cycle
If you’re in sales in a business that has a long sales cycle, you’ll know how tricky it can be to get the balance of staying on your prospect’s radar without bugging them. The longer that sales cycle is, the easier it is for them to get distracted somewhere along the way.
A blog can not only help lead those prospects from one stage of the buyer journey to the next but can give you an excuse to proactively get in touch.
Imagine you’ve met someone at a conference. They seemed interested in one of your products or services. You chatted, exchanged business cards and connected on LinkedIn. This is not the time to go in with a hard sell. Instead, sharing a relevant blog post – perhaps one that you know will help them with a challenge they mentioned – will demonstrate both your expertise and your desire to help them.
Ideally, you’ll want to create a blog post for each stage of the buying process so that you have a series you can send at appropriate times. A good place to start if you’re looking to equip your sales team is comparison posts that weigh your product or service against competing options, and objection busters that answer key questions your prospects are likely to have.
Blogging can take anywhere from 9 to 18 months to demonstrate a real return on investment, so you need to know that you’re not going to give up or have your budget pulled after three months.
Where community building is important
Even in industries such as fashion and lifestyle, where products may be fairly simple, relatively low cost and purchased more on a whim than through serious consideration, blogging can still be used to build a brand community. A number of brands do this very well, for example Fat Face, Fjallraven and our clients Tom & Teddy.
Community building blogs usually feel a bit more like lifestyle magazine articles. They build atmosphere, inspire their readers, make them feel that they are part of something bigger. You can also include posts that showcase how to use your product or service to full effect, or case study based articles that demonstrate how others have benefited from them.
Deciding whether a blog is right for your business
If you’re still reading, it’s probably because you’ve recognised one or more of the scenarios above and you’re feeling broadly more confident that blogging could add genuine value for your business. Now it’s time to look more closely at the specifics. Because to make blogging work, you have to put in the effort.
So ask yourself…
Do you have a clear strategy?
There’s no point bashing out a few hundred words and hoping they’ll stick. A blog needs to sit within a clear strategy, with a well defined audience and at least some idea of the outcomes you want it to deliver. You need to understand what part of the funnel you’re writing to, how you’re going to track results and plenty more besides.
Are the relevant people willing to get involved?
Whether you’ll be in charge of writing the blog yourself or you’ll be managing the process – for example with the support of an internal copywriter or an external freelancer or copywriting agency – you’ll probably need support from other people in your organisation.
For example, if you’re creating bottom of funnel (BOFU) blog posts that are fairly sales oriented, you’ll want input from your sales team. If you’re heading down the thought leadership route, you’ll want to talk to your subject matter experts. After all, thought leadership needs more than good writing, it needs good thinking.
If these people aren’t likely to help, you’re going to be struggling from the start.
Have you got / set realistic expectations?
Blogging can absolutely be a great lead generation tool. But it tends not to generate instant results in the way that, for example, a Google Ads campaign might. Blogging can take anywhere from 9 to 18 months to demonstrate a real return on investment, so you need to know that you’re not going to give up or have your budget pulled after three months.
The results we’ve generated for our blogging clients
As with any marketing tactic, there’s no guarantee that a blog will generate the results you hope for. We don’t believe in promising a 10x on leads because there are just too many factors involved. But we do know that with the right strategy, blogging can make a huge impact.
Tom Riglar, Co-founder of app development agency, Morrow, has been working with us to produce thought leadership and sales blogs for the last year.
He says: “As experts, we really know our stuff but struggle to communicate that expertise to the outside world. Rin and her team have transformed the way we tell our story.
“Content marketing is a long term strategy but we’re already benefiting from an increase in the quantity and quality of leads, better brand awareness and a clearer focus on who our prospects are.”
At healthcare startup Blueheart, we used SEO blogging to increase their website traffic from 5,000 to 30,000 visitors per month within the first six months of working with them.
Camiel Roex, their Head of Growth, said: “Organic visits are the most stable part of Blueheart’s acquisition funnel… RH&Co helped us generate massive results over a span of a few weeks, and that’s just from the increase in traffic on the blog.
“We can run a full content marketer’s job in one hour a week instead of 20 hours. And we don’t have to hire someone full-time, which is important for a startup.”
If you’d like to talk more about whether blogging is right for your business – and what type of blog will generate the best results – get in touch with us today.