Technical Writing: Marketing project

Marketing materials are technical documents that give potential customers a reason for choosing your product, service, or company. In this post, I will explain some information about marketing materials, then walk you through the design and creation of one of the projects done for this class.

Generally, companies that are not new want to be doing one of three things to expand their business, either 1) market a new (but related) product to their existing customers, or 2) market existing products or services to new customers, or 3) market existing products or services more effectively to existing customers (who aren’t using them yet).  The reason for this is pragmatic: new products being marketed to new customers take the most effort to go from an idea to returning profit.  Once you have services and products to promote to new customers, the next step is to ask some questions that will guide you in creating the content for your marketing material.

Here are some questions to answer before beginning to layout or write:

·         What product or service do you intend to explain or sell to your customers?

·         What information should the customer know about the service or product that would help them to decide whether to purchase it or not?

·         Why is this product better than other products?

·         What is the “hook” to capture the attention of customers?  How does the product connect to what the customer needs.

For my marketing project, I chose to market a design methodology used in Automation.  Although this method, called High Performance HMI, assists system operators to have a better understanding of how the system is doing, it is often ignored as an option for design in Water and Wastewater.  The pamphlet I created is designed to show both why and how HP HMI helps operators to do their job better.

After answering those questions, then it is time to start layout and content creation.  These can be done more or less simultaneously or one and then the other.  Just do what works best for your own personal work flow, but remember to go back and consider how it looks when you are done.  When I do layout for a document for a visual project, I like to sketch it with pencil on a piece of paper.   For this project, I did that before selecting my subpoints, so that I could see how many supporting points I needed.

In many technical documents the font and style of the document is not very important, but in projects such as marketing materials, the font selected can convey a message, so some care should be taken to select a font that helps your message rather than hinders it.  Selecting fonts is a rather subjective and artistic process that engineering types like me probably are not as good at, so we might need a little help to do it well.  Here are two links to a helpful articles about fonts:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/best-practices-of-combining-typefaces/

https://www.canva.com/learn/the-ultimate-guide-to-font-pairing/

Use of white space and images is also important in marketing materials.  I’m not great at understanding how to use that well, but I can at least say: 1) Don’t let it be cluttered. 2) Use images that illustrate your point well. (I have a couple images that I used to illustrate more than one point with the same image.) 3) Someone you know is probably more artistic than you are.  Ask him or her to give you feedback during the process.

Front Page

For my pamphlet I chose to have a small introduction, because I intend to use the pamphlet as something I explain as I’m giving it to customers. The front page doesn’t define the concept very deeply, but it does have a “hook” to show why this is important.  For any person making decisions, numbers/data on a page or screen are pretty much useless unless there is also some context.  The “hook” uses a totally different situation than what my customer would be in to make the same point.

Inside

I am not only interested in trying to get new business from customers but also help them to design their system and build it well, even if they have someone else do the work.  So inside I chose what I think are the biggest factors when doing HP HMI. I also showed my own projects for the work that is a good example.  Customers can see that we not only know how to do the work, but that we do a good job on the projects.  Always try to show real examples in your technical marketing documents.