This is about a simple truth, often heard, often neglected.

Especially start-ups talk too much. Look at the first page of a young company’s site and you’ll get plenty of information, but the visitor will end up asking herself: how can I actually benefit from what they offer? Unexperienced entrepreneurs often fail at boiling down their marketing message to 3 or 4 sentences. They live in imaginary skyscrapers touching the moon where the elevator ride takes days.

Writing a song

Good marketing has a lot in common with popular music:

“One of the most brilliant points of humanity is when you take a complex situation, and describe it in a sense that’s simplistic enough for people to grasp it very easily. That’s amazing, really, and that’s what I try to do with songwriting – I try to take a big subject and condense it down into something very simple, maybe just a phrase, or a line, or a couple of lines that says everything. That’s a tough challenge, and that’s what keeps bringing me back to writing music. It’s never easy, which means there’s always a challenge to come up with something new and different.” (Geoff Tate)

Less is more

Just try it: explain your product in 30 seconds to strangers and make them understand. Less is more. It’s damn hard, but it’s worth it. That exercise will help you to take an outsider’s view of your product, to better reflect upon what you are offering. It’s much too common that start-ups feel overwhelmed by their own product and don’t realize that it’s not about technology, but the benefits it offers to potential buyers. Looking at your product from the outside makes you better understand your potential customers. It will make the difference and provide a basis for others to choose or reject your products.

All is less

Of course, there’s always the challenge that you need to adapt your core marketing message over time, as the market and your product changes. You’ll see that changing an existing clear marketing message is possible, while changing a flabby we-can-do-it-all statement is impossible because you can only restate your omni potential hopes or downsize your message. All is less. Indifference makes you inflexible for change.

Via Copyblogger, I found this entry about educational marketing with so called video white papers:

A few years ago, I began taking the concepts used in developing white papers for clients and applying them to video-based presentations. Not really canned slide-shows, not really product demos, and not just sales presentations, but a mix of the three. I started calling them video white papers, because like a good white paper, they focused on the audience and their issues, not the authors and all the amazing benefits they have to offer. My goal was to provide an alternative to a typical presentation and demo.