Brevity = Sales
Brevity: shortness of duration, especially shortness or conciseness (of expression).
Too often marketing work, such as advertisements and brochures, try telling you everything about a business crammed into a necessarily small space. However, that is the quickest way to lose your prospect’s attention.
When you produce marketing materials, their focus should be making a point that effectively “lingers” in your prospects’ minds. When you try to say too much, you essentially say nothing – because your prospect’s time is valuable, and can’t be spent decrypting a piece of advertising that isn’t able to get to the point quickly.
If you can isolate your key points and narrow them down to the essentials, you will be much more successful in your marketing and advertising attempts. Studies have shown that, in most circumstances, you only have 10 to 20 seconds of someone’s time.
Follow this very simple process to get your point across and increase your chances of having the customer express interest in knowing more:
- Get attention
- Hold attention
- Keep attention
Sounds too easy, right. What’s the big deal?
Often overlooked when writing marketing materials is to get attention, two things are of the utmost importance (in order): visual appeal (design) and literary quality (writing). If it doesn’t catch the eye with color or design, it’s going to be invisible. And if they stop to read it – you MUST be succinct.
To hold attention, you have the same two attributes, but now literary quality is the more important attribute. Effective layout of the text, and again, effective use of language is important to keep the prospect reading on. Structuring the most likely desirables at the top is also important – which may not necessarily be your core value, but your prospect will gloss over less “appealing” attributes only to stop reading due to lack of interest. Obviously your company already has a quality product or service. But a quality product or service never gets noticed when these pieces are missing.
So remember these techniques the next time you need to write a sales letter, brochure or web site copy. You can do it! After all, nobody knows your business like you do.
