Over time, I have accumulated a number of hobbyhorses about how technical marketing texts should be written. A list. No claim to originality.

  1. Respect the medium. If it’s a website: reduce it to one screen. At least break it up into screen-sized chunks, or do something to ensure readers will want to scroll down.
  2. If we take away the company name, would we still recognize what company we’re dealing with?
  3. If we compare the text to the competition: does that give us a profile of the ways in which you want to stand out from the field?
  4. Separate the story from data – make it easy to navigate to the data. In technical purchasing we have to reckon with readers who already have a very precise picture of the product they’re looking for. They are likely comparing specific parameters. They don’t want to read any essays, they want a clear and informative data sheet.
  5. The story = benefits, not features. If the link to the data is right there, then you can use the text to concentrate on the qualitative story. What are the product’s benefits? These arise out of its features, but they are not the same as them. There’s a translation job we have to do here – from our technical invention into what it means in the customer’s world.
  6. The English has to work. Especially in headlines and short texts the English version must express the USP just as accurately and elegantly as you would expect of the German version. That can be really hard work.
  7. No empty claims/show, don’t tell. This is a really essential aspect of translating from german to English. A certain kind of claims that are not immediately backed up by concrete facts are very accetable in German as a way of projecting status and competence. Simply translated into English these run a stong risk of turning into whole sentences that do no positive work, or are even irritating. We can’t afford that.
  8. Call to action. How explcit it has to be is a matter for discussion. But every page and every text must be designed to lead and/or stimulate the readers to take a next step. This could often benefit from the input of the actual salespeople. Where are the critical points in the sales process where they have to put effort into persuading customers? Can we support them at exactly those points?
  9. Careful with optimistic phrases such as „Geht nicht, gibt’s nicht!“ – and not only because I still don’t know how I should translate that one 😉. But if your sales pitch is about how specialized you are, how helpful is it to say “We can do everything”? “Specialized” means there are things you don’t do. Try to avoid this becoming a contradiction.
  10. Avoid clichés. Or to put it another way: Can it help if you make claims that every other company would equally claim about itself? What can you achieve by emphasizing how “motivated” your employees are? Would any company admit the opposite?
  11. And finally: “omit needless words”*. Words that aren’t working for the USP need to be weeded out. (*I’ve stolen this from a book about writing that is actually pretty terrible – because it fails to explain which words are needless.)

Thos are the principle I try to apply. We can’t always achieve all of them. But we have to try. If we don’t even have that ambition, we can let AI write the texts. Then you don’t need me. And for me its a matter of survival to make sure I’m doing things that are needed.