One of the biggest challenges tech companies face is how to present a new product to the ideal customer or entity. If the details are too technical for a consumer product, people will find it too confusing to interact with (or consider buying). It’s also easy to make descriptions too simplistic, which can be equally confusing.
How, then, does the responsible technical writer strike the right balance? If you’ve had trouble with this in the past, don’t worry — you’re far from alone. Today, I want to show you how to optimize your product guides for maximum relevance and readability. These five bits of advice were the first ones to cross my mind while brainstorming this topic, so I’m going to trust my gut and say that these are the most important things to consider.
1. Make It Look Easy
One of the biggest sells for any product is ease of use. The product needs to come across as user-friendly no matter how many bells and whistles it has. This is why so many consumer IT products come with “quick start” guides or the like: some consumers — most — just want the basics explained, so they can start using their router. Truth be told, most IT professionals aren’t interested in much beyond that either.
All that said, a detailed guide should also be developed and included with any consumer product you manufacture or resell. The latter is necessary for legal reasons in many places and also for other purposes, including white papers, B2B marketing, affiliate sales programs, etc.
2. Make the Language Match the Audience
How tech-savvy is the consumer buying this product? If it’s a cable modem, very little tech speak should even be necessary. If it’s a motherboard, most buyers will want more technical details.
Let’s take two IT products, a cable modem and a motherboard, and compare them in terms of how to present their features and usages to a consumer audience. A cable modem is a simple device, usually with a single purpose, so its instructions and descriptions should be pointed and simple, too.
A motherboard, on the other hand, has a litany of features and specs that need to be outlined in a product guide. Anyone who already knows how to build a computer will need many of those fine details to determine if the board meets their operating needs. Therefore, that guide — even when written for a consumer — would need to be far more detailed.
3. Use High-Quality Visuals
The best product guides provide visual descriptors that accurately reflect the instructions in the guide. While not an IT copywriting issue, I want to address this one just for a minute. Visuals and written copy have a powerful symbiont relationship. When used well together, they can bring a heightened degree of clarity. When used poorly, your customer service lines start lighting up like a Christmas tree.
In the case of product guides, I recommend professional-grade visuals or highly detailed graphic renderings. The latter might be necessary when dealing with products like motherboards or devices with multiple components, but for the most part, just a reliable facsimile of the actual product can make a huge difference.
4. One Product, One Guide
I’m sure anyone reading this for the advice I’m offering has seen this one: A company manufactures several different model routers, but all models have just enough of the same features that the company decides to write a single guide. Within that guide are several caveats alerting the user to the differences between models.
Please, please don’t do this.
And if you’ve done it already, please don’t do it again.
One of the easiest ways to endear customers to your brand — especially if you’re targeting millennials — is to make them feel like you are speaking to them directly. If they bought Model 221-T, they want a manual for the 221-T, not one that covers the 221-T, the 221-TX, and the 221-TX Ultra.
Believe it or not, even IT companies need to start steering their copy more in the direction of relationship building. One easy way to do this is to always produce support materials that relate directly to — and only to — the product in the box.
5. Maximize Readability
One huge trap that tech companies walk into all the time is leaving the development of product guides to the engineers who also developed the products. There’s just one problem with that: Those people are engineers, not writers. It’s not reasonable to expect an engineer to be able to communicate product capabilities to the consumer. This is why working with good writers for your product guides is always a good policy.
IT consumer copywriting is tricky business. It requires the writer to have enough working knowledge of the technology to be able to explain it in a way that a layperson can easily understand.
This is why I recommend only hiring writers with technical writing backgrounds who can write guides they would be able to understand and follow. Whomever you hire should have a demonstrated ability to do this, whether you directly hire a freelancer or work with an agency, like BeezContent. That said, we would love to chat with you about your next product launch and discuss how to optimize all your written content, from product guides and press releases to blog posts and social media. Feel free to contact us and ask how we can help.
