When Less is More

Don’t ramble. Don’t rattle. Be prudent in your marketing communication.

It’s a fact of life: For today’s multi-screen hooked, attention-deficit audience, less is more. Don’t beat about the bush. Get to the heart of the matter, and they may listen. Else, you will simply drive them away.

Long winding, long-copy sales letters full of outlandish claims are dead. Speak direct and simple to people in their own language, and they may space you one of their most precious asset- their time.

Most companies have no sticky brand narrative to tell because they’re busy slapping more content on their websites; randomly sharing tweets, tweaking their Facebook pages, looking for pictures to caption on Pinterest or uploading more videos on their YouTube channels than consumers can make a note of.

They forget that Google’s search bar looks the way it does for a reason. Ditto for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube. These digital marketing platforms know that the simpler and faster they make their platforms, the less likelihood that the highly flirtatious user will hop from their search bar to another search engine.

According to Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist and the author of two bestsellers – Web Analytics – An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0, for every second that a person has to wait for a page to load, the conversion potential drops seven percent.

As any CIO worth his salt would tell you, consumers these days are ruthless. Spoilt for choice, they will flit to the next, or the next web property that serves them better.

Respect the consumer’s time they spend on your web property and they will return the sentiment by respecting your brand. Bombarding them with mindless realms of promotion will cause brand alienation – not a good strategy for building customer retention.

Whether you are selling to engineers, scientists, architects or the common man, you are invading on their time. You are trespassing into their private space. A lot of companies put out meaningless, long-winding message in a manner that the focal point is completely lost on the consumer.

Say only what needs to be said. Writing a good ad copy is an art in brevity – not a word more; not a word less. Be frugal. Don’t over-complicate your message, or worse – ramble.