Overview
Marketing encompasses reaching out to prospective and current clients via our web site, social media, email, phone, and other forms of communication.
Over the past 10 years, the internet has revolutionized how marketing is done, particularly with technology-centric products. There are many lessons learned, and Quandis needs to heed them. To wit:
PDFs are bad: one-sheets should be HTML content, easily readable on an iPhone. Emails should contain the one-sheet text in the email, not as an attachment.
Be succinct with bullet points: information scent gets peoples' attention, not flowery language
Corporate blogs should summarize info, rather than show full text
We need to publish standardized pricing: it's just too hard to find
In case you did not bother following the links above, at least check out:
This stuff may be counter-intuitive, but the data don't lie. Let's trust the top usability expert in the world instead of our "gut".
Use http://preview.quandis.net/wordpress to draft and manage this content. I'm open to other suggestions if this is unworkable, but until then, use it.
Content
Content is all about words and concept; it has nothing to do with presentation (colors, fonts, link styles, etc.). If you ever find yourself high lighting a section of text to bold, color, and change a font, you're doing something wrong. All that stuff should be relegated to styles (see below).
When writing copy, keep these things in mind:
Headers Should Have Each Word Capitalized
HEADERS SHOULD NOT SCREAM IN ALL CAPS
Bullet points should capitalize like sentences.
They Should Not Be Capitalized Like Headers.
Summary: Sometimes bullet points comprise multiple sentences. In such cases, start the bullet point with a key phrase in bold. Then consider adding extra space (usually via shift-return) after each multi-line bullet point, for readability.
Mixing: If you mix one-line bullet points with multi-line bullet points, err on the side of more white space. That means adding the extra carriage return at the end of the one line bullet points.
Email Guidelines
Assume it will be read on a smart phone,
Make the text very quickly scannable,
Images and videos should be used sparingly, if at all,
Include a link to a website landing page that matches the email campaign,
Don't include attachments; assume they will be stripped out by corporate firewalls
Ironic side note: my daughter is in 3rd grade, and her teacher has parents working with the kids on expanding sentences to be more descriptive. Ironic that I find myself working hard to do the opposite when writing for the web / email.
Style
HTML defines lots of tags; several should be used in marketing pages, but many should not be (since their function should be handled by CSS instead).
Tags to use
Tags you should not use
Headers: <h1> .. <h6>
Bold
Bullets
Indent
Div (for columns of text)
Table (for tables of data)
Links: <a> tags
Font (including font size)
Color
Blink
Tables (for columns)
Div (for tables of data)
When dealing with style or layout, keep this in mind: