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Artefact Team
Creative Graphic Design
Dublin, Ireland

Providing Information

A failure to communicate well is a failure to market well. The primary purpose of a brochure, an advertisement, a business website, apart from making sales, is providing the information to support making sales. A lot of textbooks and courses about advertising and marketing like to tell you to 'focus on the benefits rather than the features'. This is often valid, but some take that lesson to heart too literally and don't ever get around to telling you about the features. You get an endless stream of hype about the terrific benefits of...what? You can spend ages trying to find out exactly what is being offered and longer trying to find out how much it will cost you. But you are a busy person busy, so you don't bother! A sale is lost.

The price should not be a state secret. If you have to spend hundreds of words trying to sell the idea with a lot of hype and wild promises, you will excite suspicion rather than interest. If you find yourself having to do this, it is probably because you don't really have a genuine value proposition. Your time would be better spent trying to come up with one.

You may find a few undiscriminating buyers but most people who are smart enough to know how to key their credit card number in, are also smart enough not to do it unless they have been provided with the information they need to make a purchase decision. So be up front. By all means point out the benefits and advantages of your product/service, but also make available and easily accessible comprehensive details of the features, characteristics and cost of your offering. Avoid 'economy with the truth' especially if it will unexpectedly result in customers having to shell out a lot more than they were led to believe. It will sour a relationship and you will lose a customer - and everyone he/she knows - for life.  

THE LARGE PRINT GIVETH and the small print taketh away...

Until recently in Europe the norm has been for ISPs to charge for access to the internet, typically $150 per annum, and since the telephone companies charge for local calls, your phone bill is also being added to each time you go online. Some of the ISPs who charge for access also have deals whereby the telecoms charge a low call rate for dial up to the internet. Now there's a new trend; Free Internet access is being offered by a range of new players. Totally Free, their advertising screams, nothing to pay! Sounds like a great deal. But when you look into it their technical support is charged at about $1.50 per minute and the phone bill is charged at a very full rate with no discount at off-peak times. There is no mention whatever of these facts in the advertising. The result is that for relatively heavy users, these so called free services can end up costing them a lot more than the standard service. If you were stung like that, how would you feel? How would you expect your customers to feel?

Apart from setting out your basic information on a web site site, there are a number of ways in which you might consider making large amounts of detailed information available through your site, particularly where your offering involves a need for, say, a 40 page prospectus as is necessary with some investment products, or a user manual as in some software products, or a need to show close technical detail as in some electronic/mechanical products.

You can, for example:

* Provide downloadable PDF documents.
This is a good way of getting large amounts of text to your customers. It's also a good way of displaying on-screen or for download/printout your attractive glossy brochures. PDF files for download add attractiveness and professionalism to your site. Don't forget to provide the link to Adobe Reader that your customers will need to be able to view PDF format documents.

*Offer to e-mail such materials as file attachments.

Provide an enquiry form for completion by visitors to your site so that they can specify what they would like to receive information about. Whether online or offline, Communicate! Inform!