Yesterday I mentioned voice recognition, and you may have wondered what it has to do with marketing. Well, apart from its potential everyday application, it may be precisely the tool which can get us communicating more effectively. There’s no doubt that most written sales material isn’t nearly as good as a spoken sales presentation. That’s not down to any lack of communication ability from the writer of the sales material, but more because of this strange compulsion we have to dress up written material in unnecessarily complex words and sentence construction. The few people who actually talk like this in a business environment are rightly derided; we call it “management-speak”. Most of us don’t talk like this, but judging from most marketing material, it’s a lot harder to stop ourselves writing like this.
I’ve mentioned before that one good technique for creating great written sales material is to listen to your best salesman describe the product, and to use a transcription of that as the basis for your written content. You’ll see the part that easy-to-use voice recognition software can play in this. Whether you transcribe someone else’s sales patter, or just dictate it yourself, sales material that began as spoken word is almost always more understandable and gets to the point better. Give it a try. Your dictated content will still need some subsequent polishing, but that process isn’t likely to result in you adding an excess of jargon or overcomplexity.