The Pursuit: Boosting Marketing with Manuals

In my last post I wrote about leveraging your technical documents as marketing materials. Everything your company does or creates should pass through a marketing grid, and that includes user manuals and other “boring” documents.

In this post, I want to talk about pursuing three essentials to turn your documents into high-performing marketing materials: truth, goodness, and beauty.

Pursue Truth

By truth, I mean accuracy. This point should be obvious, but it’s amazingly easy to write a manual that’s got the wrong information in it. And unfortunately, it’s not too hard to find examples of that. Bad instructions leave customers with a sour taste in their mouths, and that dampens their enjoyment of your product or service.

Whatever you do, make sure your documents are accurate. This tells the customer a lot about your company: You pay attention to the details. You care about excellence. You can be trusted. Your product is high-quality (if the manual is shoddy, how do I know the product is any good?).

Your customer might not be able to articulate these messages, but she will internalize them. And you can bet that inaccurate documents will broadcast messages that your customer will be able to articulate.

Your technical documents absolutely must be full of truth. This is Number One.

Pursue Goodness

It’s not enough to have accurate documents. You need good writing, too.

Good technical writing is crisp, clean, and easy to read. Instructions are clear and simple, the writing style is straightforward, and the organization of the content makes sense from a customer’s (not your company’s) perspective. In short, it’s pleasurable to read.

Ikea pursues goodness. There are two great things about Ikea: their prices, and their assembly instructions. They consistently have some of the best tech writing I’ve ever seen. It’s all pictures—clean, clear, simple pictures. There’s a lot of white space, and even though there are no words, it’s obvious what they’re instructing you to do. I’ve never had a problem assembling Ikea furniture.

In my opinion, this is their greatest marketing tool. Why? Because I hate going to Ikea. I can’t stand spending any time there. It’s a labyrinth of stuff upon stuff, all designed to make you buy gear you didn’t intend to buy when you arrived. And it takes forever to wend my way through that confusing maze. But their easy-to-use instructions (and their prices) make an occasional trip worthwhile, and I’m always glad I bought that bookcase or the chairs. Now that’s how to use tech documents!

One other point about good writing: don’t outsource to other countries. If you use non-native speakers, your customers will know it. I could see it right away when I started using that Adobe product. Even native English speakers from other countries (such as Britain or Australia) can introduce odd phrases or regionalisms in the documentation, and it always comes off badly. Keep it local.

Pursue Beauty

This is the most neglected part of technical documents, and it’s a shame. Your manuals should be beautiful. Remember—that user guide is the first thing your customers will see when they open the box. Perhaps they never will read the manual, but they’ll see it. And you want them to be attracted to it.

So use an eye-catching design on the cover. Try unconventional sizes or dimensions. Use creative layouts and designs. Make good use of color. If your tech writers aren’t graphic artists, have them collaborate with designers to develop something amazing—something you’ll frame on your front wall with your press releases. Seriously.

Last post, I added some links to some great tech docs. Here are a couple more. How do you see these companies pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty in their documents?

• Cingular
• Intego

How about you? Got any good examples to share? How do you use technical documents to appeal to your customers?

Photo credit: Eustaquio Santimano