Do you present your product or service with enough details? You may be so familiar with it that you don't realize an outsider may not even "get it". The secret is in the details!
This holiday season, like many other people (at least according to the New York Times), I have done my Christmas shopping online. In particular, I was looking for … sculpting supplies for a dear friend of mine, whose creativity is looking for a medium to express itself. I did not know anything about sculpting. I had no idea what would be an appropriate gift for a beginner, so I went to the Internet, hoping that I would find more information than I could gather from an art supplies store employee who might be as knowledgeable as me (in other words, not at all).

So I did a search on Google.com for "sculpture supplies" and I got several results. After half an hour of browsing, I was frustrated. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of the websites that advertised such supplies simply listed them, with absolutely no information on how one might use them, or what is appropriate for a beginner or an advanced sculptor. To add to the problem, there are so many mediums for this particular art form, that one can get easily confused.

In the end, I did buy my sculpting supplies. Where? At Dick Blick, one of the oldest and largest art supplies store in the country. And I bought from them not because they have the largest selection (although that certainly contributed) or the best prices (they do not have the lowest prices around – I found out afterwards), but because they gave me the information I needed.

A search on their website (www.dickblick.com) produced several results that one could choose from: "wood

Moral of the story: people may need your product or service and not even know it. You are seeing the stuff every day, eating it, sleeping with it, so it becomes so familiar to you that you can not tell what is intelligible to an outsider, what is easy for people to grasp. So my suggestion is that you do an inventory of all your marketing materials (website included, if you have one), and see if people get all the information they need from them. Do you spell out all the possible uses for them? Do you tell them how easy or how hard it is to use the product? Possible applications? Any suggestions? You may argue that it would take a lot of words to do so, but I beg to disagree. You can find the balance between overloading people with words, and giving them enough informational details for them to find you extremely useful, very well informed, and authoritative.

About the Author

Cristina has recently launched her own Internet and traditional marketing and copywriting firm. You can see her website at www.4businesswriting.com.