I’ve been in and around high tech marketing groups for decades and have noticed that there’s a certain “style” to the way such groups communicate with each other and the outside world.

It occurred to me that mastery of this “style” (since it’s apparently universal) must be the primary requirement for success in high tech marketing. With that in mind, here are three questions to test your high tech marketing aptitude:

1. Product Descriptions

Which of the following best describes inventory control software?

  1. "Our solution controls inventory."
  2. "Our solution was designed to enable users to control inventory."
  3. "Our solution was specifically designed to enable users to integrate inventory control into their work environment.”
  4. "Our bleeding-edge solution is fourth generation technology that was specifically designed to empower users to seamlessly integrate comprehensive inventory controls into diverse environments to increase productivity within the global enterprise.”

2. Market Strategy

Which of the following best describes a plan to sell widgets?

  1. “We sell widgets.”
  2. “We market top-quality widgets.”
  3. “Our company is the leading vendor of state-of-the-art, top-quality widgets.”
  4. “Our go-to-market strategy is to maintain and increase our dominant position as the industry leader in high-quality, state-of-the-art widget-enabled products that leverage today’s digital economy.”

3. Market Positioning

Which of the following best describes the function of an online ad agency?

  1. “We design web ads.”
  2. “We provide design services for multi-media web advertising.”
  3. “We help companies in the online advertising industry to conceptualize and execute multi-media advertising campaigns.”
  4. “We provide high quality advertisement design services that fully conceptualize, execute and monetize peer-to-peer and one-to-many campaigns for both virtual and brick-and-mortar enterprises using a wide variety of traditional and social media.”

SCORING:

If you completely missed the point of the above test, congratulations! You have a bright future in high tech marketing!

Seriously, though, there truly is a tendency inside many high tech firms to weigh down simple statements with biz-blab and bullsh*t.

Whenever this happens, it’s because the marketing group hasn’t figured out the basics:

  1. Why would anyone buy this product?
  2. Why would they buy it from us?

Those are simple questions and therefore have simple answers. Add buzzwords doesn’t fool anyone; they just make you and your company seem unfocused and confused.

If you want to write better sales and marketing messages, sign up for my free weekly newsletter (the link is below) or read and watch my 7 step tutorial on sales messages.