I once participated in a focus group to evaluate the effectiveness of sales materials produced by an insurance company.
The group included people of diverse professions, ages, and life experience. Yet it was interesting to see how quickly they reached consensus on which document had the most appeal, especially for motivating a purchase decision.
The group's choice? The document with the greatest amount of product details, even though it was in a very text-heavy, table layout with a small font and footnotes.
Contrary to what some conventional marketing wisdom might indicate, the simpler piece was rated as much less effective and credible by the group because of the complexity of factors that must be considered when buying insurance.
The lesson for technology marketers from this group is that for technical products, like insurance, the "devil is truly in the details." Especially when buyers are comparing products on their short list, the sometimes maligned "feeds and speeds" data and other specifications can be critical input for a purchase decision.
A lot of discussion about content marketing is focused on the more glamorous documents such as white papers, case studies, web articles, and blog posts.
But as a group of thoughtful consumers can tell you, don't forget the usefulness of detailed data sheets and technical product brochures for your sales collateral set.
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