Reasons Your Marketing Materials Are Going Unread

• You are using the "We-We" approach. Your marketing materials might be too "we" oriented instead of customer oriented. Your customers are interested in learning about you, but instead of talking about the new and improved equipment that you purchased, explain instead how this new equipment will benefit the customer.

• Test - Perform the "We-We" test by counting the number of times you use we in one of your marketing pieces. While it will be impossible to delete all of the we references from your literature, work to cut the number in half.

• Too much technical jargon. Depending on your audience, you should dumb-down the language in your literature if it is technical. You can have a technical person write the test for your materials, but you should always have someone in marketing, or a different department, reword the text into layman's terms.

• Test - Have someone from outside your company read your marketing materials. If they can't understand what your message is, then chances are you need to rework your wording.

• You haven't answered, "What's in it for me." You might be stating too many generalities in your literature. Be sure to focus more on the benefits instead of the features.

• No call to action. Have you ever gotten a piece of mail encouraging you to purchase a product, but the literature contained no information on how to purchase the product? Make sure you include a call to action on every marketing piece that you send out.

• Poor grammar, punctuation and lack of proofreading. This one doesn't require a lengthy explanation. Bottom line is that if people see mistakes, they will probably dismiss your marketing piece.