“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it … I can resist everything but temptation.” —Oscar Wilde
It’s tempting to cram everything that can be said about your product, program, or service into every communication about it. That way, you can satisfy all the internal agendas and answer any question that might occur to anyone.
But yielding to temptation ultimately didn’t work out well for Oscar Wilde, and it probably won’t for you either. Asking your audience to wade through a river of detail to find the bit they want (not to mention the bit you want them to get) is making them work, and people generally expect to get paid for that.
Make it easy for people to understand what you’re offering and how it will benefit them: address them directly and clearly, and don’t let extraneous bits obscure your message. That means resisting the engineer or other detail-obsessed insider who insists that everything is important, and leaders who can’t see that, frankly, your target audience doesn’t give a damn about their hobbyhorses.
It doesn’t mean paring your pitch down to lofty generalities (a sure way to raise greenwashing suspicions). The trick is to isolate essential and powerful details and let them shine. How do you do that? Find out what your target audience cares about and speak directly to that, with verifiable claims. Anything more will tempt them to tune out.
