Your marketing writing doesn’t need to be all sell, sell, sell.  Your writing can speak to your customers pre-sale and then post-sale.

I’ve mentioned before the differences between marketing writing and technical writing. You can use both on your web site, in your newsletters, and in various communications to customers and potential customers.

Think “Post-Sale”

After you sell your product or service to a customer—the work was performed and paid for—he still needs to hear from you.

Depending on your business, your customer needs instructions or opinion. If you sell garage door openers, provide installation and how-to-use instructions. If you sell mortgages or cosmetic dentistry, provide advice on how he should proceed with the choice he’s made:  You don’t need to “sell” the loan or the crowns to him again, but you can answer common after-sale questions and offer reassurance.

Offering instructions and advice to your paying customers helps you to:

• Solidify your relationship with your customers, which makes them more likely to remain customers—and more likely to recommend you to others.
• Lessen the phone calls and emails you need to deal with, to answer customers’ questions. I’m not saying you aren’t willing to talk to customers, but when you answer simple, common questions in an easy-to-distribute written form, you’ll free up time you can spend with customers who have pressing problems.

Think “Expertise”

Write about your business to  demonstrate your expertise.  Be a resource! Have an opinion. Give the facts.

You can provide information in various ways: As content on your Web site, as PDF files that readers can download from your Web site, as articles in your newsletter, or as blog postings.

Also, answer questions posted to groups such as on LinkedIn. That’s a great way to introduce yourself as an expert and move readers to your web site.

Think “Reader’s Need”

If your web site is all about selling, selling, selling…then it’s all about you. Maybe people will check it out when they have a specific need for your product. Maybe they won’t.

But if your web site is hospitable, readers will visit often. Consider the reader’s need. Let’s say you’re a midwife. You’ve got readers who aren’t even pregnant yet but they come to your site because they might someday need you. Solve a problem for them, for free.  Write an article about IVF, about home births, about birth control before and after pregnancy.  Again, you’re positioning yourself as the expert you are.

Readers will  bookmark your site or blog, will visit it regularly, and will remember your name.  When she’s pregnant, you’ll be at the top of her mind.  Solve her need now, pre-sale, to make the sale when she has the need.

Don’t write solely about the immediate sale. Write also about your customer’s need, and your ability to solve that need.