Lessons on presenting your work more efficiently
By Anna Scordos-Brooke
Director of Public Relations
Technical articles and case studies are a great way to showcase your company’s expertise. They offer you an opportunity to put things into context, explain the relevance of your work and offer detailed evidence on how and why your products or services helped a client succeed.
But communicating your message through an article relies on your audience having the time and inclination to sit down and read it thoroughly. Here are a few ideas to help you reach your target audience without having them read the entire article.
A Picture Tells a Thousand Words
This is the age of Instagram, where a picture and a brief caption have the power to tell a story in an instant. Did your company manufacture a tool or system that can withstand the hardships of the oilfield better than its predecessors? Show a side-by-side comparison of how each one looked after working downhole. Did your company build a structure that served a unique purpose? Let’s see it!
Does your team provide the best service in town? The world should see their smiling faces after a job well done! Good photos can be used anywhere. From brochures to trade show banners; from LinkedIn to Facebook. The key is to invest in good quality photos from the get-go. Hiring a professional photographer to capture a bank of reusable images of your company’s products and services is always a good investment if you want to showcase your success.
Crunch the Numbers
Statistics play an important role in backing up a case study’s claims with evidence. Making a case study interesting can be a challenge for even the best writers (and we’re good). Reading them can be pretty dry, but if you have compelling statistical evidence to share that underlines your success, you can share it via a graphical representation.
Pie charts, bar charts, line charts, scatter diagrams – these are all visual ways of communicating the impact of your work quickly and in a way that is easy on the eye. Just choose the type of graph and color scheme that best showcases your numbers. It’s critically important that the numbers represented are accurate and the graph stands up to scrutiny. Once you have some good solid charts at your disposal, they can be used in internal and external promotional materials and across social media whenever you’re looking to present evidence quickly and efficiently.
Speed is of the Essence
The story that you tell in an article can be packaged in a way that is quicker to digest for the reader. Animations can quickly summarize the key events of a project from start to finish and can be more engaging than a page of text. They can also be easily shared online, kickstarting a conversation with interested parties inviting you to fill in the blanks for them.
If you’d prefer to stick to words, the brevity of a press release works just as well today as it did before. For example, the who, where, what, why and when in your lead paragraph quickly gives a reader the story. If you want to make a technical article more accessible, try breaking it up into a three-part series, or add some human or historical context to inject more ‘story’ to the technical details.
Start a Conversation
Real-life press conferences and presentations may be off the table for a while but there’s nothing stopping you from taking them online. Re-purpose that booth presentation you were going to give at OTC and have a one-on-one video call with a key client. Host a webinar and take questions. Take some time to make some videos that start a discussion about best practice in your industry, post them online and engage in the comments that they provoke.
Today, more conversations are online than ever before. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – make sure that your company is an active part of the conversations that are happening on these platforms.
For 40 years, Foster Marketing has been using its experience and know-how to help our clients showcase their success across all platforms. Contact us today to start a conversation on how we can help you, too!
Foster Marketing is here to help you create strong paths for you to connect with your audience, whether you are still in virtual-only mode, or back face-to-face. Call us today at 281-448-3435, contact us online or connect with us on LinkedIn.
BONUS TIP
Numbers don’t lie … and according to Hubspot, not only do 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, but 88% of those who use video said that it gave them a positive ROI.