Hello everyone. I’m new to the forum, and I suppose new to copywriting (been in Marketing for years, but my new job is the first requiring such a concentration of writing). I have the following challenge that I hope to get some suggestions on…

I am currently re-writing some copy for the company website. The product is very technical in nature. The web page currently lists 23 features of the product in bullet form after two paragraphs of intro text. I asked the engineers and other geeks what was most important to the customer. Answer – everything. So my question is; how would you deal with a whole bunch of features that are all regarded as important, and make it into good, web page copy?

I think the next project may be re-writing the product sheet, where I will have the same problem.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Welcome fobeiro. There are probably some additional things you can do for the web, but regardless of where it appears you need to break it down into smaller, categorized lists with subheads. Nobody will look at a 20-something-line list of bullets.

You need to make this reader-friendly as reference text, not narrative text. So, try to find out how to do this logically by first by categorizing like items. Product managers often don't appreciate the difference between product functions, features, and benefits/differentiators. If you see any bennies or diffies, you may be able to cross them off the list by treating those in an intro paragraph or sentence (to the page or the section). I think of functions as more important. Functions are what the product does (e.g., monitor physician's productivity in a medical group). Features are "nice-to-knows" about how (a web-based application vs. client-server or the ever-popular user-friendly interface) it works. But they're not central to getting it done.

Once you categorized these, if applicable, just try to group like items from most important to least. Bottom line: you need logical groupings of 4 - 5 each to help the reader navigate to where they want to go.

Otherwise, just be sure not to be redundant. And stay parallel, friend. Stay parallel.

Thanks boiler. I pretty much figured this was the way to go about it, but I'm still not doing very well. Everyone at the company wants different things, so it's difficult to write this and please the (many) stakeholders. Folks can not seem to let go of what you call the "nice-to-knows". In my opinion, this is info that should be on a data / product sheet. But this is a problem for a different forum!