The Challenges of Marketing Application Services

If someone asked me to describe what we do, I would say something like, “We provide web-based solutions to help maximize profit and efficiency for your business.” This is easy enough to understand – we develop programs, accessible online, that save your business time and money. Perhaps a little generic, but certainly accurate. The problem arises when we try to get more specific. People may ask, “What exactly do you create? What do your programs do?” It can get tricky here, because explaining our applications to those without an extensive background in the application service provider (ASP) industry can be a difficult task.

Allow me a moment for a quick sidebar. I ran our website through a website grader, which, among many other things, analyzed the education level required to read and understand the content on the site. The grader returned a rating of Advanced / Doctoral Degree. I was surprised and somewhat perturbed by this, though upon reflection, I realized that it just shows how difficult it is to convey the functions of our services.

I think the main reason for this is that our services are stooped deep in technology, and many of our clients are involved in telecommunications and very knowledgeable about the industry. They understand the language we use with ease, while others may consider it jargon.

So the question becomes, who do we want to read our site? Obviously we want as many people as possible to visit, but we do have a target audience. The challenge is keeping the language simple and understandable while accurately conveying all the key features of our services. As we broaden our target audience, we need to ensure that our content is coherent, but not lose any important information.