Forbes recently published an article outlining ten effective digital marketing strategies that businesses can use to grow their revenue and engage with customers online. One of the strategies discussed was to ‘describe your product,’ or ‘break down the key features of your product.’ The logic there being that ‘if you can’t describe it to them, you can’t sell it to them.’ What does that mean for a business?

Think about any product that you use or have used. What does the packaging look like? What features does it have? Where can you buy it?

When you’re shopping for a product like that, you’re not just looking at the price or the features, you’re also going through the product’s description to try and understand what it is you’re buying. This is known as ‘brand knowledge’ and it forms part of an individual’s ‘brand loyalty.’

So, how does describing a product work?

• Start with the basics – what is the product and why should someone buy it?
• Use ‘actionable’ language – avoid using superlatives such as ‘best’ or ‘the greatest,’ because what you’re actually doing is impressing the listener or reader, rather than informing them.
• Be specific – it’s always better to use specific language when speaking about a product. For example, instead of saying ‘this product is safe for use,’ you would say ‘this product is safe for ingestion in birds.’
• Avoid using jargon – if you need to use industry or business terms to explain the concept of your product, define them before you use them.
• Be honest – be direct and upfront about the features, benefits and risks of your product. If you can’t articulate these concepts with simplicity and transparency, how can you expect your customers to understand or appreciate them?
• Provide as much information as possible – if you’re describing a product that you’ve never even seen or used, how can you expect someone to trust that you know what you’re talking about? Provide as much information as possible, including images, videos, and all relevant statistics.
• Use easy-to-understand language – nobody likes a complicated or jargon-filled explanation when they’re trying to buy something. If you want to impress someone with your vocabulary, impress them by using simple, everyday language.
• Be unique – If you’re not providing any contextual or relevant information, your listeners will have no idea what you’re talking about. Be unique, use your own words, and don’t copy any other product’s description.

As you can see, these tips aren’t hard to follow, but they do require some effort. Your product’s description isn’t something that you want to go through haphazardly – you want to take the time to think of the right words and phrases, and to ensure that everything is accurate and understandable. For example, if you sell bird-related merchandise, but you’re explaining a product that is safe for use by both humans and animals, you could say ‘while this product is safe for use by both humans and animals, it is, nonetheless, not suitable for delicate feathers.’

Now, I don’t want to go overboard and suggest that you need to use the same exact phrasing and terminology that the brand you’re describing uses. After all, your product is probably different enough that you’ll need to come up with your own unique language and phrases to accurately describe it. However, following these guidelines should help you come up with a quality description that will make your customers understand and appreciate your product.

How to Describe Online Marketing for Products

So, how can you effectively describe online marketing for products? One way is to use the above guidelines to come up with a unique and compelling description for your product. Another way is to think of a list of advantages and disadvantages. What are the features and what are the drawbacks? What makes your product better than the others and why should people buy it?

When you have all of this information written down, you can come back and review it at a later date. Doing this now will help you edit and improve upon the text as needed. There are plenty of advantages to doing this ahead of time as opposed to writing a generic and lifeless description and then trying to come up with a good reason for why someone should buy it. Editing the text now will make it much easier to come up with a compelling argument as to why someone should buy your product.

Editing and formatting your product’s description can be a hassle. Luckily, there are tools that can make the process easier – like Revue. Platforms like Revue allow you to create and maintain a product catalog that can be accessed from various platforms like mobile phones and tablets. This is incredibly helpful because it means you can update the content whenever you want, from anywhere, and it will automatically propagate to all locations.

The great thing about Revue is that it can help you ‘brand’ all of your products. This is important because if you’re selling multiple products under the same umbrella, it’s important to create a consistent and cohesive brand identity for everything. Using a tool like Revue does this automatically – if you have a mobile phone app, you can use it to access your product catalog from anywhere and at any time. This makes it incredibly easy for customers to find and purchase what you offer. They don’t need to search for it, they just need to look through your catalog and find what they want. In addition to this, you can create ‘look and feels’ that can be applied to all of your products – this will make it easy for customers to find what they want, regardless of the platform on which it was originally accessed.

Creating a product catalog is only the first step of describing online marketing for products. Now that you have a place to store all of your products, it’s time to populate it with content.

Populating your product catalog with content is actually quite simple – once you have your product’s description written out, you just need to go through each of the product’s details and add in some content. There are plenty of content options – including video, images, and text – and you can even add in some calls to action (e.g. buying buttons, links to social media accounts, etc.).

The above guidelines can help you come up with a unique description for your product. Of course, you’ll need to follow a few more tips to effectively market it online.