How Complex Industries Connect with Their Customers
How to communicate complex ideas simply and effectively, drawing your audience in without overwhelming them.
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Sophisticated marketing aims to attract and engage audiences, communicate unique propositions, and encourage interactions that lead to embracing your products or services.
It sounds simple, right? Yet the challenge gets more complicated when introducing groundbreaking innovations or navigating hyper-technical spaces like renewable energy marketing, healthcare websites, and advanced technology. Here, the typical communication barriers are even larger.
Simplifying complex or confusing content isn’t just about making things easier to understand; it’s about prioritizing what you want to say, balancing connections and credibility, and setting your brand apart in crowded marketplaces.
So, how do marketers in complex industries overcome these very real communication challenges?
As a leading webflow agency known for high-converting websites, we’ve developed some working principles to help some of today’s most innovative companies overcome these very real challenges.
Start With The Basics.
Balancing how much to share can make or break your customer’s experience. Too often, companies either overshare, burying the essential message under layers of technical jargon, or undershare, leaving potential users puzzled by what they actually offer.
Don’t go crazy and attempt to share everything in one go. We recommend focusing on “Who, What, When, Where, and Why” to avoid overwhelming your audience. Save the rest for other areas on your site.
Balance Functional And Aspirational Content.
Finding creative ways to balance functional and aspirational information in marketing can take time and effort. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Even with consumer-centric marketing trends influencing the B2B world, businesses still need to communicate vital information, even if it is complex.
We recommend not letting the pendulum swing too far to one side or the other. In areas with heavier information, use more aspirational visual cues and references. Keep a keen eye to ensure you don’t go so far that you risk diluting or distracting from the message.
Explore how consumer centric marketing trends are influencing B2B business in The Evolution of B2B Websites: Beyond Just Business
One of our favorite examples of this is the LOSMP Website we created a few years back.
When we first met the LOSMP team, we had limited knowledge of the specialized law’s technicalities. However, we discovered this was far more than your average small business website.
By designing an experience that catered to the diverse needs of all audiences, we could not only provide the critical information required to attract and convert a potential client but also engage other audiences through visuals that displayed the brand’s core personality. The result is a welcoming and approachable feel to a serious and practical topic.
Break Content Into Bites, Snacks, and Meals.
It’s not a novel concept, but allowing people to dive deeper on their own terms proves to be successful time and time again. Enable audiences to engage with top-line information and then choose to learn more.
This avoids forcing unqualified audiences into the wrong funnel and increases the likelihood that you will turn that bite of content into a snack or even a full meal when the time is right.
Humanize Your Content.
We nerd out on technical information, too. But when your content is already functional, focus on making it approachable with human language and a distinct or conversational tone of voice.
Play up your brand’s personality, but avoid too many 100-dollar words and fluffy marketing language. Avoid jargon that might alienate non-expert users and instead opt for clear, simple language that bridges the gap between expertise and general understanding.
Sure, you have to be of the category you’re in and your audiences’ expectations, but ultimately, we’re all still human and would like to be treated as such.
Adapt To Various Learning Styles.
Just because the topic may be less exciting to some doesn’t mean the experience has to be. Consider a mix of text, visuals, animations, and interactive elements to cater to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.
We are constantly exploring ways to bring the technical aspects of products and offerings to life and updating more Webflow components to cater to all learning styles.
For example, with Lumafield, we used colorful images from their CT scanner to illustrate the power of their technology.
The result is a website tailored to expert engineers, but it’s easily understandable to almost anyone who goes to their site. If you want to see more inspo from Lumafield, check out their Scan of the Month website, too!
Different types of rich media, visuals to bring to life before and after examples, and interactivity improve your organization’s memorability and use existing memory structures to help audiences more easily understand the content.
Repeat Key Points For Emphasis And Clarity.
Simplifying the experience often also means simplifying how much you’re trying to say at once.
Rather than overwhelming your home page with data, focus on delivering the right information at the right time. This approach helps guide potential customers to a well-placed call-to-action (CTA), where a more personalized interaction can occur, often through a product demo or a consultation.
Determine a maximum of three ideas you want to reinforce to your audiences and reiterate those points over and over until the cows come home.
Have a project or problem to solve? Let’s get started.
Working with Gigantic was inspiring and impactful. Given the nature and timeline of this project, our company needed a collaborative and nimble partner—not just one who lists those qualities as bullet points in a capabilities presentation, but a partner who actually exhibits them day in and day out. Gigantic worked with our team to create and implement design decisions in real-time and, like any true partner, asked great questions and challenged us which has only benefited our company as a whole.
Working with Gigantic was inspiring and impactful. Given the nature and timeline of this project, our company needed a collaborative and nimble partner—not just one who lists those qualities as bullet points in a capabilities presentation, but a partner who actually exhibits them day in and day out. Gigantic worked with our team to create and implement design decisions in real-time and, like any true partner, asked great questions and challenged us which has only benefited our company as a whole.