Tips For Effective Datasheets

No matter term changes depending on the industry, it is one of most important document for customers and companies. Yess, I’m implying datasheets. Some refers it as Technical Datasheet (TDS), some terms it as Product Datasheet (PDS). These documents introduce your product briefly and purchasers (or customers) expect to get product technical information from datasheet. F. Raymond Dewey puts it simply “To a potential customer, the data sheet is the company…” Datasheet are the first most-consumed content by customers who are considering a technology purchase, according to Eccolo Media’s 2014 B2B Technology Content Survey Report, Vol. 2. Well then, what do you think about the key questions? How they affect the readers (customers) and what is the significance level of the datasheets in the Sales&Marketing actions? Can we do to make effective and comprehensible TDS?

Yes, datasheets can be extremely effective when it comes to lead generation, particularly in technology industry. According to investigations, datasheets are the first most-valued content sources in during the purchase stage by business buyers and specifiers and second most-valued content in the evaluation stage. Then, we can say that datasheets have considerable effect on Sales&Marketing.

I think there are 3 key factors for effective and professional datasheets: Understandable- Concise -Informative.

Understandable: It’s the foremost factor for effective datasheets. Readers will glance them to pick up the main points, and, if they find what they look for in the product, they’ll read the other content in depth. So, you should write a content that gets to the point quickly and to use a very readable layout. I recommend you to use short sentences with well-known technical terms, if possible prefer to highlight the most important features with bullet lists. Keep away from grammatical, or technical errors which have negative influence on your branding. The words that define the product differences than others or the key properties, should not be get lost in the text ad long paragraphs. This trick will help readers to find what they look for like product’s specific features, benefits.

Concise: Most-liked and most-consumed TDS or PDS are concise with 1 or 2 pages. First, you should decide to titles and content, then design your datasheet template. By the way, don’t forget to consider visual materials and branding standards.

Technical specifics, the most distinct features must be written in the datasheet. But avoid from the overdone marketing statements and the content which is not directly associated with the product features and information like cases, comparisons with competitive or pricing. The data sheet is not advertisement material, in fact, it is an informative technical document between the brochures and the white papers.

Informative: The datasheet should include all of the information needed by the customer to use your product into their process or the users to consume your product. Before start to choose titles and write datasheet, investigating the datasheets of the top players in the market can help you to decide to content layout.

I recommend you to use sectoral terminology while producing content of datasheet and prefer clear, understandable, short sentences (mentioned above). Product description or general definition is essential information for almost all datasheets. But, keep this title and statement short and briefly explain your product. As you guess, specifications are the sufficient information for the data sheet. The data sheet should provide sufficient technical information to provide the reader fundamental issues for they process or using case. These technical specs should include details differ them to other products. Other important title must be Features or Benefits which explain your product’s advantages and properties which solve the problems of users or meet the requirements of the users. Information like Application or Usage will enrich your datasheets and help readers to find your datasheet easily while searching with keywords. Finally, don’t share your contact information like website, E-mail, phone no of your company.