Product Marketing Copy
How to Create a Competitive Analysis for Software Products
I published a product management article for CloudApp about conducting a competitive analysis for software products.
Rakuten Marketing
A team developing their deep linking product at Rakuten Marketing needed a user story to demonstrate how their product would be used in different settings. I wrote the stories and recorded each one for a separate video, for which I also created the graphics and animation using Adobe Illustrator, Premerie Pro, and AfterEffects.
Still from marketing video
Storyboard I created to show the user story
Attribution Copy:
Let’s say you’re the marketing manager at a department store called Jackson’s. For the upcoming sale that lasts from after Black Friday through Christmas, you’re launching a Buy 1 Get 1 Free campaign for winter clothing through Jackson’s mobile app. You’re advertising the campaign by placing ads on the web, and you want to find out which of the three ad designs actually generated the most sales revenue. Trouble is, you can’t tell how many people are clicking on your ads, installing your app, or actually buying anything. With Rakuten Marketing’s attribution technology, deep links track customers throughout their journey, from viewing an ad to making a purchase. Viewing the dashboard, you can see a complete breakdown of user data. Now you can use this data to make better product and marketing decisions!
Still from marketing video
Storyboard I created to show the user story
Deep Linking Copy:
You’re the marketing engineer at Timothy Hartwood Bank. You want to encourage parents to sign up for savings accounts, so you create a financial calculator app called Savings for Kids that parents can use with their children to show how much money they can save over time with an account. You create some banner ads that will take customers from a webpage to the app. The problem is, regular web hyperlinks can’t take customers directly from a search or embedded link to a page in your app. But with Rakuten Marketing’s deep links, you can! And if customers don’t have the app installed yet, Rakuten Marketing’s deferred deep links will first take them to the app store, then directly to your app after they install it.
Palate Wine Flyers
I wrote and designed flyers for the Palate app and portal using Sketch.
B2B portal flyer
Consumer app flyer
User Help Guides
Palate Wine
I wrote the help guide for new users of the Palate portal on our Zendesk site.
Excerpt from About page:
The information you fill out on the About page will appear in your Winery profile in the Palate app. You can edit this information at any time. Required fields are marked with red asterisks.
(photos of portal and app side by side)
Fill out the basic information: Business Name, Business Type, Description, Phone Number, Email Address, and Location.
Add a cover photo and profile picture to make it easier for visitors to identify you.
Amenities: Check the amenities that your business offers for visitors.
Business Hours: Check the days of the week that your business is open to the public. If you are only open by appointment on certain days, check Appointment Only for those days.
You have the option to provide your business's founding year and your Facebook URL.
Click Save to save your changes.
The Daily Californian
As the Multimedia Editor at The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s campus newspaper, I wrote a guide on how to publish posts on the paper’s WordPress site.
Looking back on this document after a few years of experience, I can make the following critiques:
Some UI labels are bolded, some are not, and still others are in quotation marks. For consistency, pick one format, preferably capitalized and unbolded
Be consistent with periods. Add one to the end of each sentence.
Make the headings for each step more prominent.
Don’t use letters for annotations - use numbers for each sub-section like 2.1, 2.2.
Choose a more prominent heading format for Troubleshooting FAQs to distinguish it from the other steps.
Daily Cal should be italicized, since it’s a newspaper.
UI Labels and Error Messages
Rakuten
I worked on UI reviews for the Rakuten Merchant Server (RMS), which helps merchants sell products and manage logistics through their online stores. The UI for RMS is translated into several languages, so the copy had to be simple and translatable. I also worked on the Internal Business Server, a portal that helps Rakuten employees manage merchants and their stores. Generally, I reviewed wireframes created by product managers.
Examples:
Before
Ready to Shop Open
(label for a switch that toggles the visibility of a merchant’s store on the Rakuten site)
Analysis
My guess is that since the object comes before the verb in Japanese, the original author of this label wrote “Shop Open” by mistake, and it stuck.
“Ready to” is redundant. The switch is either on or off; there is no intermediate “ready to turn on” stage. Since concision is key in technical writing, we can get rid of “ready to.”
After
Open Shop
Before
Please enter a valid format on “Order Date”. Please use DD/MM/YYYY.
Analysis
"Please enter” is fine - it clearly and politely instructs a user to do something.
We can condense two sentences into one. “Valid format” is redundant with DD/MM/YYYY.
Quotations are distracting and difficult to translate. UI labels can be capitalized, bolded, or both depending on the style guide.
After
Please enter an Order Date in DD/MM/YYYY format.
Before
Sorry, page not found.
Try again later!
Analysis
Rakuten’s audience is mainly Japanese, so “Sorry” by itself sounds flippant. In most cases, a simple Page Not Found message on a 404 page is fine.
Since a 404 page is a result of a broken or incorrect link, it’s unlikely that trying again later will fix things. A more helpful followup to the error message would be to provide links back to the homepage or to the help desk.
After
Page Not Found
Go back to Home (link to home)
Contact us for help (link to help desk or support email)