Your product manual is a huge, often missed (or poorly executed) opportunity to create loyalty among your customers.
As much as manufacturers would like to think that everyone enjoys going online to download PDF instruction manuals from a support web site, people still like to have product manuals with their devices. They’re reassuring. They show you care about your customers. And if they’re actually good (about one percent of product manuals these days), you manually can be a highly effective marketing tool.
But if a manual is poorly written, reads like it has been translated word-for-word from Chinese, or difficult to follow, it will actually accomplish the opposite effect: a bad product manual frustrates consumers. Makes them cranky.
Manufacturers don’t think about this very much, but there are a lot of consumers out there who are unhappy about the complete lack of, or poor quality of consumer electronics product manuals.
How do you make you manuals better?
- Start thinking of your manual as a marketing tool.
- Which means getting your marketing department involved in its creation.
- Hire a capable designer to lay out your manual. Paragraphs don’t count as design.
- Don’t include eight languages in a single manual. It’s frustrating when a 300 page brick of a manual only has 48 relevant pages in consumers’ native tongue.
- Include stories of real people in your manual. You do consumer research (right?). Tell people how their peers use your products.
- Never repeat anything your engineers say in your manual. Rather, have someone who speaks English translate their instructions into understandable even interesting terms.
- Include some tips on how to get the most out of the device. Imagine how powerful a Tips and Ideas section would be?
- Advertise your new, hugely valuable manual on the box, in ads, everywhere. It’s a competitive advantage. Throwback, sure. But a competent, valuable, interesting manual will put your product and company head and shoulders above the competition.