Stop explaining the science
Technical companies tend to explain the science to an audience that already knows it, and skip the part the buyer cannot work out for themselves — what changes for them if they buy. Explain the marketing side, never the science. Your reader has a doctorate in the thing you are teaching them.
The instinct is backwards
Open most instrumentation websites and the first substantive section explains the physical principle. Light scattering works like this. Rheology measures that. It is accurate, it is well written, and the reader learned it a decade ago.
Meanwhile the thing the reader cannot determine — whether this instrument fits their material, their throughput, their regulatory position — appears on page four, if at all.
The instinct comes from a good place. Technical founders are used to earning credibility by demonstrating understanding. In a paper that works. In marketing it reads as though you are unsure who you are talking to.
What a technical reader is actually scanning for
Three things, in this order. Does this apply to my material? What does it measure that my current instrument does not? What would I have to change to use it?
None of those require a tutorial. All of them require specifics: materials, concentration ranges, sample volumes, throughput, the method it replaces or supplements.
Write the consequence
Replace explanation with consequence. Not "dynamic light scattering determines hydrodynamic radius by analysing intensity fluctuations" — they know — but "resolves aggregates in a 2 mg/mL formulation without dilution, which is where a plate-based method loses the population you care about."
That sentence assumes the physics and delivers the thing the reader cannot look up: whether it survives contact with their sample.
Where the explaining does belong
Explain the commercial side instead. Technical audiences are frequently under-served on the parts of a purchase that are not scientific: what a validation actually involves for this instrument, how service coverage works, what the five-year cost looks like, what happens to historical data.
Those are the sections that go unwritten, and they are the ones a scientist forwards to their manager.
Written by Matthew McGann, President and Owner of Particle Analytx. More about the practice.
Questions on this piece
Is there never a case for explaining the method?
There is: when your method genuinely differs from what the reader knows, or when you are addressing an adjacent field. The test is whether the reader could have written the paragraph themselves.
What replaces the explanation?
Consequence. What the result lets them do, decide or stop worrying about.
How technical should marketing copy be?
As technical as the claim requires and no more. Every number carries its units and its technique; nothing else needs padding.
Recognise the problem?
If this describes where you are, thirty minutes on a call will get further than another article.