An executive in a technology/marketing company recently asked me to review some copy for new marketing pieces that are supposed to explain the company’s offerings to prospective customers.
It’s a good thing I had sat down for a couple hours with this individual first and gotten a solid overview. Because based on the words I was seeing, had I not known all about the offering already, I would have never found the value proposition.
…develop engagement solutions that create behavior change…educate and engage audiences with meaningful information…conceive new integrated marketing strategies and create closed loop measurement opportunities…unique thought leadership…” You know the drill. Clouds of jargon words.
Now the offering is actually quite interesting, but the key message was obscured by all the officious tech terms.
When writing marketing copy, it’s always a temptation to assume that the target audience: 1) knows everything you know; and 2) can absorb a whole bunch more. That’s not the case. Make it your goal to express one critical point very well, within the first 10 seconds. Because nobody is going to want to work hard to figure out what you do.
How to accomplish this? Simple – run your preliminary copy and messages by an “unbaptized” set of reviewers. Have some smart unofficial advisors look things over who are not in your company, maybe not even in the field – just to see if your message comes through. Your spouse. Your mother. A trusted friend from college. If you’ve distilled your message down to simple clarity, even the uninitiated will grasp the key point.
You only have a few seconds to earn attention. Don’t waste that precious time sending up fog and leaving people wondering what you’re talking about!
Another way to do that is think about how you’d put that “one singular idea” on a bumper sticker.
I think they were using a “Random Mission Statement Generator.”
This is a great reminder, Steve, and strong writing advice for the New Year.
It reminds me of HubSpot’s Gobbledygook Grader, inspired by David Meerman Scott’s analysis and resulting list of the top 25 gobbledygook phrases, used in press releases sent in North America, in 2008.
According to the HubSpot site, “Gobbledygook refers to the many phrases that are so overused they have become meaningless.”
To make sure you’re not writing using gobbledygook, you can also run your text through the Gobbledygook Grader.
Steve, you’ve done a good job of capturing the assumptions that lead to jargon.
Peg, thanks for mentioning the Gobbledygook Grader, which led me to David Meerman Scott’s Gobbledygook Manifesto; always a good reminder.
We have a Jargon Quiz that has fun with gobbledygook: http://www.contentfactor.com/fun-stuff/jargon-quiz
Steve, I agree that there’s too much jargon. After a while, it frankly sounds pretentious and perhaps a bit pompous. I especially have a problem with jargonistas’ tendency to make verbs out of nouns and vice versa.
Plain English usually works best, for all involved.
This is great advice, Steve. All of our clients come to us with the same kind of mumbo-jumbo in their positioning statements, website, etc. It’s interesting how married the exec’s get to this stuff and how reluctant they often are to letting go. Once you show them the alternative, though, the light usually turns on.
[...] If your content is confusing or hidden, it won’t reach your audience. Steve Woodruff wrote a post for MarketingProfs in January that I think fits well with Brain Traffic’s message. He wrote, When writing [...]