Marketing jargon on landing pages

Playing catch-up with end users

“He’s the lead singer of the Beatles”
“George Micheal!”
“Correct! Ok, the next one is…”

That took me a whole ten seconds to register. Not only did the answer not match the question, but it was the correct answer. Listening to this, my eyebrows were raised and then found new heights to raise to.

We were playing a game called 30 Seconds.
It’s made up of cards with names and the objective is to get your partner or team to guess what’s written there, but without using any of the words themselves. Names like, “The Great Pyramids” or “Nile River”. Saying things like, “It’s a very long body of water, running through Egypt”, might get your team to guess “Nile River”.

30 Seconds board game. Irish edition.

The better you are at general knowledge, the better you will do at this game. But it isn’t the brainiest that win. It’s the siblings, close friends and depending on how stressed they are, couples too.

What I’d just witnessed were two very close friends, who knew each other better than they knew their music trivia. George Micheal is not the lead singer of The Beatles, but 30 Seconds doesn’t care if he is.

You can be great, or you can be great for your audience.

As a software developer starting out, I would look at the landing pages of the products I worked on and think, “this is horse-shit”. How could anyone read this and think this isn’t anything but marketing speak? It left me wondering if marketing folks and copywriters had ever been experts in the product, or if they were expected to do “marketing stuff” only. Turns out I was half-right. Landing pages are horse-shit, but they’re (mostly) by design.

They’re not for me to read. They’re for customers to read, and not the end-users of these products, but the buyers. I was an end-user, you see.
The pages were laden with abstract words - Scale, solutions, seamless integration - like lettuce on a burger, they were something to work around as I would look to see what this product actually did.

How I imagine the purchasing decision by customers

But to some people, these terms relieved the pressure they were facing at work. These were the problems they were facing, they weren’t looking for the fastest car or the slickest shoes. Their bosses demanded: scale, solutions and seamless integration.  These buyers were the middlemen. They needed to deliver on these terms, not use the product. 

But that was then.

While we still have middlemen, access to trialing products has become simpler and easier. Moving the buying decision to end-users, more often. If you’ve been in the industry you know this to be true. Terms such as “bottom-up” or “DX” (Developer Experience) have become buzzwords themselves, as they reflect this change. 

What hasn’t caught up as much, are our landing pages. Our 30 Seconds partners are changing, and we need to keep up with good copy.
So please, help your copywriters – get them talking to end-users.

Thanks to

Becky Isjwara

and

Jisoo

for helping me change tack and just publish something :D