Buzzwords are driving away your customers
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Writing is hard. After hours of banging your head on a wall trying to come up with that perfectly succinct, catchy phrasing to draw in customers, it can be awfully tempting to reach for buzzwords to try and spice up your web copy.
Here's the problem: people can tell when you're full of it, and closing a browser tab is really easy. Even if you've got a great product, leaning too heavily on jargony copy can make it seem like you don't believe that your offering is good enough to stand on its own two feet.
This is especially true for indie hackers. Authenticity, small size and transparency are some of our biggest advantages. People like knowing that they're dealing with real human beings, not an enormous faceless corporation. When you write jargony copy or try to make your project look bigger than it is, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
What do you folks think? Are you bothered by jargon and buzzwords as much as I am?
Imagine now that all the copy will be written by those GPT3 bots ... it will ONLY be jargon copy and buzzwords
What fresh hell. Only semi-related, but dear lord do I hate the recent trend of using text-to-speech for everything. I miss hearing real people's voices! Robots are overrated.
Oh my, I didn't think about that but you're probably right!
I couldn't agree more! I can't tell you the number of times I've rolled my eyes or clicked off a website because of all buzz words and jargon it contains. It's disingenuous and often doesn't have much meaning or say much about the product/vision. Being authentic and using the same language I'd use when speaking to customers IRL is my preferred approach.
I'm not sure how companies ever accepted 'jargon copy' as an effective way to market to customers. Does confusing people or trying to sound smarter sell more widgets? I think companies that do this are ignoring their larger audience.
Jargon drives away not just customers, it is hard on the mind, it requires effort to decode and such. Even here on the IH forum, people abuse it assuming readers are on the same page. Use jargon only if you are 100% confident the other side understands it exactly the way you do.
100% agree - language is often used for gatekeeping. And the tech industry is chock-full of that. It's a real problem!
I love this. The best copywriting is really using plain simple words that hit the heart directly. The rest can be done via brand, customers, track records and such.
I think for anyone starting out, building meaningful relationships in the space is 100x more useful than focusing too much on copywriting. Since ... it will change anyway.
Great post and very applicable to people in the services space as well. If you're an individual consultant you can build a great profile and find good clients by showing yourself and being honest about how small you are. Calling yourself "a leading digital agency" while being one person is knocking back small clients and not convincing large ones.