Is Your Content Meaningless?

January 3^rd 2017 Sally Ormond avoid jargon, content, meaningless copy, relevant copy

Content marketing

Your challenge is to create fresh content for your website.

It hasn’t been changed for a while, and as your business has moved on a bit, it’s time to revamp it, so it’s more relevant to your audience.

It can’t be that hard, right?

After all, you work in your business every day, talk about your products and services regularly, so writing about them should be a breeze.

Yeah right, that’s why you’ve been sat in front of a blank screen for the past half hour.

Writing about your business for someone else isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Before you know it, you’ve filled the screen with meaningless drivel that you try to convince yourself sounds great.

Rather than being original, you’ve fallen back on the overused phrases you’ve read on other sites, such as:

Flexible
Robust
World-class
Industry-leading
Scalable
Easy to use
Cutting edge
Industry standard
Groundbreaking
Turnkey

Yawn.

The result is overly corporate sounding drivel that doesn’t mean anything.

How to spot meaningless content

Every word you write has to mean something to your reader.

So if you look at your copy and find a word or phrase that doesn’t tell you anything, or can’t be clearly defined, it’s meaningless.

Think about the term ‘market leading’, it doesn’t tell your reader anything about how it’s going to make a difference to them and you haven’t qualified it so the reader doesn’t know why it’s market leading.

So to avoid such fluff, make sure:

Your features have substance – what is it that makes your service ‘ground-breaking’?
Talk about specific benefits – what does it mean for your reader? How is her life going to be improved?

If you’re still not sure, imagine you’re having a conversation with your best client. What type of language would you use to talk to them? How would you convince them they need your product or service? Basically, if you wouldn’t use a specific term during a face-to-face conversation, don’t use it in your copy.