No, I’m not talking about the glam rock band KISS in this blog. If you’re looking for that kind of nonsense, you can hire me as a copywriter and I’ll gladly hide many rock and metal references in your copy. This blog is, however, about how to speak like your customer and the danger of what happens when you don’t.
But what has that got to do with KISS?
Good question. KISS stands for Keep It Super Simple. Actually, I think it originally meant Keep It Simple Stupid but that’s just a bit rude. You don’t really want to be calling your customers stupid. And in fact, this blog will hopefully highlight how you might be being a bit daft by not keeping it super simple.
KISS is a phrase I heard early on in my business when I wasn’t sure how to sell myself or that I even wanted to. So, I did a course on selling. By the end, it occurred to me that many of the same principles of selling are the same principles of writing well. Who’d have thought?
It comes down to creating a balance between sounding knowledgeable about your subject and not talking about a bunch of stuff that your customers don’t understand. It’s about keeping your language in plain English.
Talking your customers’ language
A copywriter friend of mine asked in a group of business owners if they understood what “reverse engineer” means. All the marketing people were like “yeah, duh!” and a few techy people were “sure, of course”. But there were a lot of people who’d never heard this before. Smart business owners who are well-read and educated.
Being well-read and educated doesn’t mean you’ve heard every phrase, acronym and terminology out there. And being a customer doesn’t mean you don’t understand long and complicated words. It simply means you’ve not come across it before.
Now, if this copywriter put this phrase in their copy they risked the reader not understanding the meaning or the message. Worse, it risks making the reader feel like they don’t know something and that’s pretty bad. Particularly when there is a clearer way of communicating it – even if that does use more words.
Use words that your audience uses
We don’t need to make assumptions about what language or understanding our audience and future customers have – we can ask them. And we probably do this all of the time without realising it.
I speak to several people every week over Zoom. I can hear what language they use. I’m also in several networking groups on Slack and WhatsApp. I can see on there how they ask questions and when they aren’t sure of a certain phrase.
And this is important because if you put a word or phrase in your text that your future customer doesn’t understand, they aren’t going to tell you. They are going to be confused and won’t want to ask because they might feel stupid.
For years, I had no idea what a KPI was. It got thrown about by a client at the time and every time I had to secretly Google it in a meeting. By the next meeting, the acronym hadn’t stuck in my head. If they’d just said “targets” I’d have known straight away and not felt like a bit of a numpty.
We’re all guilty of doing it. Whether we’re talking about customer acquisition, growth marketing, CTAs, or some other industry-specific language – it’s not how normal people talk. You don’t go down the pub on a Friday and discuss the sales funnel of who buys the next round. You switch into talking in plain English because your friends and family wouldn’t have a clue what you’re on about.
And we need to do the same with the words we use in our content.
I took part in a workshop run by a company that does something very similar to what I do. And while so much of the workshop wasn’t really applicable to me or my business, it was interesting to watch and listen to the questions coming up from the other businesses. To understand what they didn’t know about the process.
What I found particularly interesting was that the session was about sales. So the presenter framed it as the systems and processes you need to attract clients to your business. Now, I find the word “system” to mean something big, grown up and well, a bit boring. So I call it a content strategy.
It’s the foundation on which you build your content plan. But I’d not thought about it as a system. Which is, of course, exactly what content marketing really is. A system that you test and tweak until you can reliably bring customers into your business. This, in turn, fits into a larger sales and marketing plan.
I was surprised at how many business owners didn’t have this in place and that it could be called something different to what I was calling it. I saw the opportunity to create some content around this.
Assume and you make an ass out of you and me
It’s far too easy to make assumptions about what someone knows or understands about the services we provide or the products we sell. It’s also too easy and a bit dangerous to make assumptions about the language our customers use.
Imagine how many people you turn away because they don’t clearly understand what you do. Or who feels stupid because they don’t understand one word of your copy?
Instead, go out and do the research on how people really speak. When there is a phrase like “reverse engineer” check in with people to see if they use it and if not, rephrase it into something like “starting from the goal and working our way back to how we need to get there.” Yes, it might be wordier but if it makes it easier to understand, then that’s the goal.
And finally, don’t assume (like I did) that everyone uses the same words as you do. If they don’t, then start bringing them into the content you make and see how that makes a difference.