Write for Your Prospects and Customers

There’s an old saying in marketing that “It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle.” The image at the left, which is from grok.com, illustrates the point well. The man trapped in this bottle may not even know that’s a sauvignon blanc bottle!

Everyone who has a Web site faces the same issue, that I call the “insider-outsider” problem. People within a business have their own vocabulary, that lets them make all the fine distinctions that they need to make about their products and services. The typical prospect, though, isn’t sensitive to those distinctions and may not even understand insider language.

It’s important that the copy on your Web site be written using language that your prospects and customers use to refer to your offerings, and not the words that you use in the business every day.

How can you avoid this trap? By paying close attention to the terms your customers use to talk about your offerings, and making sure that your Web site reflects that language.