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Among the many hats that I wear these days is that I am a tutor at a local college in Southern California. I work with students on their writing skills, with English as a second language students on their grammar and speaking skills, and with students who just need a little nudge in the self-confidence area. I am often amazed at the instructions that instructors give their students. . With all of my education and experience, sometimes I can’t make head or tails of what the assignment is.
These professors use language in their instructions that is so thick and obtuse that it literally leaves me scratching my head.Â
Why do they do this?
Product Training
I ran into the same kind of thing when I was in outside sales. Mind you, I wasn’t in a real technical type of sales for much of my career. I sold packaging to packaging distributors for a good portion of it. And, while packaging can get very technical, most of the people I worked with were not engineers. These sales reps wanted information such as:
- How does your product work?
- How does your product compare with the competition?
- How can using your product help my customer?
- How can using your product make me more money?
In other words, what is in your product for my customers, and ultimately, “me?”
The product training sessions that I held addressed these issues with a little humor thrown in. After all, bubble wrap can be a little dry until you talk about putting a small roll behind a rear tire of a car and waiting for the driver to pop over the roll or letting kids run over sheets of the wrap at birthday parties. I had the technical information available if needed, but was rarely asked.
I had the misfortune of attending meetings where the technical information was the focus of the gathering. The presenters, because the they had a personal stake in being seen as an “expert,” lost their audiences in a very short period of time, sometimes oblivious that no one understood or valued what they were saying.Â
Why do they do this?
What is an Expert?
An expert is a person that knows a whole lot of stuff about a given widget. In my opinion, it is part of the expert’s responsibility to explain his or her widget in terms that an audience will understand.
Any given industry has its own peculiar jargon that sets it apart from other industries. The jargon of a given industry is important method of communication. I am not talking about jargon here.Â
I think that some individuals feel that if they explain ideas and concepts in clear, understandable terms, it somehow denigrates them and, perhaps, their products. So, they use terms that sound important, which actually confuse, if not alienate, the very people that they are supposed to be either selling or helping.
Online Content
How does this apply to online writing? You have to have content on your website that your potential clientele will easily understand.
Sounds easy, right?
Wrong.
You do not have just one type of client. If you are selling to the general public a technical widget, you may have techies that love the technical terms. If you fill your website with those technical terms, techies will get it and buy.
But, what about the non-techies who are just interested in an easy to use widget? You will loose these potential clients because you are talking over their heads. We are not talking about scratch feed here. Incremental sales can contribute heavily to the bottom line.
Writing for websites becomes much more complex when you start to realize that you have more than one type of clientele.
Even worse, what if you are just compelled to talk over your potential clienteles’ heads because you think that this will make your website look more “professional” or “important?”
You may be shooting yourself in the foot.
Your website is “talking” to people for you. The people you are talking to need to get your message before they will buy.
Be an expert, but one who communicates clearly and effectively, with your content.
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