Fake blood and fart spray

Back when I was in a death metal band (yes, really), we went into the studio and cut a small demo.

Thinking we needed something to get attention from the record labels, we decided to send our demo in with a note that looked like we had coughed blood all over it and then filled in the inside of the envelope with fart spray.

It was absolutely disgusting — and we were sure whoever opened it would have to put the CD in and find out just how brutal we were!

Surprisingly enough, even though we sent out a couple dozen of these packages, we never heard anything back.

We (obviously) didn’t understand our audience.

Sure, as death metal fans, we love the gory, disgusting, & brutal things (think of it like the horror movie genre of music)… But the people opening these packages weren’t fans moshing at a concert, they were people in suits in a corporate high-rise.

And although you’ve probably never tried covering your product in fart spray (🤦‍♂️) — we’re all guilty of this same marketing mistake.

We’re consumed in the world of websites… thinking about the tech, tools, and gadgets that made us fall in love with this industry and forgetting that our clients (most of them, anyway) don’t care about (or understand) those things.

Our websites mention things like SEO, PPC, ROI, CPC, and Core Web Vitals — all of which mean little or nothing to most of our clients.

Simplifying our messaging so that anyone (picture your grandma) could understand and appreciate isn’t an easy thing to do — especially for technology-loving geeks like us.

But littering your website with all this jargon is not much different than covering it in fart spray — and it has a similar effect; it pushes people away.

For $20 I bet you could find someone outside of our industry to take a quick glance at one of your pages to share their takeaways and explain (in their own words) what it is you do.

In fact, that might be the best $20 you could invest in your marketing.