Marketing mambo-jumbo

I’m planning a big overhaul on my agency website — specifically the copy.

In auditing what I have now, I find a lot of things like this (this specific example is a section talking about care plans):

“In order to operate a successful website, you need a plan for keeping content fresh, security tight, and software up-to-date — we can take that off your plate and give you complete peace of mind.”

Is it true? Yes.

Does it sound cool? Yes (IMO).

Are those the words that would come out of my mouth if a client asked me about care plans? Not even close! I would feel like a pompous asshole if I said that outloud (I just tried, it was gross)!

But there it is… plain as day on my website.

Why?

No one is going to spend the time decoding “marketing speak” to figure out what that really means for them.

In fact, today I had a client ask about my care plan options and instead of calling them by the names that are on my website (‘The Basics’, ‘Business Class’, and ‘Mission Critical’) I called them “Small”, “Medium”, and “Large”.

And guess what? The client understood exactly what I was saying!

I did this “translation” instinctively, and (to be honest) because even I don’t remember the name of the damn packages! ????

I look at a lot of agency websites (and a lot of websites in general) and most people are guilty of this marketing mambo-jumbo — but I don’t think it’s doing us any favors.

I can’t help but wonder how much more people would get out of looking at my website if I just wrote things exactly like I would say them?

I’m beginning to realize that these linguistic flexes are doing no more than stroking my ego — not fulfilling the objective they were written for: to sell more websites.