All organizations claim to put their customers first. But if they’re using confusing jargon and providing poor web user experience, then that promise is quickly undermined. In the age of growing semantic search and in the name of common sense, it’s time B2B organisations in particular spoke the language of their audience.
There’s a wonderful quote from the Dutch footballing legend Johan Cruyff: “If I had wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better.”
A lot of B2B companies are unwittingly guilty of failing to explain their position with clear language. The temptation to use elaborate language – business-speak – to make the organisation appear more authoritative actually alienates the two audiences it should be addressing: it confuses humans and writes off search engines.
We live in semantic times. Changing current business lexicon is not restricted to simple keyword research for relevant topics that our audiences are searching for; the rise and rise of voice search also forces us to consider our content strategy as more and more people start search queries with how, where, what and when.
The business case for business-speak, therefore, is greatly diminished.
What we really need to know is are we answering the questions that our audiences have? After all, those brands that prove to be more ‘useful’ to customers are preferred to ‘interesting’ ones.
Technology particularly guilty
I won’t single out any one guilty party here, as you can probably find plenty of examples over on PR Newswire or similar feeds. A wry smile came across my face in response to a journalist’s post on Facebook group I am a member of citing an absolutely unfathomable piece of jargon sent from a technology vendor that drew the vitriol of journalists and PRs alike.
As a former technology journalist that works in marketing I know that the two industries are equally guilty of what Private Eye calls Birtspeak 2.0.
Let me be clear: working in communications means being able to communicate. That starts with understanding the language your audience uses, how they research and answering their questions in a simple-to-understand fashion.
A great benchmark by which to check the readability of your content is to run a sample based on the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease test, such as Readability Score or Read-able, and also look at Hemingway App. This post wouldn’t score well in Flesch-Kincaid due to words like ‘lexicon’, but I hope I made my point.
Language took millennia to evolve and English is wonderfully versatile, so B2B organisations should use it properly.
Let’s take a note from Johan’s book: if we want people to understand, we need to explain it better.
I run sessions on Writing for the Web and SEO training for PR professionals, and am a B2B copywriter. If any of the issues above affect your organisation, please get in touch.