Keep Your Copy Clear and Simple. Here’s Why

If you’re a business owner, here’s a challenge:

Explain your product, why it matters, and how it benefits your customers in one sentence.

Suppose you have a clear and straightforward way of explaining your unique selling proposition (USP), way to go. Stop reading this now, rockstar.

But if you had trouble describing your offer in a few words, you may be confusing your customers too.

While we think complex ways will drive more impressive results than simple ideas (Ahrens, 2017), people rarely act on the information they can’t understand (Raphaelson & Roman, 1981). Yet many entrepreneurs assume that confused customers will go out of their way to seek information, not realizing that “when you confuse them, you lose them” (Dib, 2016).

In their book Writing that Works, Raphaelson and Roman point out, “Good results are even less likely if you flood the reader with information that isn’t organized to lead to an action or isn’t relevant to a grasp of the subject.”

So here’s a helpful guide for writing clear (not clever) copy that converts.

Think of marketing as an amplifier. Here’s an example.

You tell one person about what you do, and they don’t get excited. You then try telling ten people about what you do, and they don’t get excited either.

If you amplify this message through marketing and tell 10,000 people, what makes you think that the result will be any different?

If you haven’t first clarified in your mind why your business exists and why people should buy from you rather than your nearest competitor, marketing will be an uphill battle. — Allan Dib, The 1-Page Marketing Plan

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