If you want more people to hear your message, drop the corporate BS. Sorry, but somebody had to say it.
You know the phrases I mean.
"Here at XYZ Agency, we pride ourselves on..."
"We are a leading provider of..."
"Our client centric approach delivers..."
They put people to sleep.
Your audience sees straight through corporate BS. They've read a thousand websites that say the same thing in the same flat voice. The second they hit a sentence like that, their eyes glaze over and their thumb starts scrolling.
I get why it hangs around.
Lots of people spent a fortune learning to write corporate copy. Whole careers were built on it. Many of us were taught at school and in our first jobs that business writing had to sound serious, formal and a bit grand to be taken seriously.
But it stopped working more than 20 years ago.
People buy from people. And the way people talk to each other has changed completely. We text. We message. We comment. We send voice notes. Then we land on a business website and it reads like it was written by a committee in 1994.
No wonder nobody's listening.
The fix is simple, even if it doesn't always feel easy. Be personal.
Write the way you'd talk to a customer if they were sitting across the table from you. Use short sentences. Use everyday words. Say "you" a lot more than you say "we". Tell them what you actually do, in the words they'd use to describe the problem.
If it helps, read it out loud. If you'd feel daft saying it to someone's face, it doesn't belong in your marketing.
You can be warm and clear and still completely professional. Plain words usually make you sound more confident, because you're not hiding behind them.
Do YOU want to read corporate babble? Of course you don't. So if you wouldn't read it, what makes you think your audience will? Picture yourself as the reader and ask what would make you stop and pay attention.
Your audience doesn't care about you or your brand. Not at first, anyway. They care about themselves, and they want you to do one of two things for them. Educate them, or entertain them.
Ideally both. That's a big part of why I'm a fan of edutainment, which is my word for teaching people something useful while keeping them entertained.
And to the best of my knowledge, corporate speak has never managed to do either of those things.
