I guess that grammar they taught us in school IS useful. Sometimes.
Your credit score is lit...or at least it could be if you wanted.
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? What’d everyone think about the SNL 50 special? Yeah, me too. It’s amazing to me that 15 million people watched that and it was considered a hit, and 30 million people used to watch a random episode of Happy Days.
Anyway, today we’ve got:
You deserve copy that does not have grammar problems.
Don’t worry, my human friend, you will still have a human-friendly job.
Hello, fellow kids.
Copywriting Hint: Your Subject Should Match Your Verb
I should just lay my (proverbial) cards on the (proverbial) table:
I care more than the average person about the actual words written on a website.
I know that’s shocking, seeing as I’m now approaching almost 3 (???) years writing this newsletter about the words people put on websites.
But even so, even if you don’t care THAT much about the words that software companies put on their website, you should have a shred of self worth (and I bet you do! Even several shreds!)
You shouldn’t accept companies writing nonsense at you. You deserve better.
To be clear - not much better. But a little bit better.
Like, for example, if very successful project planning software company Monday.com put some nonsense on their homepage, you shouldn’t put up with it, y’know? Because I’m sure that Monday.com has a very significant marketing budget, and they probably went to some agency and they had a lot of meetings and in the end they came up with this headline that lives at the top of their homepage:
I’ve been sitting here thinking about “Made for work, designed to love” for an hour and a half.
The subject of the first part of that (“made for work”) is the Monday product. Monday.com is made for work. I can understand that.
But “Designed to Love” - well, my first thought was “That was a lovely song by the Carpenters.” Except it wasn’t. But could’ve been…
However, I don’t really understand - is Monday.com designed to love? What does that mean? It’s got AI built in, and maybe it’s designed to help you with projects and then fall in love with you, like you’re a 54 year old mid-level executive in 1958 and Monday.com is your 24-year old secretary*?
(*I’m allowed to say ‘secretary,’ yes?)
Or is it saying that Monday.com is designed to BE loved, by you (and nobody else but you…)
But then why doesn’t it say, “Designed to be loved?” Oh I know why, because of the sad truth that nobody cares about copy anymore. Sad! (Truth!)
And now that I’m looking at it, the subhead is really pissing me off, too…
Streamline workflows, gain clear visibility across teams, and empower smarter decisions with AI seamlessly woven into your work.
Again, what’s the subject of each of those clauses? Am I the one streamlining workflows? That seems wrong - isn’t Monday.com streamlining the workflows? But if that’s the case, then the second thing (“gain clear visibility across teams”) doesn’t really work, because YOU is the subject of that. Monday.com doesn’t gain clear visibility, YOU do. And “empower smarter decisions” doesn’t actually make any sense at all, regardless of the subject. How do you “empower smarter decisions?” I guess I could “be empowered to make smarter decisions,” but that’s not what it says.
But I’m really trying to understand this - let’s just accept that AI is “seamlessly woven into your work,” which, wow, does that make any sense? How is it woven into my work? Anyway, did they mean “make smarter decisions”? Why did they use “empower?”
(Can you imagine how fun it is to be married to me?????? SB - please let everyone know the answer to that in the comments.)
What I’m saying is - you deserve better than gobbledy like that. (And Monday.com deserves better! Did they really actually pay an agency for that? I can help! And if you hate me - which is definitely understandable - I know other people who can help! Please - get help!)
And if the Monday.com team is feeling bad about this, please don’t - your friends at Asana (basically the same thing as Monday), have some gobbledy on their site, which I have defaced like I am Perez Hilton:
If only someone other than me and Joanna Wiebe (hi, Joanna!) cared…
But Who Will Be HR for the HR That’s HR for Bots?
HR/finance software something Workday recently made an announcement that I will not bore you with other than to note that they have some sort of HR product that will be HR for all of your AI bots. I think that’s it - from their CEO:
“The workforce is expanding…It’s no longer just human workers, it’s now digital workers, and we need to have a unified platform that manages your entire workforce going forward.”
Not terrifying at all!
Your non-human workers are also going to be a gigantic pain in the ass, and not show up, and get drunk at Sales Kick Off, and they’re going to bitch that they didn’t get promoted but some other non-human worker did, and that non-human worker does such a terrible job and barely tries and is constantly talking shit about the other non-human workers in the breakroom…so you’re going to need HR software to manage all of these non-human workers who, obviously, suck as much as non-non-human workers.
In any case, Workday has a vision for the future that seems terrifying and sad to me, but maybe it’s empowering* to others.
(*Empowering smarter decisions!)
But they’re really leaning into this whole “humans vs non-humans” thing, and celebrating (?? that’s not the right word) the various traits that each of those two groups brings to the table.
Under the “How we move business forever forward” section of their website, they say this:
Which I read as:
What I’m saying is this: If you have software that includes AI, and you want to reassure people that they will still have some sort of job in the future, referring to them as “humans” does not reassure them at all.
How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?
Look, I get it. Re-positioning is kind of a pain in the butt:
You have a positioning
You’re not selling as much stuff as you think you should be selling.
You have a bunch of meetings where you discuss why that might be. And I’ll save you the trouble, it’s marketing’s fault.
As a good marketer, you have an idea: Maybe we’re trying to sell to the wrong people, and we’re not really showing how our product fits in the market. We should change that.
You have a bunch of meetings.
People reluctantly come to the meetings, then complain that they spent all day in the meetings.
After the meetings you decide that the way you have been talking about your product really undersells the value of it. And also you haven’t been clear WHO should buy your product.
Let’s say, just to make up an example, you’re some sort of credit monitoring something something. And you’ve been trying to convince younger folks that by using your product they can improve their credit score.
That seems fair enough - so you create a homepage that shows a young person and it tells them they can improve their credit score by 79 points. It looks like this:
But after the meeting you feel like you really have to double-down on the young person thing. Like that woman represents the customer you want to have - she has a couch and a phone and candles in jars. That’s all good. But once you’ve got your positioning down, you’re going to have to create your new messaging to match.
And these kids these days have their own lingo and you’re like a middle-aged marketing person (nothing wrong with that!) and you don’t know how these kids speak these days with their “low key” and their “not gonna lie” and whatever.
So now you have to go ask your Associate Manager of Demand Gen to help you with your messaging so it really speaks to the kids these days.
But also that 79-point increase in your credit score also seems to undersell the value. You can fix that, too.
Behold:
Yes, the credit score boost is lit! And it’s so lit that it’s now 82 points instead of 79.
And you’ve added some stuff about AI, which in your case is there to make “it easy to slay your credit score.”
Slaying your credit score is dope.
As always, thanks for reading to the bottom, which is inevitably the best part of the email (the satisfied feeling you get from finishing something outweighs the quality of the thing you just read) (tm).
As always, I’m happy to chat - here’s my Calendly link. Sure, we can talk about how I help companies with their messaging. But also we can talk about the Lively-Baldoni situation, or whatever.
SB is conspicuously silent.
Those were some good days when software companies didn’t need to tell humans their software was made for humans—and literally nobody was confused by this.