Weaselly Product Copy + AI: A Bad Combo

It’s not an unusual challenge for your marketing to run ahead of your product realities. But it can create some tricky situations for copywriters and content marketers when it comes to talking about product.

Let’s boil it down to the most straightforward alternatives:
🧐 Product realities: Either your product can do something or your product cannot do it or do it well 
📣 Messaging volume: Either you stay quiet about your product. Or you talk.

The Right Approach Depends on Your Brand, Industry, Audience

It may seem like this framework contains obvious good and bad decisions. However, a lot of it has to do with your brand, industry, and audience.

Examples:

• It may seem obvious to stay quiet if your product isn’t there.
  • BUT: An early adopter audience will be much more open to messaging that runs quite far ahead of realities because they’re buying into potential a whole lot more. Moreover, we all gotta start somewhere and finding ways to message around product gaps is a reality for most of us.
  • BUT: In certain industries and categories, passing the mic to let others talk for you is a more compelling and elegant approach. Think about how much Boardy is letting others do the talking for it, as an example. Boutique agencies and firms (e.g., law firms) often look more prestigious for their restraint in messaging.Conversely, it may seem obvious to be loud and proud when your product is great.

What You Want to Avoid: Unnecessary Weaselly Copy

Here’s what I would say you absolutely want to avoid: Talking, but sounding like you’re weaseling your way around a product that’s lacking when your product is actually great. (i.e., sounding like you’re in the top left of the chart above when your product is actually in the top right).

Seems obvious, right? But it happens all the time: Web pages and blog posts full of vague product information, weasel words and phrases, unsubstantiated claims, and cringe marketing jargon—even when the product itself is pretty great. For a lot of prospects, this makes your product seem confusing or suss, which is a huge shame if your product is actually great.

Why Does Bad Copy Happen So Much on Websites?

How have so many websites ended up with unnecessarily weaselly copy? I have a few theories, but I'm sure there are more explanations:

• Website copywriting is done by people who are too ‘inside the bubble’ and think everybody knows what they know
  • Solve: Get out, listen to your market, get user feedback.
• Content/copy writers who haven’t been given enough information about the product or access to SMEs so they really understand it deeply. In lieu of that, they fall back on vaguely compelling statements
  • Solve: Content teams need to spend time with product teams. Don’t rely on product marketing to relay what you need—in my experience, they often fall short and, indeed, can be the source of vague but compelling-sounding messaging.
• Trying to keep things attention-grabbing and punchy instead of crisp, clear, and accurate.
  • Solve: Rein in your brand voice if it’s compromising clarity. We all love a great line of copy but your love of “the line” can be your undoing sometimes.
• The business overall is unclear about its product or market positioning
  • Solve: It’s time for a brand/product positioning exercise.

Clear Product Copy Is Essential for AI

These challenges with vague copy are not new. How many of us have landed on websites and bounced because we're not clear what the product really does (or doesn't do) or whether it's 'for us' or for an altogether different scale or kind of audience?

But the challenge is going to become much more pointed with AI

For AI optimization, we’ll all need to get a lot more crisp on what our product does and who it’s for. Details and information that used to be gated or hidden in-app (like demo videos, onboarding drips and how-to guides) teach AI about your product and how it works—which helps it make more accurate product recommendations to the right people.

There’s always been a dance between sharing enough information to help people make a buying decision and leaving enough of a curiosity gap to drive them to that action (trial, demo, etc.). AI is going to magnify this push-and-pull for copywriters and content marketers. Reining in that weaselly copy isn’t just a messaging paradigm anymore—it’s an AI necessity.