Common Key Messaging Mistakes That Tank Your Website—With Examples

Think of your website as a house you’re trying to sell. The house is the website itself: Nice design, but bare-bones copy. Could you sell your house without any furniture or effort to appeal to a potential buyer? Sure—but it might take you a lot longer and you might have to reduce the price more than you’d like. Investing in staging could save you time and money in the long run.

That empty house is a website without any sort of key messaging strategy. You’ve got some copy that’s not intentional, strategic, or aimed toward your target audience. Might you get some customers? Sure—but best case scenario, it will be an uphill battle. Investing in marketing could save you time and money in the long run.

Just as homes with staging convince buyers better and faster, a website with intentional core messages will help you generate leads and convert them into customers.

As you develop a brand messaging strategy, it’s important to understand what some common mistakes are so you can avoid replicating them. Let’s look at some real-life unclear key message examples.

Too. Much. Jargon.

Check out this example from the data analytics platform, Alteryx: “The Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform delivers end-to-end automation of analytics, machine learning, and data science processes that accelerate digital transformation.”

Even the most analytical, data-driven mind would have a hard time parsing that sentence. There’s no telling what Alteryx is trying to say except that they’re throwing around data industry buzzwords. When even the product name itself sounds like jargon (The Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform), there’s a problem. Everything about the product description is esoteric, meaningless, and forgettable. Even technicians won’t remember it.

Give people something they understand and can connect with. Here’s a five-second rewrite that makes much more sense: “Accelerate your projects using the automation, machine learning, and data science capabilities built into the Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform.”

Too wordy

Especially on a website, consider brevity your bestie. People simply do not like to read paragraphs that are or look long. Make your site skimmable.

Here’s an example from Clozd: “Win-loss analysis is the practice of systematically capturing and analyzing the reasons why you win and lose sales opportunities. It’s an essential practice for any organization that wants to improve its sales win rate. If you have a sales team and a CRM system, then you should be conducting disciplined win-loss analysis on an ongoing basis.”

Here’s how that could have gone: “Win-loss analysis captures and analyzes why you win or lose sales opportunities and helps improve your sales win rate.”

(I speak in more detail about Clozd’s messaging in this video.) 

Often, we think that adding more words sounds intelligent and authoritative. Instead, it obfuscates your market messages. Clozd missed an opportunity to be more persuasive by getting straight to the point of winning more sales. 

Some of this is just poor writing, but if you’ve built a messaging framework, it’s much easier to know what to write because you already understand exactly what you want readers to come away remembering.

Long on features, short on value

We preach this over and over again, but features are not value. People do not buy automated workflows or intelligent recommendations. They buy a tool that saves them hours a day from administrative tasks or onboards new employees quickly. 

Here’s an example from Veeva:

They lead with great value-based headlines, but the rest of the content is choppy. Well-organized bullet points are excellent, but the black text gets swallowed by the orange text. They tell me what I can do, but don’t speak to the larger impact of those features. Why do we need rapid coding for clinical teams? What’s the pain point the target audience is experiencing that makes rapid coding necessary and notable? Why do we care that it’s the only suite of unified clinical operations on one cloud platform? 

The crux of key message development is understanding the pain points your target personas experience. Is clinical coding normally so slow that trials are delayed and lives are at stake? Does the organization lose precious time and money because coding isn’t fast enough? We need to set the stakes and establish more of an emotional connection. 

If you want to show you’re an expert in your field, you must demonstrate full awareness of customer pain. Without understanding the help your audience needs, you can’t develop key messages that speak to what they are looking for. 

(You can check out more examples of how to develop better key messages with our key message formula.)

Too technical

There’s nothing wrong with being technical, especially if your product/service is very technical. But it’s unwise to assume that your audience has the same level of technical knowledge you do. You may be targeting developers, but developers have different backgrounds, processes, and experiences. “Compliance” may not mean the same thing to you that it does to them.

This is especially important if you are creating something new or redefining a space. Many brands say things like, “Our proprietary vaculosis process sets us apart.” But no one knows what a vaculosis process is except the people at your company. (Hint: I made up the word vaculosis.)

Use simple language to explain what you do and the value you provide, even if what you do is complicated.

Komodor is a very technical product that does a good job straddling the line between technical and understandable. It’s worth looking at their entire home page, but here’s a snapshot:

I have only the barest understanding of Kubernetes, but Komodor does a great job of explaining their value in the top paragraph. Then, they choose four specific features to focus on.

Use your key messages thoughtfully

It’s not enough to have a key messaging framework and strategy if you don’t effectively deploy them. The most important thing is to ensure your key messages are prominent, memorable, and persuasive. And if you can’t do it yourself (we have a course on this), enlist experts to help you define your key messages and put them into practice.  

We understand that a lot of this key message stuff is difficult to understand and implement. We want to help you! Please feel free to contact us and ask some questions, message Ellis and Edify on Twitter.