Please Stop Talking about your Solutions

Solution. The most over-used word in marketing content.  Ever.

Recently a friend told me about a company that "could use some help". Seems they have a fantastic product that does amazing things, but they do a terrible job of communicating what they actually do. Intrigued, I took a look at their website.

The homepage presented a hero area with the question "What can Inspired Collaboration do for you?" and lovely pair of images labeled "Education solutions" and "Business solutions". The title text in the URL tab read "Interactive Solutions for Education, Business and Government | XXX Technologies".

Nothing on this page told me, a first time visitor, what this company sells. If I'd been a potential customer, I likely would have bailed by now. But I continued to dig deeper. Clicking on "Education solutions" led to another page with a carousel of images that highlighted "Collaborative learning", "Mobile learning", "Teacher effectiveness", and "Personalizing learning" and the invitation to "Learn more about our solutions in early ed, accessibility, STEM and ELA". Acronyms that hopefully mean something to people interested in Education solutions. Whatever those are.

Given that I'm nothing but persistent, I continued further into the site. I clicked on an invitation to "See the products that inspire and engage" – and FINALLY, after much reading and clicking – I discovered that this company sells interactive products and software that allow real-time collaboration between remote locations.

If only that information was clearly presented on their homepage. I can only speculate how many of their website visitors "bounce" long before figuring out what this company actually does.

There is a lesson to be learned here. When writing copy for your website, brochures or other marketing collateral, make sure that what you do or sell is clearly stated. In simple language that says why a potential customer should care. And please, please, please – stop talking about your solutions.