"Simple" and "powerful" are terrible descriptors

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I'm naturally suspicious of copywriters who give hard-and-fast advice. Stuff like ""write like you talk." They're kind of silly because every business is different.

But today I'm going to make an exception.

I spent a few hours last week looking at 50-odd CRM and email marketing software companies' home pages. And I kept seeing the same two words: simple and powerful.

Here's my hard-and-fast advice: delete these words. Delete them with extreme prejudice. Delete them and never type them again.

These words are hurting you more than they are helping you. Here's why:

What do these words mean anyway?

This is especially true for "powerful." What does that mean? Does it load fast? Is it packed with zillions of features? Is it something else entirely? I truly have no idea - it's a nice-sounding word, but doesn't mean anything tangible.

And this is a problem, especially in crowded fields like email marketing and CRM. If you're running a company in one of these categories, you have a truly exhausting amount of competition. Have a look at Capterra - there are 1360 CRM providers and almost 800 email marketing providers. It's tough out there!

So if you're going to lean on a word like "powerful," it's going to be a real challenge to differentiate yourself from all this competition, as you haven't really said what makes you actually different.

Where's the pain point?

The other big problem is that these two words are really just descriptive. They don't meaningfully connect to customer pain.

"Simple" is a good example of this. Lots of people want simple, easy-to-use software (you might argue that it's table stakes - but that's another conversation).

But people want their software to be simple for a reason. One big one that I see come up a lot is that a lot of companies have high turnover, relatively non-technical staff, or both.

Spending ages training new staff on software, correcting their errors as they get up to speed, or both, is a huge drag on time and energy.

Or, a company might be trying to grow by standardising processes and outsourcing them. That's a lot easier to do if the software you're using is simple to use!

Same goes for "powerful." If "powerful" means "packed with features," then that might mean that you're not going to outgrow it - great for growing businesses, not so great for businesses like mine that will probably be one person forever.

Point is, the copywriting on these home pages would be a lot more effective if they went that layer deeper. Why do people want their software to be simple and powerful? What problem does it solve? Find that out, then serve it up.

An easy way forward: add "ly"

Stick with me here.

So let's say you've been using words like this for forever, and you can't think of what else to say. Here's an easy hack: just add 'ly' to the end of them.

"Simple" becomes "simply" and "powerful" becomes "powerfully".

But, you can't just put those words in there by themselves. Now you have to add to them and define them.

Here's a great example from a company called Kickbox:

Do you see the difference here? Rather than saying "Kickbox is simple," they're clearly defining it by spelling out what that simplicity looks like. I can read that sentence and clearly visualise what it's like to use Kickbox - and why that makes my life easier.

Adding an "ly" forces you to think like that. It forces you to ask "so what?" "What does that mean in practice?" And so on and so forth.

So if you're leaning on some generic-sounding adjectives like "simple" and "powerful", give this a try. Turn them into adverb phrases with an 'ly'. They'll be clearer, more specific, more compelling and more differentiating.

Have a good week

Sam

PS: I'm two for two on my video-a-week goal. Check out last week's one, where I covered the pointlessness of "learn more," "get started" and other similarly vague button text. Check it out and drop a comment (as long as it's not making fun of the way I annunciate "button").

PPS: Book a home page review for $799. A cool thing lots of folks are doing at the moment is identifying a landing page that they know needs improvement, and booking a review + a rewrite. That gives really clear direction as to what needs to change, without spending heaps more. Great for home pages, feature pages, lead magnet squeeze pages, campaign pages - list goes on.

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