Is good marketing copy the polar opposite of legalise?
In marketing we refine messages into concise, emotionally powerful language that encourages readers to try something new.
Legal folk prefer a full-length, ‘no-stone-unturned’ style, designed to limit readers‘ thoughts to only a clearly defined space.
There’s good reason for each profession’s style; it is what it is because that’s what works best.
In a B2B sales cycle, though, prospects often fall from one extreme (lofty sales and marketing spiel) to the other (the stark realities of a proposal with legal terms.) It can sometimes cause a bit of a crash landing.
Perhaps there’s room for some stylistic cross over?
Maybe there’s even a NEED for each profession to borrow a linguistic trick or two?
Legalise certainly doesn’t always carry the label “off-putting”; there’s attractive value to be found within dense language. Sometimes the detail and clarity contained is exactly what customers are looking for. They may even be prepared to read deeply to find it.
Too often, ‘uplifting’ B2B marketing language (the only kind usually available to curious customers online) feels vacuous and – with little offered by way of detail or evidence – disingenuous.
As marketers, we should be prepared to offer greater depth. We should be prepared to work closely with legally-minded contract writers (or, at the least, to read their output thoroughly ourselves!)
Our skill at distilling information and presenting positive potential could prove invaluable in softening the full contractual blow for prospects.
It will mean providing readers deeper pathways, extending from the broad ‘brilliance’ statements of homepages and landing pages, onwards towards more comprehensive ‘competancy’ clarity.
The benefit for us? Better informed leads, who will find enough information upfront to make an enquiry, and don’t run a mile when they finally see the fully-fledged legal contact.
(Oh, and conversely of course, legal types can of course learn a lot from marketeers’ writing styles – that’s kind of a given!)
