Can You Explain Your Product Without Sounding Like Your Website?
Are you telling customers what matters to them—or everything you know about your product? Learn how to find the message worth communicating.
by Marie Caraig
Ask someone what their company does and you might get a perfectly understandable answer.
Visit the website and suddenly it's:
Innovative solutions. Advanced capabilities. Superior performance. Industry-leading expertise.
Everything sounds impressive.
I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to care about.
When we're close to a product, it's easy to forget that the person reading about it doesn't necessarily know what we know—or care about the same things we do.
Good marketing has to bridge that gap.
But that doesn't always mean making things simpler.
Clear Doesn't Always Mean Simple
Marketing advice often tells us to avoid jargon and simplify technical language.
That's useful advice—until it isn't.
Take broaching technology.
A company selling broaching tools may be talking to engineers, machinists, manufacturers, or purchasing teams. Its customers probably don't need splines, keyways, or tolerances translated into everyday language.
Those aren't confusing technical terms to them.
They're their language.
Replacing them with simpler words could actually make the message less useful—or make the company sound as though it doesn't understand its own audience.
The question isn't:
How can I make this simpler?
It's:
What does this audience already understand, and what do they actually need me to explain?
But Understanding the Words Isn't the Same as Caring About the Message
Now take fintech.
A business owner may know what card processing fees are. They may even have heard of cash discounting or chargebacks.
That doesn't mean an email explaining those features is automatically worth reading.
You could start with:
Cash discounting allows merchants to offer customers a discount for paying with cash.
Useful information.
But perhaps the more relevant place to start is:
How much are card processing fees taking out of every sale?
Now there's a reason to talk about cash discounting.
Or instead of opening an email with an explanation of chargebacks:
A customer disputes a payment. Can you prove the transaction happened?
Same subject.
Different way in.
You're not simplifying the concept.
You're connecting it to something the reader already cares about.
Know What Your Audience Needs From You
This is why “write simply” isn't enough as a content strategy.
Different audiences need different things.
An engineer may want specifications, tolerances, materials, and technical capabilities.
A business owner reading about payment technology may want to know how something affects costs, risk, or day-to-day operations.
A customer encountering an unfamiliar product may need context before any of those details make sense.
None of these audiences is more or less intelligent.
They're simply coming to the message with different knowledge, priorities, and questions.
Good content meets them there.
Sometimes the Best Explanation Isn't More Copy
And not everything has to be explained with another paragraph.
A diagram may communicate a technical process better.
A pricing comparison can make a fintech concept immediately clearer.
A product image can show something that takes several sentences to describe.
The question isn't whether words or visuals are better.
It's:
What will help this particular audience get the point?
Sometimes that's technical copy.
Sometimes it's plain language.
Sometimes it's an image.
Sometimes it's all three.
Before You Write, Find Out Who You're Talking To
Before deciding how simple, technical, detailed, or conversational the content should be, I would ask:
Who is reading this?
What do they already know?
What do they actually care about?
What are they trying to figure out?
Which information helps them do that?
And which details are here simply because the business wants to talk about them?
Because understanding your product is only half the job.
You also have to understand the person you're explaining it to.
A broaching engineer doesn't need you to explain what a spline is.
A business owner doesn't need a product manual disguised as an email.
And neither needs information that doesn't help them understand why the message matters.
Good marketing isn't about making everything simple.
It's about knowing what your audience needs from the message—and speaking to them accordingly.