What’s wrong with our marketing copy?

TL;DR

Marketing copy usually underperforms for one of five reasons. The objective is unclear, the audience is wrong, the message focuses on product rather than buyer value, the tone has been flattened by review, or the brief doesn't define what the content needs to achieve. The best fix is to diagnose the job of the copy before you rewrite the words.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

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B2B copywriting rarely fails because somebody picked the wrong word. More often, the problem sits somewhere upstream. The audience has shifted. The messaging has drifted, or the objective’s become fuzzy somewhere along the way.

Teams collide, too. Product wants one thing, Sales wants something else and Legal just arrived in the copy doc with a disapproving demeanour and phasers set to 'kill'.

Meanwhile, the CMO is looking at the page wondering why it no longer seems to be doing its job. Which is interesting. Because when a CMO asks, “What’s wrong with our marketing copy?”, what they often mean is:

Why isn’t this helping with the thing I’m worrying about today?

That could be leads. It could be revenue, positioning, a product launch. It could be brand perception or a campaign that’s underperforming. A sales team that keeps rewriting the deck (the bastards). A homepage that somehow manages to say 700 words without ever making a point.

Different problems, different jobs for the copy. So before we start rewriting sentences, I suggest we start somewhere more useful. Intent and outcome, baby.

First, what was your B2B copy supposed to do?

This sounds painfully obvious, but people forget it all the time.

A nurture email does a different job from a product page. A product page does a different job from a technical whitepaper. A technical whitepaper does a different job from a brand piece designed to make someone think, “Huh. These people might know what they’re talking about.”

Yet copy often gets reviewed as though “good” were a universal quality. It isn’t. Good B2B copywriting is B2B copywriting that does its job. So when somebody tells me a piece “isn’t working”, I want to know what working was supposed to look like in the first place. Do we want the reader to:

• understand something complicated?
• feel something?
• click?
• book?
• sign up?
• trust us a bit more?
• remember us?
• move one step further through a buying process?

If nobody can answer that clearly, the problem was already there long before the writer got involved.

Why does B2B marketing copy feel flat or boring?

Sometimes the copy has simply lost its spark. I’ve seen plenty of long-form B2B content that’s technically accurate but spiritually dead and has become almost impossible to care about.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with technical content when technical is what the reader needs. But a blog, brand article or thought-leadership piece still has to earn the next paragraph.

A point of view, a story, or a useful observation. Something surprising, maybe. A sense that there is a person on the other side of the page who has thought about this before opening ChatGPT and asking for 1,500 words on “five trends shaping the future of X”.

Without that, you get a strangely familiar sort of B2B content. Accurate. Structured. Thorough. Entirely devoid of a soul…

This has become a bigger problem as LLMs have gotten a lot better. Machines can now produce competent copy very quickly, so competence alone has become rather less impressive. The bar has moved. If the piece is supposed to make somebody care, then “technically fine” probably isn’t enough.

If you're reviewing a lot of content at the moment, I built a calculator to work out your content review gap and  how much it could be costing you.

The audience can be wrong even when the words are right

One of the most useful things a writer can say is: Who is this for? Closely followed by:  Where are they when they see it?

Those two questions resolve a lot of nonsense. Because a technical buyer needs something different from an economic buyer. A champion trying to build the internal case needs something different from somebody seeing the company for the first time. A buyer at the start of a category search is in a different state of mind from somebody comparing two shortlisted vendors on a Friday afternoon.

This sounds basic because it is basic. But that doesn’t mean organisations consistently do it.

I’ve seen copy criticised for being too technical when it was written for the wrong audience. Too vague when the reader was already deep into evaluation. Too salesy when the person had barely understood the problem yet.

Sometimes the writing's perfectly serviceable, it’s just turned up at the wrong party.

Product truth and customer value are different things

This is one of the recurring tensions in technical B2B work. Product knows what the product does. Marketing needs to explain why somebody should care. Those two things need each other, but they’re not interchangeable. Product teams will quite reasonably say: “This is what the feature does.”

Equally reasonably, the writer’s job is then to ask: “And why should a prospect even begin to give a shit?”

That sounds simple until you get into complex SaaS, cloud infrastructure, security, AI or anything else where the product genuinely is complicated. The danger is going too far in either direction. Stay too close to the product description and the copy becomes an instruction manual with a CTA. Push too aggressively towards benefit language and you can end up making claims the product doesn’t really support.

The useful territory sits between the two. Be absolutely clear on what the product does, then explain why that matters in terms the buyer recognises.

And yes, sometimes that means pushing back.

“We can’t say that” isn't always the end of the conversation

Some of the more interesting feedback conversations start with: “We can’t say that.”

Sometimes they’re right. Accuracy matters and evidence matters, of course. Regulated industries exist for good reasons and nobody wants the headline from their campaign appearing as Exhibit A in the Old Bailey.

But there’s another version of “we can’t say that” which really means: “We wouldn’t normally say it like that.” That’s a totally different problem.

Brand voice only becomes useful when it affects the work. If every interesting line is slowly neutralised during review, that bold new tone of voice you worked so hard to make sound unique, will end up sounding remarkably similar to your old one.

This is where I’ll push. Can we defend the claim? Is it accurate? Does it fit the brand? Is it likely to cause proper trouble? If the answers are yes, yes, yes and no, I’d rather have the discussion than automatically retreat into corporate sludge.

Legal teams may disagree with this paragraph (hey!).

What should a good marketing copy brief include?

For smaller companies, fast-moving teams and anybody currently doing three jobs, the brief can be fairly rudimentary. Sometimes it is a Slack message or an idea formulated in three minutes in a meeting.

Sometimes it’s a comment in a Google Doc containing the phrase “make it punchier”, which I’m pretty sure historians will one day identify as a contributing factor in the downfall of western capitalism.

Now, you do not necessarily need an enormous briefing template. But you do need clarity on two things.

1. Who are we speaking to?

Not “enterprise buyers”. Who’s the person? Are they a technical buyer, an influencer, a champion, a budget holder? What do they already understand? What are they worried about? What do they need from this particular piece of content?

2. What do we want to happen next?

What’s the outcome? That might be a click or a conversion. It might be understanding. It might be confidence. It might simply be that somebody finishes the article thinking the company has said something useful. Once those two things are clear, most other decisions get easier. Tone. Length. Level of detail. Proof. Structure. CTA.

In short: Is this speaking to the right person, at the right moment, in a way that moves us towards the agreed outcome?

That gives everybody something better to argue about than whether they personally like the word “unlock”.

How much does tone of voice matter in marketing copy?

Tone can sound like decoration. It isn’t. How you sound affects whether people trust you, remember you and want to spend another 30 seconds with you.

There are limits, obviously. You don’t need your cloud-security whitepaper sounding like a bad stand-up routine. Nor should every SaaS landing page start swearing because someone read a LinkedIn post about “human brands”.

But there’s usually more room than companies think because the safest possible version of the copy is almost never the most memorable one. And that’s particularly true when every competitor is saying broadly the same thing.

If your brand allows personality, use it. If you have a point of view, share it. If there’s a simpler, sharper or more human way of saying something, fight for it.

Otherwise you’ll end up with the peculiar situation where everybody agrees the brand should sound distinctive until somebody writes something distinctive.

There’s no such thing as useless feedback

Shit feedback, sure. Like “can we make it pop?” Or, “my husband didn’t like the headline.”

But feedback (even the bad stuff) nearly always tells you something. The trick is working out what problem the reviewer is trying to solve.

If somebody says a paragraph feels too technical, maybe they’re reacting to the audience level. If they say the message isn’t strong enough, perhaps the outcome was never clear. If Product says the copy overclaims, that deserves attention. If Legal wants to add 47 qualifiers to a six-word heading, we’re almost certainly gonna ignore them.

Feedback gets more useful when everyone can tie it back to the same brief.

• Who is this for?
• What are we trying to achieve?
• Does this get us closer?

That gives the review process a centre of gravity. Which is useful when twelve people have already opened the document.

Before blaming the copy, read it properly

This is my very sophisticated diagnostic technique.

Read it. Like, read it properly.

Not while answering Slack. Not while scanning for words you dislike. Not while imagining what Legal might say about paragraph four. Sit down and read the thing as though you were the person it was written for.

What happens? Do you understand it? Do you care? Does anything make you want to keep going? Does it feel relevant to the situation you’re in? Do you know what the company wants you to do next?

And perhaps the hardest question:

Does it make you feel anything at all?

That last one is subjective, obviously. Your addressable market remains stubbornly populated by humans with feelings and personal tastes.

But most CMOs I’ve worked with are pretty empathetic people. They have to be. Their job involves seeing the business through the eyes of customers, Sales, Product, leadership, investors and whoever has just pinged them asking why pipeline is down.

So borrow your reader’s chair for a minute. If you can’t work out why they would care, there’s your starting point.

So, what’s wrong with your marketing copy?

Could be the writing.

Sometimes the headline is weak. Sometimes the structure drags. Sometimes the tone is dead. Sometimes the writer just hasn’t found the interesting bit yet.

But I wouldn’t start there.

I’d ask:

• Who is this for?
• What do they need from it?
• What are we trying to make happen?
• Does the message connect the product to something the buyer values?
• Are we saying it in a way that feels recognisably ours?
• Can we defend every important claim?
• And when you read the thing properly, does it make you care?

If we've got answers to those, fixing the copy becomes much easier,

If we don't, another round of wordsmithing probably isn’t going to save it.