Everyone Hates Marketing

So what's a marketing copywriter to do?

I wanted to return to an idea I touched on briefly in No, We Can’t All Write:

Different types of writing have different purposes…generally marketing is for drawing attention to yourself, [while] UX and technical writing are for providing clear instructions on what to do.

My professional writing experience is largely in marketing, but I’ve been dabbling in UX (user experience) for several years, and over the past few months I’ve become solely responsible for both forms of writing at my current company.

And let me tell you, they’re completely different worlds.

Even if you’ve never worked in marketing, you probably understand what the marketers of the world are trying to do with their writing: Get your attention first and foremost, then convince you to buy their product/sign up for their service/whatever by making various emotional or logical appeals. It’s a shouty art form, to say the least.

Eliza knows all about being shouty.

On the other hand, UX writers prefer to be invisible. So invisible you probably don’t even know we exist. We handle the words in various digital products like apps: button labels, instructional text, error messages and the like.

Writing for this kind of experience gives you a totally different perspective on language and what it’s for. In UX, you understand that people probably won’t read most of what you write. At best, they’ll skim for the piece that seems relevant to them.

Whereas most marketing writers are dying for an audience to think what they wrote is clever, the mark of good product copy is that users make their way through it seamlessly, barely noticing the words on the screen at all. They’re two different approaches to getting you to the finish line of whatever action we want you to take.

At first glance, you might think there’s a pretty stark division between these worlds, and certainly most companies that hire both marketing copywriters and UX writers treat them that way, assigning their wordsmiths to completely separate departments. Typically, marketing is what happens before you acquire a customer, and UX is what happens after.

Another way of thinking about it is that marketing happens in an environment the company doesn’t own (like social media or your inbox), while UX is the area the company does control. Duo the Owl being deranged on TikTok is marketing; Duolingo’s psychological manipulation to get you to keep up your streak in the app is UX.

But the boundaries are porous. The company’s website, which they control, is clearly marketing…until you click “Get started” and find yourself in a product flow. When you’re using an app and suddenly get a pop-up asking you to leave a review in the app store, that’s marketing. There are upsells (buy our more expensive subscription!), abandonment campaigns (here’s free shipping if you come back and order what’s in your cart!) and reactivations (you used our app once three months ago, please come back!).

And when both the Marketing and Product teams claim a piece of writing as their own, the feedback gets messy. Marketers think UX writing is boring and lifeless; UX writers find marketing annoying (as do most people).

Let’s say a user has several steps they need to go through before they can purchase a product. From a UX perspective, the writer might want to let you know that the process will take about ten minutes and you’ll need a photo ID, so you should pause and grab that now. From a marketing perspective, that level of disclosure will scare the customer away—just let them know there are a few quick steps to go, nothing to worry about.

So what is your poor writer supposed to do (besides scream)? It all comes down to having empathy for your reader.

Forget what the company wants. Forget your business objectives and KPIs (key performance indicators). What does the user need, and how can we get that for them?

My opinion is that the kindest thing you can do for someone you’re communicating with is to be as clear as possible.

It’s also good for business; when users get confused, they bail. So write specific button text instead of the lazy “Get started” you see everywhere. If the user is going to need to take a photo or make a call during set-up, tell them up front.

At the same time, be friendly. Assure them they’re in good hands. Be a little clever sometimes to make them smile. All of that is marketing, but when you do it right, it doesn’t feel disruptive or intrusive the way bad marketing so often does.

So, you know, do all of that. You get two lines of text on a phone screen. Go.