Why Your Business Should Use Less Jargon

Jargon is not an uncommon sight in business materials, sales calls, and things of that nature. There are certain terms that are associated with certain business practices and most of us use them in the course of running our companies.

However, jargon that may be totally natural to us is not always so natural for our customers and clients to understand. If you use a lot of jargon in your interactions with customers, whether online or in person, you should definitely think about changing that. Here’s why:

It is alienating

If your customer does not know what various words mean, then they will find it difficult to understand what it is your product can actually do and why they might want to buy it. They will end up feeling confused and this will alienate them from your company. They will end up buying the same thing from a company that explains what their product does in plain English instead.

It’s not ideal for SEO

Search engine optimization is an important part of any modern company’s marketing strategy. Good SEO will ensure that you maximize the number of visitors to your website, and that means higher sales too.

Talk to any good SEO company and they will tell you that jargon typically does not rank well. Customers do not typically use jargon when searching for products and services, so if you do use jargon in your content, it will end up getting buried and customers will not easily be able to find you.

It’s not uniform

The jargon you use in your company may not be the same jargon another company uses in your sector, which means the customers may be used to a whole different set of jargon, and they might find it hard to see what you are talking about. By stripping out the jargon and using plain English, then, you make it easier to get your point across, whatever that point may be. It enables you to be more consistent and that is a big plus point when it comes to marketing and selling just about anything you can think of.

It can feel like a hard sell

Rightly or wrongly, when you use jargon, it can come across like you are trying to confuse and baffle your audience with big words and complicated sentences, and it can make them feel like you are going in for the hard sell by trying to impress them while also obscuring the meaning of what you are saying. Lots of customers do not like jargon, for this reason, and it is just another reason why you should think about removing it from your customer interactions more often too.

Using jargon is not necessarily something you need to eliminate completely in your customer interactions, and in some industries, especially if you are selling B2B, keeping it may be more appropriate, but it is definitely something you should think about using less for all of the reasons above if you want to maximize your sales potential.