Most people, when faced with a blank screen on their computer and a deadline for a new marketing piece looming, get a little uptight. It’s intimidating to try to capture everything you want a prospect to know and share it in a compelling way. Your product or service is superb, and you have so much to say – how will you do it justice?

Which is why most marketing copy is dreadful. Here are the most common mistakes:

1. We do a brain dump, sharing everything we know.

2. We want to demonstrate that we’re experts, so we use impressive words and jargon.

3. We cram way too many words into the piece, because it’s all important.

4. We talk about our company, our product and our people … but not about the customer.

If you make even one of these mistakes, odds are your prospects will glance at your first two or three sentences and move on. You haven’t invited them into the conversation; you’re just talking about you.

How do they talk?

I can have the best deal in the world, but if I tell you about it in Japanese and you don’t speak Japanese, you can’t possibly want what I am selling.

You need to know your prospects well enough that you know how they talk.

• Are they engineers who use very precise, detailed language and acronyms?

• Are they teachers who speak about their students with affection and pride?

• Are they purchasing agents who need to squeeze every penny from the deal and deliver the highest return on investment possible?

Understanding the language they use and how they’re going to have to sell your offering up and down the food chain will allow you to craft your message in their native tongue.

Your prospects are busy and won’t take the time to translate your marketing messages. If they don’t instantly understand it and see that you’re talking to them, they’ll pass it by every time.

Do they know they need you?

No one wants to buy something they don’t need or want. That sounds like a “duh,” but many times businesses try to sell solutions to clients who don’t realize they have a problem.

Often, we just go right to the solution without even mentioning the problem. Let’s say that I want to sell my home in the next 12 months. You own a landscaping business and send me information about how good your work is, showing me pictures of gorgeous yards, etc.

But I dismiss it, because I’m not going to live in my house much longer, so why spend money on something I won’t get to enjoy?

You’ve lost the sale, because I don’t know I need you. But if one of your marketing pieces was titled “5 landscaping tricks to sell your house faster,” now you have my attention. If the first line of body copy tells me that 34 percent of buyers passed on at least one home because the landscaping was disappointing, you have just converted a “no” into an interested prospect.

By paying attention to these two elements, you can effectively avoid all four of the mistakes I mentioned. You’ll speak in your clients’ language and only talk about what matters to them – their problems and how you can solve them.

Drew McLellan is Top Dog at McLellan Marketing Group and blogs at www.drewsmarketingminute.com. He can be reached by e-mail at Drew@MclellanMarketing.com.© 2011 Drew McLellan