Look, most SaaS homepages are vague on purpose. Not strategy. Accident. The page is trying to talk to two readers at once, hedges every claim to keep both interested, and ends up speaking to neither. You scroll through three sections of soft verbs and abstract nouns and walk away with no idea what the software does. That is not your fault as the reader. It’s natural to feel frustrated. The page stole your time. ...
A fair warning before we start. This article has an expiration date. Not the principle. The principle is permanent: marketing copy should sound like someone with conviction wrote it. But the specific tells I catalog here reflect LLM-generated text I’ve seen from 2024 to 2026. AI writing patterns will evolve. Signals will shift. A year from now, some of these tells will be less common and new ones will replace them. Treat the examples as a snapshot. ...
Here’s a common scene product and technical marketers have lived through. You write a value prop. You’ve done the work. You talked to product. You understand the feature. You describe what it does for the customer. You feel good about it. Then someone reads it and says, “So what?” Not because it’s wrong. Because it stopped too soon. The copy describes the direct effect of the feature. The direct effect is real. It is good. But it is not the reason someone buys. The reason they buy is one level above: the business outcome the direct effect makes possible. ...
Let me make a seemingly obvious statement: A presentation is a story told by a person to a room full of people. That sentence should be straightforward. It is not. If it were obvious, most presentations would not be walls of text projected onto a screen while a person stands next to them and reads aloud. They would not be documents pretending to be presentations. They would not be decks that work perfectly fine without anyone presenting them — which is another way of saying they do not need a presenter at all. ...
I came into product marketing from a technical background. Programming, hardware, IT, databases, support — I’ve done it all. Years of thinking in systems, logic trees, and structured problem-solving. When I started building messaging documents, I did what any technical person would do. I organized the information. I categorized the features. I mapped capabilities to outcomes in clean, logical structures. The documents were thorough. They were accurate. And they persuaded nobody. ...