Ground breaking. Revolutionary. Innovative. Best-in-class.
Are these words you’d hear in a late-night informercial or ones you should be using to describe your offerings?
In this episode, we talk about the dangers of using hype words, and what happens when people get their expectations up but we fail to deliver.
Listen now!
One of the things about writing copy for your website, marketing emails, social media, and more is that: most of us were not taught this in school. So we pick up a few tips and tricks here and there, wade thru a lot of crap to find a few nuggets that we think are gold.
One problem with this piecemeal approach is that we may be executing it incorrectly.
Enter the concept of the attention-grabbing headline.
At face value, an attention-grabbing headline is a good thing.
But the way a lot of us execute it?
Not so good.
I have a theory that our subconscious is filled with language we heard in infomercials and when someone says “write an attention-grabbing headline,” our mind conjures up something straight out of QVC or one of those late night ads that we probably never see anymore since we’ve all switched over to Netflix.
Let’s Talk About Hype
Hype. I’ve got a couple of bones to pick with you.
My motto is: credibility first.
If all of sudden I started talking about “an amazing, groundbreaking opportunity that you CAN’T MISS!” what would you do?
What if I talked about how “revolutionary” and “outside the box” it is?
Would you listen, or would you call me out on my BS?
Too many hypewords can undermine your credibility and authority.
Many so called “attention grabbing” headlines lack humanity and are things no one would ever say in real life…unless they were a sleazy car salesman.
Should You Label Yourself As “The Best”?
I wanna share an example that makes me laugh that I’ve actually seen out in the wild.
I’m gonna change the details a bit because I actually kind of know this person. We’ll call her Penny.
Penny started a true crime podcast.
After publishing like, episode 5, she adopted the tagline “Best True Crime Podcast” and started branding herself with it…including using it as one of the first things you see when you visit the website. It’s also in her social media profiles.
Her particular reasoning for going with this tagline? The VERY MISUNDERSTOOD concept of “search engine optimization,” or SEO.
Her thought process is that anyone searching “best true crime podcast” on Google is going to find her website because she will be at the top of Google’s search results.
In reality though — not Penny’s magic world — Will this actually help her with SEO?
It will help her rank in search engines very little, if at all. (In other words, NO.)
The short explanation here: there are SO MANY RESULTS when you search “best true crime podcast” in Google. The results that are top ranking, or shown on the first page of Google, are from very well established brands and websites. Search engines aren’t as dumb as they used to be — you can’t game the system by throwing some keywords in your tagline.
So, Penny: If branding yourself with “best true crime podcast” does not help you from an SEO perspective, what is it doing?
I’ve listened to a few episodes of the podcast. Is it a decent podcast? Sure. Is it the “best true crime podcast” as promised? Well, that’s pretty subjective….and certainly debatable!
So it’s honestly just making Penny look sad and desperate.
Anyone, anywhere, can label themselves as the “best true crime podcast,” or the best ANYTHING. There’s no way to prove or disprove this, since “best” is all a matter of opinion.
And so the word essentially has no meaning, and if you used this word in a prominent place — like in a big headline on your homepage — you’ve wasted a lot of valuable real estate.
When you use a hype word like “best” in such a prominent place, you open yourself up to a lot of outcomes…very few of which are positive:
- A user reads “best true crime podcast”, thinks you’re full of shizz, rolls their eyes, and leaves
- A user reads the word “best” and glosses over the rest because the word doesn’t mean much
- A user reads “best true crime podcast”, believes you, but then becomes disappointed when they see you missed publishing an episode for the past 3 weeks
- A user reads “best true crime podcast”, believes you, and after listening, agrees…..in which case, congrats….but you alienated a lot of other types of people with your use of hype words, so maybe not congrats?
What Is Affective Misforecasting?
A study by Patrick, Macinnis, and Park was conducted in 2007 that uses a term called “affective misforecasting.”
This term describes the gap between expected feelings and actual feelings.
The researchers set up a situation where volunteers watched a film clip.
Before the volunteers watched the movie, researcher had them read reviews of the movie, similar to what you’d read on Amazon or Rotten Tomatoes.
Some of the participants read positive reviews of the movie, like “this film is very popular and has won many awards and received a lot of praise from other students who have watched it.” They also read comments from other students, praising it, and were told the average rating was 5 out of 5 stars.
But other participants read negative reviews of the movie, and researchers told them the movie had a 1 out of 5 star rating.
Both groups were shown the same exact film clip, which was a black and white silent comedy that had proved to perform ‘neutral’ in previous research. In other words, I’d say the film wasn’t awful but wasn’t great either. In reality, probably a solid 3 out of 5 stars and people walked away feeling “ok” after seeing it.
All participants were asked “how do you think you will feel after watching the clip?” and after seeing it, “how do you feel now?”
So what happened in this study?
The researchers found that the participants who expected the 1 star movie but saw a somewhat funny movie didn’t pay much mind to the fact that they felt better than anticipated.
But the other participants, the ones that expected a 5 star movie?
These participants definitely noticed the disparity, and it impacted the evaluation they made of the movie.
They were more elaborate with their feedback than the other participants, too.
When people experience feelings that are worse than they expected, they are motivated to analyze the WHY behind this. This exploration ultimately tends to lead to a lower evaluation of the product or service. (The researchers mentioned above did a second part of the study and their findings are consistent with this concept.)
In other words: if you’re expecting crap but get something decent, you aren’t really likely to notice, or feel one way or the other about it.
But if you’re expecting gold and you get something that’s just ok or worse, you aren’t likely to think highly of the product….and you’re probably more likely to be ticked off about it, too!
Makes sense, right?
Hype Words Are Dangerous
Because of the concept of affective misforecasting, we can’t rely on hype words to get people to buy our product or service…unless we are a scammer.
Customer satisfaction, retention, repeat purchases, word of mouth referrals…those are what credible businesses thrive on.
And we aren’t going to get those things IF we end up promising the world to our people, and then failing to deliver.
The research in this area also reminds us that we need to represent our products and services in a realistic way.
Of course, when we are writing or talking about our offerings, we’re going to talk about them in a positive way — we’re trying to sell something, after all — but hyping up our products too much and then letting people down not only hurts them, it hurts us as a brand!
Don’t Give People A False Representation Of The Future
When describing your offering, be careful that you are not doing so in such a way that gives people a false representation of the future, and do not leave out critical details.
It’s a bit of a delicate balance.
I always have my clients focus on the benefits and outcomes of using their product or service, and encourage them to weave it into their website copy and imagery, BUT you have to keep it grounded in reality too.
For example, will taking your course REALLY help EVERYONE create a 7-figure life in ONLY 4 weeks?
Story Time! When Hyping Your Offering Up Too Much Drives People Away
Like a lot of you, I’ve taken online courses before. I once signed up for and spent $79 on a mini course.
I’d been on the creator’s email list for years and one of the emails promoting the course really got me. You’ve probably received one of these too because they all tend to follow the same typical format. It was the standard “Imagine how much your life would change IF ONLY you could do this!” “You probably thought it was impossible!” “Well, it’s not impossible! Let me tell you about Sally, who did what you want to do and made $50k in 2 weeks!” “We taught Sally the EXACT STEPS to success on auto pilot and we can teach you too in our EXCLUSIVE mini course!”
The idea of $50k in 2 weeks GOT me. Making $50k in 2 weeks on autopilot would make my life infinitely easier!
It was a pretty hypey email and trust me, I recognized this. But, it was a cheap course…low risk, potentially high reward. And so I bought it.
Even though I picked up a few things from it, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I think it all has to do with affective misforecasting.
The course really set expectations high: Sally making $50k in 2 weeks was only one of the presale testimonials provided. There were others. One woman made $6K in one day. Another made $40K in a couple months after “just making a couple tweaks” that she had picked up in this mini course…or so the testimonial made it seem.
And the course itself started out with a lot of vision exercises: what does your life look like in 1, 3, 5 years, that kind of thing. What would your life look like if you had your rent money coming in on autopilot?
This was followed up with a spreadsheet that got us crunching the numbers. The whole purpose here was to show us just how doable our goals actually were…how attainable “rent on autopilot” actually is.
And of course, at this point, I was on a very high note. Emotionally, I was feeling energetic and happy because my goals seemed very much in reach, and I was led to believe that the rest of the course was gonna show me exactly how to hit these goals, right? Wasn’t showing me the steps to success what was promised? Don’t I just have to hit play?
Well – here’s where things started to fall apart for me.
It turns out these steps for success weren’t quite so straightforward.
In fact, most of the steps for success relied on other steps that weren’t covered in this course. Prerequisites if you will.
For example, one of the “must have” items was an email list with at least 1500 people on it.
Until you have that, according to this course, it’s going to be fruitless to work on all the other steps, so you need to build the list first. Forget about that $50k in 2 weeks like Sally made. Rent on autopilot? Unattainable. Just a pipe dream until you build that list.
BUT. Not only was building a 1500 person list NOT covered in this mini course…it also was never mentioned anywhere prior to purchasing the course that it was a prerequisite.
The course creator did not use caution in the way she described her mini course. She left out critical details AND gave people a false representation of the future.
My expectations were high because the creator had shown me a future that just was not realistic for most people purchasing the course, and they left out important information when describing it before people pulled the trigger and bought it.
The disappointment REALLY hit an all-time high the last day.
It’s probably not a surprise to anyone, but it turns out the mini course was more or less a device to encourage people to buy the creator’s more extensive, and much more EXPENSIVE, mega course.
Turns out – it was ONLY in this mega course that we really would get ALL the steps for success, including the foundational ones like building that 1500 person email list.
And oh boy, the creator REALLY pushed the mega course.
In addition to the course materials, there was also a Facebook group the creator set up for the mini course. Through the week long mini course, there were maybe 10-12 posts total about the actual mini course content.
There were 24 posts pushing the mega course…all in a very small range of time.
It was excessive.
I’m not knocking the hustle because I know this is how people make money. And I’m not saying that the mega course isn’t valuable.
What I am saying is: this felt sleazy.
The worst part about it was the same pitch that was used to promote the mini course was used to promote the mega course.
The same “Imagine how different your life could be if you FINALLY figured this shizz out and were making over $5000 a month on autopilot! Stop waiting around — purchase the mega course!”
The same testimonials were used, even!
After analyzing this and having time to sit with it, I realized this course creator really let me down and lost credibility.
Even though I learned some things from the mini course and found it valuable, I can’t say that I would ever recommend it to anyone because of the hype and the inaccurate way it was represented.
I expected the world but what I received was just ok. And it left a sour taste in my mouth.
And that’s pretty much what affective misforecasting is.
Hopefully this drives the point home to be cautious with how you represent your offering in your marketing materials. Being TOO positive may get you some traction initially…it may get people excited about what you have to offer…but you can risk losing clients and customers when you don’t deliver.
So let’s ditch the hype words and aim to be clear and credible instead!
Avoid Using These Hype Words!
As you are writing your website materials, avoid using these. If you already have your stuff written up, I highly recommend editing it and taking this words out. Replace them with ones that aren’t so empty and mean a little bit more.
- Ground breaking
- Revolutionary
- Once in a lifetime
- Miracle
- Jaw dropping
- Game changing
- World class
- Outside the box
- Cutting edge
- State of the art
- Satisfaction guaranteed
- Hidden gem
- Opportunity
- Innovative
- Customer-oriented
- Awesome
- Amazing
- Ultimate
- Huge
- Buy Now
- Deal
- Skyrocket
- Premium
- Safe & Effective (I fricken hope so, right?)
If you ever find yourself having doubt, wondering if your headline or whatever you’re writing sounds too hypey and not credible enough, I highly suggest asking yourself this question: “would I say this in real life?”
You know your copy has too many hype words if you feel like a total sleezeball saying it outloud.
And when you are trying to sell your offerings, triple check to make sure you are giving people EVERYTHING they need to make an informed decision and be successful.
Are you really able to deliver on your promises?
Is making $50k in 2 weeks like Sally did REALLY an outcome people should expect after taking your 1 week mini course?
Or are you representing the future in a FALSE way and leaving out critical information in order to “get the sale”?
These are important questions to ask yourself when putting anything out there.
It’s all about credibility!