In cognitive neuroscience and psychology there is the concept of "processing fluency". It means the ease with which information is processed.
Wikipedia has an article on that topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_fluency
The relevancy for marketing becomes clear, when you see that research indicated that information with higher (=better) processing fluency is perceived as more credible and trustworthy.
Wikipedia:
"As high processing fluency indicates that the interaction of a person with the environment goes smoothly, a person does not need to pay particular attention to the environment. By contrast, low processing fluency means that there are problems in the interaction with the environment which requires more attention and an analytical processing style to solve the problem."
In other words:
Make it harder for your users to understand your content (preselling article, review, ad copy, sales letter, whatever...) and they will find it harder to trust it. Which will result in less conversions.
As the famous quote (from whomever) goes: "Don't make me think!"
If you make them think, they will also start thinking whether they want/need your product in the first place. Whether your product could possibly be as good as you claim. Whether your claims make sense. Whether you are trustworthy.
You don't want them to think.
So you want the processing fluency of your content to be high enough for your users to easily consume it without thinking too much. But how?
The aforementioned Wikipedia article mentions several factors, such as using good colors and fonts in your content. Another important factor in texts are short sentences that you don't have to read a second time to make some sense of them.
But the possibly most important factor (in my humble opinion) is making sure that you are actually speaking the same language as your users.
You think that goes without saying? I beg to differ.
Most online marketers are primarily interested in the US market, right? And some other English-speaking countries. So the language in question would usually be English.
But even many people in this forum here don't seem to speak actual English. I'm sure many don't even realize it, but what they believe is English is actually just a rather pathetic pseudo-language. Real languages follow rules to make them understandable for everyone who knows the language. What people often try to pass off as English, here or anywhere else on the Internet, follows either only a small number of rules (which are often wrong too) or no rules at all. Not to mention that many people who do know the rules seem to believe that following them is optional.
It's almost impossible to find a thread on BHW with more than two or three posts where not at least one or two posts contain errors such as:
- mistaking one word for another (possibly because they sound similar - like "their", "they're" and "there),
- believing that singular and plural forms of words are freely interchangeable,
- hacking otherwise almost acceptable sentences into tiny pieces that make no sense by using commas where they don't belong,
- turning a text into a senseless sequences of words by using neither capitalization, nor commas or any punctuation,
- believing that a sentence or any sequence of words can be turned into a question by doing nothing more than putting a question mark at the end of it
- and so on...
That's not real English. It is, quite frankly, pathetic.
That kind of "English" may make sense to you, but it's your users that need to (but won't) understand it.
It's not just regular posts either: I've seen sales pages (often also in the BHW Marketplace) where the seller apparently doesn't give a damn about proper English. I've seen PPC ads with two, three or more serious errors within just a dozen words.
Now, I realize that people may not be at fault themselves in many cases. Sometimes it's simply a case of never having had the opportunity to learn English in school or maybe they had an incompetent English teacher.
Also, for people from some countries English may be much harder to learn, possibly because learning their mother tongue in early childhood wired their brain in a way that makes English much harder for them.
But know what? The reason doesn't matter.
Your users won't care for the reason why your English is pathetic. If you force their brains to engage to understand your content, then you have lost. No matter the reason.
And the processing fluency is just a subconscious part of the whole issue.
There's also the part of me that very consciously thinks that people who don't really speak the same language as me are not people I personally can trust with my money. Not because I consider those people untrustworthy, but for very practical reasons.
An example:
I once had just created a new account at some push advertising network and had a question about the process for loading funds into the account. I sent that question to their support. The response came within minutes. And it was useless. The English in that response was so broken it was ridiculous. And the support guy had completely misunderstood my question. So I rephrased my question in a way that a five year old would have understood it. The five year old obviously would have been unable to answer the question but would at least have understood it. The response I got then told me I was not dealing with a five year old native English speaker, nor with someone who at least graduated from an elementary school in any English speaking or any Western country. Possibly not even someone who ever been taught any English by any professional teacher.
That second response was actually even less helpful than the first.
But it told me two important things about this network:
1. I couldn't trust their support to help me in case of any problems. Not necessarily because they didn't want to help, but simply because they were incapable of understanding me.
2. A moron was in charge of that network, someone who didn't understand the need for support staff speaking acceptable English. The reason for the support guy's bad English didn't matter. What did matter was that the guy in charge of the whole network didn't give a damn about that problem. In light of that one could easily ask themselves: What else must be severely amiss there? And would you want to entrust your money to a moron anyway?
I instantly abandoned my newly created account there, found myself a better push ads network and never looked back.
See it now?
All those fancy copywriting techniques taught in marketing courses costing thousands of dollars aren't worth shit, if your user's subconsciousness tells them that you are untrustworthy, before their subconsciousness ever has any chance to actually start processing your message.
And you will never make marketing really work for you the way it could, if you don't speak your users' language. You may get some conversions, but not nearly as many as it could be.
The takeaway from all that: Learn English! If you believe you already know English, learn better English! And, for the really important pieces of content, use Grammarly! (And if your market isn't English, the same is obviously applicable for any other language.)
The results may astonish you.
Wikipedia has an article on that topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_fluency
The relevancy for marketing becomes clear, when you see that research indicated that information with higher (=better) processing fluency is perceived as more credible and trustworthy.
Wikipedia:
"As high processing fluency indicates that the interaction of a person with the environment goes smoothly, a person does not need to pay particular attention to the environment. By contrast, low processing fluency means that there are problems in the interaction with the environment which requires more attention and an analytical processing style to solve the problem."
In other words:
Make it harder for your users to understand your content (preselling article, review, ad copy, sales letter, whatever...) and they will find it harder to trust it. Which will result in less conversions.
As the famous quote (from whomever) goes: "Don't make me think!"
If you make them think, they will also start thinking whether they want/need your product in the first place. Whether your product could possibly be as good as you claim. Whether your claims make sense. Whether you are trustworthy.
You don't want them to think.
So you want the processing fluency of your content to be high enough for your users to easily consume it without thinking too much. But how?
The aforementioned Wikipedia article mentions several factors, such as using good colors and fonts in your content. Another important factor in texts are short sentences that you don't have to read a second time to make some sense of them.
But the possibly most important factor (in my humble opinion) is making sure that you are actually speaking the same language as your users.
You think that goes without saying? I beg to differ.
Most online marketers are primarily interested in the US market, right? And some other English-speaking countries. So the language in question would usually be English.
But even many people in this forum here don't seem to speak actual English. I'm sure many don't even realize it, but what they believe is English is actually just a rather pathetic pseudo-language. Real languages follow rules to make them understandable for everyone who knows the language. What people often try to pass off as English, here or anywhere else on the Internet, follows either only a small number of rules (which are often wrong too) or no rules at all. Not to mention that many people who do know the rules seem to believe that following them is optional.
It's almost impossible to find a thread on BHW with more than two or three posts where not at least one or two posts contain errors such as:
- mistaking one word for another (possibly because they sound similar - like "their", "they're" and "there),
- believing that singular and plural forms of words are freely interchangeable,
- hacking otherwise almost acceptable sentences into tiny pieces that make no sense by using commas where they don't belong,
- turning a text into a senseless sequences of words by using neither capitalization, nor commas or any punctuation,
- believing that a sentence or any sequence of words can be turned into a question by doing nothing more than putting a question mark at the end of it
- and so on...
That's not real English. It is, quite frankly, pathetic.
That kind of "English" may make sense to you, but it's your users that need to (but won't) understand it.
It's not just regular posts either: I've seen sales pages (often also in the BHW Marketplace) where the seller apparently doesn't give a damn about proper English. I've seen PPC ads with two, three or more serious errors within just a dozen words.
Now, I realize that people may not be at fault themselves in many cases. Sometimes it's simply a case of never having had the opportunity to learn English in school or maybe they had an incompetent English teacher.
Also, for people from some countries English may be much harder to learn, possibly because learning their mother tongue in early childhood wired their brain in a way that makes English much harder for them.
But know what? The reason doesn't matter.
Your users won't care for the reason why your English is pathetic. If you force their brains to engage to understand your content, then you have lost. No matter the reason.
And the processing fluency is just a subconscious part of the whole issue.
There's also the part of me that very consciously thinks that people who don't really speak the same language as me are not people I personally can trust with my money. Not because I consider those people untrustworthy, but for very practical reasons.
An example:
I once had just created a new account at some push advertising network and had a question about the process for loading funds into the account. I sent that question to their support. The response came within minutes. And it was useless. The English in that response was so broken it was ridiculous. And the support guy had completely misunderstood my question. So I rephrased my question in a way that a five year old would have understood it. The five year old obviously would have been unable to answer the question but would at least have understood it. The response I got then told me I was not dealing with a five year old native English speaker, nor with someone who at least graduated from an elementary school in any English speaking or any Western country. Possibly not even someone who ever been taught any English by any professional teacher.
That second response was actually even less helpful than the first.
But it told me two important things about this network:
1. I couldn't trust their support to help me in case of any problems. Not necessarily because they didn't want to help, but simply because they were incapable of understanding me.
2. A moron was in charge of that network, someone who didn't understand the need for support staff speaking acceptable English. The reason for the support guy's bad English didn't matter. What did matter was that the guy in charge of the whole network didn't give a damn about that problem. In light of that one could easily ask themselves: What else must be severely amiss there? And would you want to entrust your money to a moron anyway?
I instantly abandoned my newly created account there, found myself a better push ads network and never looked back.
See it now?
All those fancy copywriting techniques taught in marketing courses costing thousands of dollars aren't worth shit, if your user's subconsciousness tells them that you are untrustworthy, before their subconsciousness ever has any chance to actually start processing your message.
And you will never make marketing really work for you the way it could, if you don't speak your users' language. You may get some conversions, but not nearly as many as it could be.
The takeaway from all that: Learn English! If you believe you already know English, learn better English! And, for the really important pieces of content, use Grammarly! (And if your market isn't English, the same is obviously applicable for any other language.)
The results may astonish you.
