Over and over, the same mistakes get made when marketing. It matters little if it is a video or a blog post or a capture page. All have the same mistake, the same theme. They are all too serious.

The video

In the video, the person pitching the latest and greatest whatever is well dressed and groomed. Other than their mouth, they hardly move. After all, they have a serious business to offer. They want to be taken seriously. Therefore, they are serious, so they present serious. Is there any other way?

Write to me

Blog posts that fall into the too serious category are long and boring. They ramble on and on, use eloquent and awkward speech, and seem as though their authors have swallowed a Thesaurus. The grammar is near perfect, punctuation correct and don’t have contractions. Readers leave nearly as quickly as the arrive.

Combining all of the worst

The long landing pages combine all of the bad aspects of videos and blog posts. They go on and on. The never-ending text is only interrupted by bad videos. The text is laid to use all the colors of the rainbow, multiple font sizes, bold and underline. The content is bad enough, so the author assaults the reader every which way. Oh good grief.

Have fun

Why all the seriousness? Lighten up a bit. Don’t be sophomoric. Be entertaining! Be Lively! Get your point across clearly in a relaxed manner. Don’t worry about perfection, worry about value. Introduce a comma, splice to see if anyone is paying attention. Sure, get the spell and grammar correct (at least mostly), but not to the point of awkward absurdity. After all, this is a post to get attention and make a connection. It is not a term paper or a doctoral thesis.