Why Your Industry Jargon Is Costing You Customers

# Why Your Industry Jargon Is Costing You Customers

There's a belief that does the rounds in small business circles, and it goes something like this: if you use the proper technical terms, you'll sound like an expert. Customers will see words like "magnetic filtration" or "MTD compliance" or "balayage with a root smudge" and think, "Well, they clearly know their stuff."

It sounds reasonable. It's also costing you customers.

The Belief, and Why It Falls Apart

Here's the flaw in the logic: jargon proves you know your industry. It does absolutely nothing to prove you understand your customer. And on social media, where someone gives you about three seconds before scrolling on, those are very different things.

When a potential customer reads "We install unvented cylinders with magnetic filtration on all sealed systems," they don't think, "What an expert." They think nothing at all, because they've already scrolled past. The words didn't land. There was nothing to land — no picture formed in their head, no problem recognised, no benefit understood.

Compare that with: "Your radiators will heat up faster, and your boiler will last years longer." Same service. Same expertise. But now the reader can actually see what they're getting.

The first version was written for other plumbers. The second was written for the person paying the bill. Only one of them was ever going to win you work.

The Curse of Knowing Too Much

This isn't a character flaw, by the way. It's a well-documented psychological quirk called the curse of knowledge: once you know something deeply, you genuinely cannot remember what it was like not to know it.

You've said "powerflush" or "self-assessment deadline" or "hybrid lashes" so many times that these words feel like plain English to you. They're not. They're shorthand you've earned through years of work — and your customers haven't done those years.

The accountant who writes "Are you ready for MTD?" assumes everyone knows what MTD is. Most sole traders don't. But "HMRC is changing how you submit your tax return, and it affects you from April" — that gets read, because it sounds like something that matters to *me*, the reader.

"But Won't I Sound Less Professional?"

This is the fear that keeps jargon alive: that plain English sounds dumbed down, and dumbed down sounds cheap.

In practice, the opposite is true. Translating something complicated into something simple is *harder* than reciting the technical version — and customers can feel the difference. Anyone can copy terminology off a supplier's brochure. Only someone who genuinely understands the work can explain why it matters in words a customer would actually use.

Think about the best tradesperson, accountant or consultant you've ever dealt with. Chances are they explained things in a way that made you feel clever, not stupid. That's what expertise actually looks like from the customer's side of the table. It's also, not coincidentally, the kind of person people recommend to their friends.

What Actually Works Instead

A few practical habits that strip the jargon out without stripping the substance:

Read your post out loud, to an imaginary neighbour. Not a colleague — a neighbour. If you'd feel slightly ridiculous saying the sentence over the fence, rewrite it. "We offer comprehensive periodontal maintenance programmes" becomes "We help you keep your gums healthy so your teeth stay put."

Keep a banned words list. Every industry has its repeat offenders. Write yours down — the acronyms, the supplier-brochure phrases, the terms you'd have to explain at a dinner party — and check your posts against it before publishing. Five minutes of discipline, every single post improved.

Translate the feature into the consequence. Jargon usually describes what you do; customers buy what happens afterwards. "Magnetic filtration" is what you do. "Lower heating bills and fewer breakdowns" is what happens afterwards. Always post the second; mention the first only if asked.

Save the technical talk for technical audiences. If you sell to other businesses in your trade, jargon is fine — it's their language too. The rule isn't "never use technical terms." It's "use your reader's vocabulary, not your own." A scaffolding firm posting for builders can talk spec; the same firm posting for homeowners shouldn't.

The Three-Second Test

Next time you write a post, picture the person you most want as a customer — not a fellow professional, the actual customer. Give them three distracted seconds with your opening line, somewhere between a school-run photo and a video of a dog.

Would they recognise themselves in it? Would they understand, instantly, what's in it for them? If the honest answer is no, the post isn't unprofessional — it's invisible. And invisible is the one thing your marketing can't afford to be.

This is one of the things we obsess over at Aunty Social, as it happens — when our AI writes posts for a business, it learns to write the way that business's *customers* speak, not the way the industry does.

Your expertise isn't in question. The only question is whether your customers can see it. Drop the jargon, and they will.