#general

I'm writing LinkedIn posts for a legacy brand. They've asked me to write their home page, as they like my style.

Myself and Marketing have agreed a voice (there isn't really a tone of voice, that's another story).

Yesterday, I gave Marketing three options of H1/Sub/H2/Sub, all based on insight, my knowledge of the market, customer pains etc.

We send it to Product Marketing and they've sent a general "this is jargon". My copy is not jargon! I talk about some of the product features, and benefits, but, say, "Where [our USP] meets efficiency." How is that jargon? (I'm not saying it's a perfect line)

For example, this is 'good' copy for the sub-head on a major product page, from their perspective: "Support the capacity of your managers to understand the dynamics of their team and promote healthy cooperation."

That's not a terrible sentence, but it's not your major sub after an H1.

People often book me to radically reduce jargon and padding, but that can be uncomfortable.

How do I navigate this? I don't have prior experience with corporate structures (my clients are usually SMEs and startups/scaleups)

These people are informing, not deciding. How do I avoid death be committee?

Non-invested stakeholder review always seems like a benign throw-in, but it's really a subtly bad incentive. Your stakeholder is, presumably, the one on the hook for the homepage rewrite. Product marketing, well, isn't. So your stakeholder de-risks the situation by asking product marketing for a review, and people asked to review something will almost invariably weigh in with critical feedback, lest they seem uninformed. The homepage not being updated isn't product marketing's problem, so providing vague, non-actionable critical feedback is no problem at all for them. The way to combat this, IME, is to make product marketing's feedback your contact's problem (i.e. it's what's holding up the goal).

The solution, I'd say, is to categorize the feedback.

In other words, feedback can be specifically objective and actionable or it can be subjective. If it's objective/actionable, it can be operationalized and you can make progress. For instance, "we consider words X, Y, Z to be jargon and don't want them in the copy." Easy enough, both to implement and to work into a standing style guide.

"This is jargon" can only be operationalized by continuously submitting things to that person and hoping that after a while they stop deeming what you submit "jargon."

And that's an awful process.

So, tl;dr, I'd tell your stakeholder that the project can only move forward if the people they're soliciting feedback from provide actionable feedback, rather than playing Siskel & Ebert