Hello and welcome to a very special issue of TouchPoints! For our first four installments of 2025, I am going to collect some common themes that we saw multiple times in websites and ad copy in 2024.

These are broad strokes tips that are usually a good idea to employ. Of course, Nothing is one size fits all.

So for the month of January, our issues will be packed with lessons and examples learned from analyzing over 200 pieces of marketing collateral.

This week, we’re going to tackle a technique I saw across several companies’ ads and websites: Specificity and Vagueness.

Specificity Wins

We saw multiple examples of this dynamic in 2024. The main takeaway is this: Specificity is usually better than ambiguity.

Here’s the reason from behavioral psychology:

When you are specific about a capability or outcome, it is easier for prospect to imagine how your solution would benefit them. We saw a few examples of

Everything is Nothing

In Issue 33, we looked at Directus’s homepage, and I coined a phrase I have used a few times since. Claiming to be able to do everything does not paint a picture in your prospect’s mind.

The most positive way to interpret this would lead a prospect to overestimate what your tool is capable of. And it’s always better to be surprisingly more capable, not less.

In Directus’s case, we can find other backend tools that use more tangible examples to demonstrate how flexible they are.

We saw this same problem in issue 37, where we looked at Clickup’s homepage. I think this is a slightly less egregious usage of the “E” word, because Clickup is a significantly more broad tool than Directus.

Still, when I see a software tool claiming to do “everything” my first critical thought is “So it can make my coffee?”

As difficult as it may seem, we can find examples of similarly broad products that use more specific headlines.

Maybe the most severe example we saw was in issue 55 when we looked at Okta’s homepage.

Where Directus at least points at developing and building online experiences, and clickup points to “work” Okta just has a single word that signifies what they actually do: “Identity”.

This headline could be for an HR tool. It could be for a DEI initiative. Also, in favor of Directus and Clickup, at least the rest of the hero section gets more specific.

What makes Okta’s hero section even more problematic is the bottom of it:

“We’ve got your back, no matter your stack”.

This is one of the most vague pieces of copy I have ever looked at.

In addition to how vague it is, it is taking the place where one would expect and want social proof to be.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend our thanks to the following companies for providing examples and insights that made this edition of TouchPoints possible:

• Adfolio - For their awesome repository of B2B ads, with excellent commentary.

• Founderway.AI - An awesome resource that helped me better figure out how to run this newsletter, and forever friends of TouchPoints.

• Concise Copy - Pavlo is an absolute expert at homepage copy. Check out his value prop canvas for a super useful resource.

• Growth Therapy - Amanda is more B2C than me, but her insights about paid media and growth marketing are always welcome.

I sincerely appreciate these folks for providing great content and inspiration. It's great thinkers like these that allow me to deliver the best of modern SaaS marketing to you, our subscribers, every week in TouchPoints.