Too often people in marketing roles write to "sell" instead of writing to match the intended readers buying process. In some circles this form of writing is technically referred to as "crap."
So how do you know what your customer is thinking? Google offers two valuable tools that offer insight into the very phrases that they are typing into the search engine.
Google Trends - you can type in words or phrases here and find out their popularity(or lack thereof) over time. If someone tells you that some topic is "hot" you can prove them right or wrong with this tool.
Google Adwords keyword tool - you can get trends with Google Trends but this tool give you hard numbers on the amount of times a term is searched on in Google. This also pulls up alternatives to the phrases you type in so you get a better sense of how real people are referring to things. Its an eye opening looking into real world data and can be used to settle many arguments over how some marketing people think the world works vs how it really works.