Here’s a question for you:
If someone read your website without knowing anything about you, would they get an accurate picture of what it’s like to work with you?
We don’t mean your services or products, qualifications or credentials, but what it’s like to work with you and your team. Your personality, your warmth or communication style?
For a lot of businesses (including many excellent ones!) the honest answer is often: probably not.
You know when you see it, the copy is fine – technically correct and professionally presented – but it’s lifeless. A law firm whose website reads like it was written by an HR department in 1987 or the incredibly warm, funny and thoughtful founder’s About page that could be literally anyone in their industry!
When there’s a disconnect between the energy on a clientcall versus the copy on the homepage, or the tone in the follow up email – it can cost you. Prospective clients might not be able to name it, but they can feel that gap and that can stop the connections landing or just giving that “off” vibe.
It doesn’t mean being casual or unprofessional on yourwebsite (let it be clear that we are not advising you to start writing in the style you message your friends or group chats!) but it does mean letting the personality – the human qualities that make you good at what you do and good to work with – through in every piece of communication.
If your team is warm, your copy should feel warm. If your approach is direct and no-nonsense, the website should be direct and no-nonsense. If you have a dry sense of humour that your clients love, keep a trace of that somewhere – just a line here or there, in a heading or the way you sign off an email.
Take your most recent newsletter, your About page or your last three social media posts for example, and read them out loud.
Do they sound like someone from your team actually wrote them, or do they sound like what you thought a business was supposed to say?
Could a competitor swap their name onto yours and it would still make sense? If yes – that’s a problem. Your marketing should be so distinctly yours that it couldn’t belong to anyone else.
Corporate
We are committed to delivering exceptional results through our client-centric approach and industry-leading expertise. Read a case study:
Human
We get properly invested in our clients' businesses. Ask anyone who's worked with us, they'll tell you we care about the results as much as they do:
Same message, but builds a completely different relationship to the reader!
It’s a fundamental truth about human behaviour and more so in an age of AI and digital-everything. We’re craving reality, authenticity – hey, even a little mess! When something sounds genuine, we lean in and when it’s written for the sake of sounding professional, that message doesn’t land – we don’t connect – and we scroll on by.
So before the next campaign, check in on your messaging. We can guarantee that your marketing will work harder when it sounds like you!
Finding your voice, and making sure it runs consistently through everything you publish, is exactly the kind of work we explore in a Discovery Session. It’s a free two-hour conversation about your business starting with who you actually are, and we build from there. Book yours today: instinctmarketingpr.com/discovery
