Your website primarily is to provide visitors with an accurate image of your company and what you offer. But is it for you or is it for the visitors?
Most companies will say that the website is for the visitor, but that isn’t what the message on it says.
Let me go off at a tangent for a moment. If you go to a business meeting and you meet someone you haven’t met before, it’s common for one of your first questions to be ‘what do you do?’
If the person you ask then talks about themselves and their company for several minutes and show little interest in you, what is your response?
Most people maintain a polite interest for a while, but then start to tune out.
How different it is if the person replies “We help businesses to grow, but before I tell you the boring details, what do you do? What kind of clients are you looking for introductions to?”
You feel they have a genuine interest in you and the narrative is more about you than them (and, of course, you will repay this courtesy as the conversation progresses).
When it’s your turn to answer the ‘what do you do?’ question you can answer in a number of ways:
“We make widgets for gizmos.”
“We help gizmo manufacturers to produce top quality products.”
“You know how gizmos need a number of components? Well, with our widgets gizmo makers get the components they need and they get them exactly when they need them with a just-in-time delivery system. It makes their life easier and they value our reliability, both for the product quality and the deliveries arriving on time.”
Which is more interesting for the person who asked the question?
Short is not always best – and certainly not always the most interesting response.
Inward v. outward
Marketing copy – on a website or any other publication – that is peppered with ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ is inwardly focused. It’s less interesting for the reader.
If the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ lead the message, people are likely to pay much more attention. The message is focused outwards – on your reader.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t say what you want to say, it just means you need to position it differently. So instead of:
We do business accounts
The words might be
You’ll get accurate, prompt figures to help you plan ahead to grow your business.
The difference is noticeable and you’re writing copy that people can relate to more strongly as it’s all about the benefits they’ll get.
Take a look at your website – does it need some attention?
