By Brad Farris
My client handed me a print out of his new website home page – he was obviously very proud of it. “This is the best description of our company’s value proposition we have ever created,” he said. As I started reading it my heart sank. It was awful. I reached over and grabbed a red pen and started circling every time he had used the word “we.” Before I was done there were 22 red circles just on the home page! That’s a lot of we-we.
It’s hard to write about yourself or your company. How do you describe all of the awesome that you are, without coming across conceited or pompous? Actually, it’s easier than you think – don’t write about yourself at all. Write about your ideal prospect.
When a prospect visits your website, their first questions are, “What is this and how can it help me?” They aren’t asking you to give them all the ways you are awesome – they want to see that you know them and can help them.
If you can describe their problem they will assume you can fix it!
Your website copy shouldn’t be about you! Wipe all the we-we off of that page (along with the I’s, us, and our companies). Instead talk about the problems you solve, and who you solve them for. Tell a story about a client who had a big problem, talk about the things she tried to solve it, talk about how worried and scared she was. Describe her situation in rich detail. Then talk about what life was like for her after working with you – it wasn’t magic, there was hard work involved. It took commitment, time and money – but you got results.
You don’t have to talk about your years of experience, or your proprietary process, or your years of schooling. Just tell stories about ideal prospects who had difficult problems and the difference your services (or products) made. Maybe throw in a testimonial or two or, better yet, a video of one of those ideal clients telling their own story. That’s all you need.
The rest of the story…
But back to my client. I handed him back his web page, with all the we-we circled in red and his face flushed. He was mad. He had worked hard on this copy, and had the help of good copy writers, but he saw the problem in an instant. To much we-we.
The truth was, it wasn’t just his web page that was full of we-we – his company was, too. They were very proud of their degrees, and methodologies and processes – but they didn’t always have great results. Over the next 6-9 months we worked on that last part, making sure his results were fantastic and his clients knew that he was making a big difference for them. It was then that we finally launched the new website, told those stories, and watched his new leads grow and grow.
