When I talk to people who want help with their organization’s messaging, one of two goals almost always comes up right away:
- “We really want to drive more customers to the site.”
- “We need this to resonate with people.”
They’re variations of one sentiment: we want more people to interact meaningfully with us. I’ve learned as a consulting partner at Will Digital and as an in-house product design writer that these phrasings point people the wrong way. If your primary goal is to get more people to interact meaningfully with you and your work, you’re best off reminding yourself of that goal, in that sort of wording, all the time. Forget about traffic or click-through rates, and focus on making a thing that a reasonable, busy, discerning person can easily interact with.
That’s the fundamental principle of people-first content: craft language that answers questions and solves people’s problems. Putting this principle into practice across their digital presences helps small businesses and new ventures grow much more quickly than they would by focusing primarily on short-term optimizations, particularly in SEO and digital advertising. By writing for people, rather than the whims of a particular search algorithm or social media demographic, you can win loyal and valuable customers.
A lot of this post is going to seem really, really simple… and it is. Time and time again, though, I see sharp, hard-working people gloss over it in favor of chasing metrics that don’t advance their missions.
Here are three ways to better design your content for people. You can do these things on your own in your organization or, if you’re interested in investing more heavily, ask about these areas when you consult potential agency or freelance partners.
1. Think like a person, write for a person
There are thousands of articles floating around the internet about ways to hack your marketing efforts and achieve 1000x site visits. Many of them are snake oil, of course, but even a lot of the legitimate ones distract from the real goal: earnestly appealing to a real person’s needs and desires, and repeating the process over and over again with more and more customers. As Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm discussed last month in Street Fight:
The reality is that it’s hard (and/or expensive) to just open the floodgates and have customers start pouring in. All businesses are going to start with a relative trickle of customers, and they need to focus first on converting the customers who already know them before spending gobs of money on ads or link building or even anything beyond factual content.
Sure, you need people seeing your offering at the top of the funnel to make the whole journey work. But you also have to make your firm’s voice attractive to real customers from first interaction all the way through to a purchase, contact, or in-person visit. Your firm’s online presence has to sound like it was written by and for people, and it has to meet folks where they are at every step. Hemingway quipped (/preached?) that “the essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” That applies to applied writing for the web, too. Good customers will smell baloney, so good organizations need to avoid writing vague or misleading language.
One way to ingrain this people-first approach into your content is to lean into the concrete value that you offer. Why should a person who has to work a full-time job, pick the kids up from school, get them fed and doing their homework, and finally relax a bit in the evening give your team the time of day?
Silicon Valley is, on the whole, terrible at speaking clearly about why a product is worth your time and money. Here’s the primary value proposition of Snap, Inc., the company that brings you Snapchat:
Snap Inc. is a camera company.
We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.
We contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.
K sure. (I try to avoid negative examples, and do so categorically for small businesses. That said, the publicly traded, $20 billion Snapchat umbrella corporation deserves a bit of critique. And yes, Snap’s website seems to exist exclusively for investors and prospective employees… but still.)
On the other end of the spectrum, here’s language from the website of a local San Francisco business that I admire, 3 Fish Studios:
Eric Rewitzer and Annie Galvin are printmakers and painters, husband and wife, and founders of 3 Fish Studios. The Outer Sunset hub is home to their workshop and studio, where art happens daily and visitors are always welcome; they love collaborating, making, and sharing creative ideas with cool folks.
On their Google My Business listing, they also offer this useful one-line description:
Local art gallery and print shop featuring California themed artwork.
Within 30 seconds, I’ve learned that 3 Fish:
- Is a print shop featuring local artists
- Is run by a family
- Offers art that highlights California
- Empowers a variety of artists and neighbors
They’ve written content that’s down-to-earth and clearly tells you exactly what they do. Through the entire process of discovering and ordering art from 3 Fish, they speak to what they’re offering with simple language. They’re designing content for actual people.
Across platforms, from search engine results through every page of your website, make sure that you’re:
- Writing in a colloquial and conversational way
- Clearly and simply articulating what you offer
- Concerned exclusively with real people’s problems, not hype-y Marketing Speak
You can check your content against some of those criteria with intuition and common sense. For the trickier cases, we have testing—that’s up next.
2. Make sure it makes sense
The abundance of quantified “proof” of success is a beauty and delusion of the Information Age. Nearly anything can come paired with stats that claim to prove success or failure: any modern ad product will give you reporting on how many people saw or interacted with your campaigns, and any wrist can be supplemented to shame you into walking more tomorrow. A lot of these measurements are great.
That said, we aren’t so far along that we know how to measure a lot of what matters. If you’re running a restaurant in the suburbs or a bootstrapped startup in Chicago, you aren’t going to be able to measure whether or not your online presence meets people’s curiosity by studying analytics reports. You might be able to track site traffic or reservations made online or newsletter subscriptions, and those are all useful things to know… but they’re way downstream, and lagging indicators of how well you’ve intrigued people about your firm. To figure out whether a customer’s journey from a Google search for “brattleboro pizzeria” to your site to an eventual trip to your pizzeria is best suited to your prospective customers, you’re going to have to test it with actual people.
Startups and cash-comfortable businesses can set up quick and effective studies on platforms like UserTesting to get honest feedback on how people read and move through your site. For $200 or so, you can get a strong sense of what’s going on with your website or app; you’ll get multiple users giving subjective feedback on what makes sense, what doesn’t, and where they get stuck or turned off. If you integrate GatherUp into your site, you’ll get an ongoing sense of what real customers like and don’t like about your business for much, much less than you would likely spend on Facebook ads. (GatherUp is a past client of Will Digital, and I consider multiple members of their team friends. That said, the product is great and it’s priced to help businesses on a budget.)
If you work for an organization with no budget to spare for testing, just ask your friends to look over customer journeys. Ask someone to search for your business or your line of work on Google, and have them talk through their thoughts as they progress through your presence online. Ask open-ended questions like “What does that sentence make you think?” or “What kind of person do you think this page appeals to?” You’ll get some anomalous reactions that aren’t worth investigating further, but you’ll also find counterintuitive trends that can help you change your “We’re changing the face of Nutmeg State cuisine” tagline to “We serve modern editions of New England comfort food.”
These quick-and-dirty user testing sessions are windows into what many more people will experience when they find your organization online. Take the feedback seriously, and see where folks give up trying to figure out what you’re selling. Each screen or message you improve will win you more business.
3. Build for days to come
Here’s the bittersweet caveat: emphasizing people-first content design probably won’t multiply your customer base overnight, and it might take a long time to be sure that you’re doing the right thing for your bottom line. What I’ve suggested here isn’t costly, but it does take some time, energy, and maybe uncomfortable introspection about the way your team has spent on marketing, advertising, and SEO in the past. Re-writing your site and listings on social platforms will take longer than pumping extra money into a Google Ads campaign.
You will, however, gradually attract the kinds of people whose trust you actually want: discriminating folks who want a reliable offering and get turned off by gimmicky value propositions. Their lifetime value to you will be higher, they’ll feel good about doing business with you, and your word-of-mouth engine will grow. It might be difficult to measure this effect comprehensively, given that your customers won’t always recognize that they became and stayed loyal to you because of the way you communicated online. But you’ll build a stronger organization by building a more robust, people-first digital presence.
This is my best piece of advice for writing for the web. Until you’ve created a consistent, accurate, and clear explanation of what you do and how you do it, you can save your money on optimizations and ads. Get your story down, articulate which problems you solve, and write for real people.
