Here’s the unfortunate truth: no one cares about your business as much as you do. So how can we create and write your website in a way that gets people to give a shit?
It all comes down to two core components: messaging and conversion.
Is messaging the same as tone of voice?
No. But messaging should inform your tone of voice.
Before you can embark on the branding journey, it’s important to understand what you do, who you do it for, and why you give a shit. Because if you don’t give a shit, your audience certainly won’t feel cared for.
Let’s look at some quick definitions before we get into it.
What is messaging?
Think of messaging as the what and why of your brand. It’s informed by what you do (services, products, audience, etc.) and focused on why you do it.
This is why you’ll often hear talk of “brand values” and “mission statements”. These are effectively the corporatisation of the overall message of a brand.
Your messaging will be informed by a lot of different factors, but some things to initially think about include:
- What problems you want to solve for your customers
- Which frustrations/struggles your customers are facing
- The level of empathy you have or approach to empathy you wish to take
- What you dislike about the industry you’re in
- Whether you want to position yourself against those problems or focus solely on the brighter side (it’s a sliding scale)
- What makes you different from your competitors (actual tangible differences. None of that “award winning” or “best in class” bullshit)
Messaging is all about other people. How you fit into the wider machine and how your product/service fits into your customers’ daily lives.
What is tone of voice?
If messaging is the what and why, tone of voice is the how. Tone of voice is the gobby child of your brand. If a brand were a person, their tone of voice is how they talk. Their word choices, world views, undertones, and subtext.
This is why so many tone of voice exercises ask you to think of your brand as a person. Your job is to build up an identity through your words. Informed by the what and why that has been developed in your messaging.
Messaging plays a major role in the success of any website
Your messaging gives your audience a reason to give a flying fuck about what you do. Almost every market these days is absolutely saturated, so it’s important to stand out.
Messaging development is an essential part of every website project I work on. Whether it’s a freelancer’s first website, an SMB’s total overhaul, or someone on my Write Your Own Fucking Content program, I dedicate a lot of time to helping both myself and my clients understand why they do what they do.
For some, it’s a wish to challenge the norms of the industry they’re in. For others, it’s a wish to improve people’s lives without sacrificing the planet.
In order to develop the messaging for your website and beyond, you need to dig deep into why you do what you do, why you love it, and what you want to see done differently.
A quick look at my own messaging and tone of voice to give you an example
The core of my messaging is pretty simple:
- No bullshit, no jargon
- Good people deserve to feel proud of the work that they do
- The internet should be an accessible and inclusive space
- Usability always comes first
The core of my tone of voice boils down to:
- Bold, brash, and sweary
- Caring and empathetic
- Says is exactly as it is
My messaging is what I believe and why I do what I do. It also hugely informs how I run my business and work with my clients. My tone of voice is how I communicate that.
Now we’ve got the general vibe covered, let’s look at conversion.
Conversion optimisation through website copy and design
This is a big topic, so I just wanna run you through the basics.
Conversion optimisation is a process of making it both as easy as possible and as appealing as possible for people to “convert” on your website. This could be the purchase of a product, an enquiry about your wedding venue, or booking a call with your sales team. Conversion will look different for every business.
The 3 key things that impact conversion on your website are:
- Clarity of design
- Readability of text
- Ease of navigation
Of course, you also need to have a good product/service. And clear, strong messaging. But from a more technical, moving parts point of view, these three have you covered.
These are also the most common mistakes I see in website projects when they’ve been handled in-house in the past. No judgement from me. These are nuanced topics that you have no reason to understand if you haven’t worked in websites before.
Here’s a quick rundown of the sorts of considerations made for each of them.
Clarity of design
- Consistent colour choices
- Consistent heading formatting, size, and colour
- Plenty of use of white space (to make text easy to read)
- Easy to read fonts (min. 16)
- Frequent (but not spammy) inclusion of buttons, calls to action, forms, etc.
Readability of text
- Simple language without jargon
- Short paragraphs
- Splitting chunks of text into multiple sections
- Easily scannable for key information
- Good use of formatting throughout
- Not letting keywords define your copy
Ease of navigation
- Clear, logical sitemap
- Always present main navigation (burger menu on mobile)
- All key pages visible from the navigation menu
- Considered user journey throughout the site
- Contact (or key conversion page) highlighted clearly in your menu
It’s all about building trust
Messaging and conversion both contribute to helping people feel comfortable enough to trust you. Service-based businesses especially require a lot of trust to make the sale. These are big investments we’re talking about, not impulse purchases.
Here’s the crux of it: you have a few seconds to show people what you do and who you do it for. You then have a few minutes to convince them you’re the person/business for the job. By focusing on your messaging and conversion, you have a much higher chance of keeping people’s attention once you’ve captured it in the first place.
It’s a tall order. One that requires an immense amount of nuance. And the reason many people underestimate how long it takes to write website copy.
SEO is important to get more people onto your site, yes. But focusing on messaging and conversion will keep them there. And keep them coming back until they’re ready to commit to the investment.
If you want a hand with your messaging, conversion, or just need a fresh fucking start with your website, lets have a chat over a coffee and see what we can build together.
