“People don’t really understand what we do.”

It’s a surprisingly common problem.

The business has been operating successfully for years. It has customers, employees, products, services and plenty of expertise.

Everyone inside the company knows exactly what it does.

The problem is… nobody else seems to.

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at why businesses so often struggle to explain themselves clearly, and why the problem may go much deeper than the wording on the homepage.

Ask the Managing Director what the business does and you get one answer. Ask Sales and you get another. Visit the website and you’re greeted with something about delivering innovative solutions through customer-focused excellence.

Excellent.

But what do you actually do?

We look at how familiarity, technical knowledge and corporate language can make businesses unnecessarily difficult to understand, and why phrases such as innovative, leading, trusted, solutions and excellence often make companies sound remarkably similar to everyone else.

There’s a simple test.

Show your website to someone who doesn’t work for the company for five seconds, then ask:

• What does this company do?
• Who is it for?
• Why might someone choose it?

If they can’t answer the first question, you’ve got work to do.

We also explore why trying to say everything can result in customers understanding almost nothing, why businesses should talk about customer problems rather than simply listing capabilities, and why clear almost always beats clever.

But there’s a more uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps the marketing is confusing because the business itself isn’t entirely clear about what it is.

Companies grow. Services get added. New markets appear. Acquisitions happen. Someone asks whether you can do something slightly different and the answer is, naturally, “Yes, we can do that too.”

Ten years later, the company offers 23 things across 11 markets and nobody can quite explain what connects them.

At that point, you don’t have a copywriting problem.

You have a positioning problem.

And the marketing team can’t create clarity that the leadership team hasn’t created strategically.

So before rewriting the website, ask:

• What business are we actually in?
• Which customers matter most?
• What do we want to be known for?
• Where do we have a genuine advantage?

Because customers don’t owe you 20 minutes of concentration to decode your marketing.

Clarity is your responsibility.

Your customers aren’t stupid.

They’re just not as interested in your business as you are.

And expecting them to work hard to understand you is rarely a winning marketing strategy.

Clear beats clever. Almost every time.

Marketing, Properly! – practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want clearer positioning, better decisions and considerably less corporate nonsense. 


Produced in Scotland.