Read the Room! Writing Content for Your Right-Fit Client

A run-in with the HOA

My partner and I bought a house at the beginning of 2021 and only a couple months after moving in, we received a dreaded letter from the HOA. 😱 What had we done? We’d barely even lived there, let alone had much of a chance to transgress The Rules. (Also, considering the state the property was in when we closed, we’d done nothing but improve it since we’d gotten the keys! 😶)

The letter stated that we had a couple months to get our driveway resurfaced because it was (and this is a direct quote) “all chunked up.” We stood outside, staring at our driveway, trying to figure out what part of it could possibly be seen as “chunked.” It had some cracks here and there, sure, but it was all very much in one piece! We walked around the neighborhood and saw worse cases than ours, so my partner decided to write back and ask them to provide pictures because we just weren’t seeing what they were seeing. The response?

“Oops, wrong house. Never mind.” 😅 It’s a lesson in making sure the message you’re writing gets to the right audience!

Who is your website talking to?

Beyond just making sure that your message is getting to the right person, you also need to make sure that what you’re saying is written in a way that they can understand and that appeals to them. (I’d also suggest generally not using phrases like “all chunked up,” but that’s just me. 😉)

Knowing your ideal or right-fit clients is the first step to being able to create a website that does its job well.

Established businesses

If you’ve been in business for a while, you will likely have an easier time figuring out your target audience. Ask yourself who your favorite existing clients are and that will probably tell you all you need to know.

However, sometimes businesses don’t always grow the way you want them to, so if you look around at your clients and you say “I have a hard time picking favorites” because none of them really inspire you, then you might need to do a little dreaming. 💭 What kind of clients do you wish you had more of? When you envision the future of your business, do you see a certain kind of client? 

New businesses

If you’re just starting out, you’re probably going to need to use your imagination. If your business was born from trying to solve a problem for someone you know (or a group of people), then that’s likely your target audience, or at least the general idea. 

You may need to ask yourself, “Who am I hoping to attract?” Or perhaps you can imagine your business a few years down the line and picture the kinds of people you’ll be working with.

Common mistakes we see with audience mixup

“Read the room!” If you’ve ever heard someone say this, you likely just witnessed someone put their foot in their mouth and offend or annoy the people they were talking to. 🫢 We often see clients with websites that fail to “read the room” and end up underperforming because of it.

Main character syndrome

Businesses can sometimes get main character syndrome and spend a little too much time talking about themselves. 😶 And we get it: business owners are often proud of what they’ve done! The problem with this is that a story that is just about the business is not very compelling to clients. 

Sure, folks come to your website to learn about you, but they are motivated by what you can do for them. We talk about this in our blog about making your clients the main character of the story you are telling, but we’ll repeat it here: people get bored if they don’t know where they fit or what’s in it for them. Know who your audience is and then tell them how much better off they can be with you in the picture.

Writing to the competition

Without meaning to, a lot of folks will unwittingly end up talking to their competition instead of their ideal clients. This may sound farfetched, but it happens when folks forget that their clients aren’t experts in their field. They’ll use industry jargon that clients don’t understand at all, or they’ll write at length about things that people in the industry really care about… but that laymen aren’t even aware of. 🫣 All the while, clients may commonly have a question or concern that isn’t addressed anywhere on the website.

It’s important to figure out what your clients typically know and care about and what they don’t. Find out what language they are using to describe their pain points and experiences and then mirror that back to them. Don’t fall into the trap of writing like you would to someone else who does what you do. 

Saying what you think they want to hear (instead of what they actually want to hear)

We’ve worked with clients who are sure that they know their audience but when we look at the data, it tells a different story: they might think that most of their traffic comes from folks who use their computers to visit the site, but then the metrics tell us that 70% of traffic came from mobile devices. If you don’t take the time to analyze what you know about your clients and how they come to you, you’ll make the mistake of thinking you’re talking to someone else.

You might think that a certain phrase or idea is really compelling, but what are people searching for? What buttons do they click on or what offers do they sign up for? It can be frustrating when your clients don’t respond to what you think they should, but you have to learn to let it go and speak their language. 

Trying to speak to everybody means you’ll speak to nobody

Casting too wide a net pretty much guarantees that you won’t pack much of a punch, but we see clients fall into this trap all the time. Sometimes they have a really great angle that we think they should lean into, but they don’t want to because they’re worried it’ll scare somebody else off. If your message is working for your ideal audience, it’s okay if everyone else doesn’t get it. After all, it’s not for them!

If you’re playing it safe and trying to make your message palatable and relatable to everyone, you’ll never succeed. Instead, you need to figure out the best way to talk to your ideal client and then lean into it. The risk will be worth the rewards.

How to talk to your right-fit clients

There’s a lot of research—and often trial and error—to really figure out how to get your message to the right people, but these steps can go a long way.

Ask your real clients

If you aren’t getting testimonials after you work with a client, you’re missing out on some excellent marketing material, but you’re also passing on a chance to hear someone talk about your business in the terms that clients will naturally be searching with. Take time to revisit some of your favorite clients and ask them about the things that they were looking for when they found you. 🔎

If what they’re saying doesn’t match the way experts talk about things in your industry, that’s okay. You don’t have to throw all the jargon out the window or start saying something that isn’t technically correct. Instead, try to use a mixture of insider language and the language that your clients are using.

Talk to a stranger

If you’re just starting out, you may not have past clients to lean on, but any layman who might potentially be in the market for your services or product can serve the same function. Find someone who fits the general demographic that you think you’re marketing to and ask them to have a conversation. If they express confusion when you explain what you do, make a note of what was confusing for them and find a better way to explain it. Or you can ask if they’ve ever worked with someone like you before and ask them to tell you about their experience.

You might not be aware of how much of your day-to-day is jargon and won’t translate to your ideal audience, so it’s good to find out. If you’re hanging out with friends or extended family, ask people if they know what you do. If they say yes, tell them to explain it to you. You might be surprised at who doesn’t actually have a clue beyond the things you’ve told them. 😂 If they do know but use different phrasing than you would, collect some of those phrases because that might be indicative of how people outside your field talk about it.

Hire an expert!

If you’re really looking to investigate your ideal clientele, a marketing guru will be able to do extensive research into demographics and keywords that can help you zero in on your target audience. But if you’d just like to do a better job of reading the room, a copywriter or web design firm can offer an outsider’s eye to your content while bringing more consideration for best practices into your website project. 

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While we’re not experts in every niche that our clients occupy, we can often help identify when they’re talking over their audience’s head (because they’re talking over ours 😅). If you’d like to build a website that talks to your ideal client in a way that will compel them to engage with you, we’d love to make that happen! Check out our website options and let’s get that message to the right people!