The campaign to inject more personality into websites

We’ve all visited them before – websites that trot out the same humdrum content, selling the same humdrum service, like all the other humdrum websites.

You can easily spot them – they’re the ones that begin every sentence with ‘We…”

• We have been supplying black, red and white widgets to the widget market for 35 years (who cares?).
• We have just bought the latest WhizzBang 1000 widgetmaker that will produce 100,000 widgets per second (yawn!).
• This will enable us to expand our capacity (so what?)

Then there’s the lengthy mission statement on the home page (well they did pay $500 to a consultant to write it, so it has to go somewhere):

• We aim to increase our profit 1000% so we can retire early and live in luxury on the proceeds

If only it did say that – at least it would inject some personality and wake up the tired website visitor!

When faced with selling what is essentially a commodity service, (where, thanks to the web, clients have access to much the same information as the consultants), consultancies need to dig deeper and examine what it is that makes their business different and difficult for a competitor to replicate. Often it comes down to the culture of the business. In a small business this is usually modeled around the personality of the owner/manager.

If you are a business where you like to have a bit of fun or you take an informal approach, then make sure your website reflects this. You’ll attract like-minded clients who will relate well to your working style, making the whole process more enjoyable and successful.

And don’t forget to introduce the people your prospects will be dealing with. There are far too many consultancy and service based sites where a potential client will leave the site with no clue as to who the people are they would be dealing with. How on earth can they make a decision to do business with them when one of the fundamental factors of human nature has been ignored – people buy from people not websites!

Posted on November 11th, 2009 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Marketing