How to Build a Brand Voice That Customers Trust: A CMO's Guide

Technology companies must build a brand voice that customers trust. There's so much competition on the market that it's absolutely essential. We've put together this guide for technology company founders and CMOs to help you build brand voice and tone, and help your content marketing efforts sparkle with consistency and authenticity.

Summary: How to Build a Brand Voice That Customers Trust

Key Foundations

Brand voice represents your distinct personality and perspective across all communications, determining whether customers see you as approachable, reliable, and authentic
Trust develops through consistent communication across every touchpoint, not from single clever messages
A strong brand voice differentiates you from competitors and transforms one-time buyers into loyal advocates

Understanding Your Audience

Identify both demographics (age, location, profession) and psychographics (motivations, pain points, solutions they seek)
Align your voice with customer expectations for your industry and brand positioning
Use research methods like surveys, competitor analysis, customer service transcripts, and sales team interviews to guide language choices

Defining Brand Identity

Clarify your mission beyond sales: what problem you solve and what change you create
Establish values that guide difficult choices and infuse your voice with substance
Define brand personality as human characteristics and determine target emotions for customer interactions
Align voice with competitive positioning (expert, disruptor, premium choice, accessible option)

Crafting Your Voice

Select three to five core voice attributes (friendly, authoritative, witty, empathetic, bold, conversational)
Create a voice chart with concrete examples showing what each attribute sounds like and what it does not
Prioritize authenticity over imitation of other brands or adoption of trendy language
Test voice attributes in real scenarios and refine until natural and distinctive

Brand Voice in Content Marketing

Distinctive voice transforms content from forgettable to memorable in crowded feeds
Consistent voice improves search rankings by increasing engagement metrics
Voice differentiates your content when hundreds of competitors cover similar topics
Clear voice ensures consistency across formats (articles, videos, podcasts, social media)

Building Consistency

Map every customer touchpoint: website, social media, email, customer service, packaging, sales, advertising
Train all teams in voice attributes and provide templates that demonstrate proper application
Adapt voice appropriately for different platforms while maintaining core personality
Develop comprehensive style guides and appoint a brand voice steward as you scale

Using Storytelling

Share origin stories and behind-the-scenes content that reveals brand motivations and operations
Highlight authentic customer experiences with specific details rather than polished marketing copy
Demonstrate appropriate vulnerability by sharing mistakes, lessons learned, and challenges faced
Apply voice consistently to storytelling: conversational voices use sensory details, authoritative voices use data

Prioritizing Clarity and Honesty

Eliminate jargon and industry buzzwords that create friction and distance
Avoid exaggeration; use specific, accurate descriptions instead of grandiose claims
Communicate policies, pricing, and product details transparently with limitations stated upfront
Address mistakes openly with quick acknowledgment, responsibility, and concrete solutions
Admit what you do not know rather than overpromising

Adapting While Staying Consistent

Understand that tone (emotional inflection) adjusts for situations while voice (personality) remains constant
Adjust emphasis across platforms (more professional on LinkedIn, more casual on Instagram) without changing core personality
Navigate cultural moments thoughtfully; participate only when authentic and aligned with values
Allow voice to evolve naturally as audience or brand matures, keeping core traits stable

Testing and Refining

Gather qualitative feedback through surveys, social listening, and team conversations
Track performance metrics like email open rates, social engagement, and conversion rates
Run A/B tests on voice approaches to gather concrete effectiveness data
Review customer service interactions to identify where guidelines help or need improvement
Conduct annual comprehensive voice audits and quarterly check-ins for adjustments

Taking Action

View brand voice as a long-term strategic asset that appreciates over time
Document your voice by defining distinctive attributes and creating actionable examples
Share guidelines with everyone who communicates on your behalf
Commit to ongoing listening, testing, and refining based on customer response

Building a Brand: It's More Than Visuals

Every day, customers encounter thousands of brand messages across websites, social media feeds, email inboxes, and storefronts. In this saturated landscape, the brands that break through are not necessarily the loudest or the flashiest. They are the ones that speak with a clear, consistent voice that customers recognize and trust.

Brand voice shapes how customers perceive your business. It determines whether they see you as approachable or distant, reliable or unpredictable, authentic or manufactured. When executed well, a strong brand voice becomes a strategic asset that builds loyalty, differentiates you from competitors, and transforms one-time buyers into long-term advocates.

The Connection Between Trust and Consistency

Trust does not emerge from a single clever tagline or a perfectly crafted mission statement. It develops through consistent communication across every customer interaction. When your brand sounds the same whether a customer reads your website, scrolls your Instagram feed, or opens a support email, they begin to feel they know you. That familiarity breeds confidence, and confidence drives purchasing decisions.

At its core, brand voice represents the distinct personality and perspective your brand brings to every piece of communication. It encompasses the words you choose, the tone you adopt, and the values you express. While visual identity tells customers what your brand looks like, voice tells them who you are.

Understand Your Audience

Building a trustworthy brand voice starts with understanding the people you want to reach. You cannot speak authentically to everyone, so clarity about your specific audience becomes essential.

Identify Demographics and Psychographics

Begin by identifying the demographics that define your core customers: their age ranges, locations, professions, and income levels. But demographics alone tell an incomplete story. Dig deeper into psychographics to understand what motivates these individuals, what challenges keep them up at night, and what solutions they actively seek. A software company targeting small business owners needs to understand not just that these customers run companies with fewer than fifty employees, but that they often feel overwhelmed by technology, protective of their limited budgets, and hungry for tools that actually save them time rather than creating new complications.

Align Voice With Customer Expectations

Customer expectations shape how your audience wants to be addressed. A financial advisor's clients expect gravitas and expertise. A craft brewery's fans anticipate personality and irreverence. Misjudging these expectations creates immediate friction. When a luxury skincare brand adopts the casual tone of a budget retailer, established customers feel the dissonance, and trust begins to erode.

Use Research to Guide Language Choices

Research provides the foundation for informed voice decisions. Conduct surveys asking customers to describe your brand using personality traits. Analyze which competitors they follow and what language resonates in those spaces. Review customer service transcripts to identify the words and phrases customers use when they talk about their needs. Interview sales teams who speak with prospects daily. These insights reveal the language that will feel natural and credible to your audience rather than forced or performative.

Define Your Brand's Core Identity

Before you can articulate how your brand sounds, you must understand what your brand stands for. Voice emerges from identity, not the other way around.

Clarify Your Mission and Values

Start by clarifying your mission beyond simply making sales or growing market share. What problem does your brand exist to solve? What change do you want to create in your customers' lives or in the broader world? A meal kit delivery service might exist to make home cooking accessible to busy families. A sustainable fashion brand might exist to prove that style and environmental responsibility can coexist. These mission statements become touchstones that guide voice decisions.

Your values reveal what matters to your organization when faced with difficult choices. Does your brand prioritize innovation over tradition? Transparency over polish? Inclusivity over exclusivity? Values infuse voice with substance. A brand that values transparency will speak plainly about pricing, acknowledge shortcomings, and share decision-making rationale. A brand that values craftsmanship will use precise language, highlight details, and express pride in workmanship.

Define Your Brand Personality

Brand personality describes the human characteristics you would embody if your company were a person. Consider whether your brand would be the wise mentor, the adventurous friend, the meticulous expert, or the compassionate listener at a dinner party. This personality directly influences voice attributes. An adventurous brand uses dynamic verbs and celebrates risk-taking. A compassionate brand employs gentle language and validates feelings.

Determine Target Emotions and Positioning

The emotional experience you want customers to have during and after interactions provides another anchor point. Should customers feel empowered, comforted, excited, informed, or inspired? These target emotions guide tone choices. A brand selling home security systems wants customers to feel protected and confident, which suggests a reassuring, authoritative voice rather than an anxious or alarmist one.

Finally, consider your brand positioning in the competitive landscape. Position yourself as the:

Accessible expert, and your voice will explain complex topics in simple terms.
Premium choice, and your voice will emphasize quality, exclusivity, and refined taste.
The disruptor and your voice will challenge conventional thinking and celebrate new approaches.

Craft Your Brand Voice

With audience insights and brand identity established, you can now define the specific characteristics that make your voice distinctive.

Select Core Voice Attributes

Select three to five core voice attributes that capture your brand's personality. These attributes function as guardrails, keeping communication consistent even as different team members write different content. Examples include friendly, authoritative, witty, empathetic, bold, conversational, educational, optimistic, irreverent, or professional. Choose attributes that differentiate you from competitors while remaining authentic to your brand identity. If every brand in your category claims to be friendly and approachable, consider whether attributes like precise, thoughtful, or candid might serve you better.

Create a Voice Chart With Examples

Transform these attributes from abstract concepts into practical guidelines by creating a voice chart. For each attribute, provide concrete examples of what this sounds like in practice and what it does not sound like. If one of your attributes is empathetic, show the difference between "We understand this process can feel overwhelming" (empathetic) and "This is a simple process" (dismissive). If another attribute is witty, demonstrate the line between clever wordplay that enhances understanding and forced humor that distracts from the message.

Ensure Authenticity Over Imitation

Authenticity separates memorable brand voices from forgettable ones. Resist the temptation to imitate brands you admire or to adopt trendy language that feels disconnected from your actual culture and values. Customers detect inauthenticity quickly, and once trust breaks, rebuilding it becomes exponentially harder. If your company culture values straightforward communication and problem-solving, a voice dripping with exclamation points and playful slang will ring false. If your team genuinely celebrates quirkiness and creative thinking, a buttoned-up, corporate voice will hide what makes you special.

Test your voice attributes by applying them to real scenarios. Write three versions of the same customer service response, each emphasizing a different attribute. Share product descriptions with team members and ask whether they accurately reflect the brand personality. Revise until the voice feels natural, distinctive, and aligned with both audience expectations and brand identity.

Why Brand Voice Matters in Content Marketing

Content marketing has become the primary way brands build relationships with potential customers before any purchase occurs. Blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media content, and email newsletters all compete for attention in overcrowded feeds and inboxes. In this environment, a distinctive brand voice transforms content from forgettable to memorable.

Voice Drives Content Discoverability

Search engines reward content that keeps readers engaged. When your brand voice makes content more readable, more shareable, and more likely to generate comments and return visits, you improve content performance metrics that influence rankings. A consistent voice also helps you build topical authority as customers begin to recognize and seek out your perspective on industry topics.

Voice Creates Content Differentiation

Hundreds of brands in your space likely publish content about similar topics. Voice determines whether customers read your article about industry trends or your competitor's. When you approach familiar topics with a distinctive voice, you give readers a reason to choose your content even when the basic information appears elsewhere.

Voice Builds Audience Connection Through Content

Content marketing succeeds when it moves readers from casual visitors to engaged subscribers to loyal customers. This progression requires trust, and trust develops through consistent voice across every piece of content. When readers recognize your voice immediately, whether they find you through search, social media, or email, they begin to form a relationship with your brand that extends beyond any single transaction.

Voice Improves Content Consistency Across Formats

Most content strategies span multiple formats: written articles, video scripts, podcast episodes, infographics, and social media posts. A clearly defined brand voice ensures all these formats feel cohesive. Your video content sounds like your written content, which sounds like your social media presence. This consistency compounds your content's impact rather than fragmenting it.

Build Consistency Across All Touchpoints

A brand voice only builds trust when customers encounter it everywhere they interact with your brand. Inconsistency creates confusion and suspicion.

Map Every Customer Touchpoint

Map every touchpoint where customers encounter your brand: website homepage and product pages, social media posts and comments, email newsletters and transactional messages, customer service responses, packaging and product inserts, sales presentations, and advertising campaigns. Each touchpoint represents an opportunity to reinforce your voice or undermine it.

Train Teams in Voice Application

Website copy typically receives the most attention during voice development, but customer service interactions often carry more weight in trust-building. A customer who reads warm, conversational website copy but receives cold, robotic email responses will question which voice represents the real brand. Train customer service teams not just in policies and procedures but in voice attributes and examples. Provide response templates that demonstrate the brand voice while allowing for personalization.

Adapt Voice for Different Platforms

Social media presents unique challenges because it demands responsiveness and timeliness. Create guidelines that specify how your voice adapts to different platforms while maintaining core attributes. Your brand might adopt a slightly more casual tone on Instagram than on LinkedIn, but the underlying personality remains consistent. Document how your voice handles common scenarios: How do you celebrate customer wins? How do you respond to negative feedback? How do you participate in trending conversations?

Scale Consistency as You Grow

As your brand grows and more people create content, consistency becomes harder to maintain. Develop style guides and templates that new team members can reference. Include not just grammar and formatting preferences but voice-specific guidance about word choice, sentence structure, and tone. Update these resources regularly as your voice evolves.

Consider appointing a brand voice steward who reviews major communications and helps teams apply voice guidelines to new contexts. This role prevents voice dilution as multiple departments create customer-facing content.

Use Storytelling to Strengthen Trust

Stories bypass skepticism and create emotional connections that abstract claims cannot achieve. When you tell stories that reflect your brand values, customers see evidence of who you are rather than just hearing you assert it.

Share Origin and Behind-the-Scenes Stories

Share origin stories that reveal why your brand exists and what drives your team. A sustainable clothing brand might tell the story of the founder discovering the environmental impact of fast fashion while working in textile manufacturing. These stories humanize your brand and give customers insight into the motivations behind your decisions.

Behind-the-scenes stories demystify your operations and demonstrate transparency. Show customers how products are made, introduce team members who answer their questions, or explain the research process behind a new feature. These glimpses behind the curtain signal that you have nothing to hide.

Highlight Customer Experiences

Customer stories demonstrate real impact and build credibility. Instead of claiming your product changes lives, show how it changed one customer's life through specific details and authentic language. Feature testimonials that sound like real people speaking rather than polished marketing copy. Include stories of customers who faced challenges or had doubts, making success stories more relatable and believable.

Demonstrate Appropriate Vulnerability

Vulnerability strengthens trust when used judiciously. Share stories about mistakes you made and lessons you learned. Explain challenges you faced launching a new product line or expanding into a new market. This openness demonstrates honesty and creates space for authentic connection. Customers trust brands that acknowledge imperfection more than brands that project flawless execution.

Stories require careful attention to voice. The way you tell a story matters as much as the story itself. A brand with a warm, conversational voice will share customer stories using vivid sensory details and emotional language. A brand with an authoritative, educational voice will frame the same stories through data points and measurable outcomes.

Prioritize Clarity and Honesty

Trust crumbles when customers feel confused, misled, or deceived. Clear, honest communication forms the foundation of a trustworthy brand voice.

Eliminate Jargon and Exaggeration

Eliminate jargon that customers do not understand or industry buzzwords that sound impressive but mean nothing. Every time you force customers to decode your language, you create friction and distance. Write as if you are explaining your product or service to a friend who knows nothing about your industry. If technical terms become necessary, define them simply.

Resist exaggeration and hyperbole. Words like revolutionary, game-changing, and unprecedented have been overused to the point of meaninglessness. Specific, accurate descriptions build more credibility than grandiose claims. Instead of calling your customer service exceptional, explain that your team responds to inquiries within two hours during business days.

Communicate Transparently About Policies and Products

Communicate policies, pricing, and product details with complete transparency. Hidden fees, unclear return policies, and vague product descriptions erode trust faster than almost anything else. State limitations and requirements upfront rather than burying them in fine print. When customers discover restrictions they did not expect, they feel manipulated regardless of your intentions.

Address Mistakes Openly

Address mistakes openly and explain your plan to fix them. Every brand makes errors occasionally. Customers forgive mistakes when brands acknowledge them quickly, take responsibility, and outline concrete steps to prevent recurrence. A shipping delay becomes a trust-building opportunity when you notify customers immediately, explain what went wrong, and offer a genuine solution rather than empty apologies.

Admit What You Don't Know

Honesty extends to admitting what you do not know or cannot do. If a customer asks whether your product will solve a problem outside its intended use case, saying "I'm not sure, but let me find out" builds more trust than overpromising and underdelivering. Recommending a competitor's product when it truly fits the customer's needs better demonstrates integrity that customers remember.

Adapt Without Losing Your Core Voice

Situations change and platforms differ, but your fundamental brand personality should remain recognizable across contexts. The skill lies in adjusting tone while preserving voice.

Understand the Difference Between Voice and Tone

Tone represents the emotional inflection you apply to your voice in specific situations. Your voice might be warm and encouraging, but the tone you use when announcing a product recall will be more serious than the tone you use when celebrating a company milestone. A crisis demands empathy, clarity, and calm. A celebration allows for enthusiasm and joy. These tonal shifts feel natural as long as the underlying voice attributes remain consistent.

Adjust for Platform Differences

Platform differences require thoughtful adaptation. LinkedIn audiences expect more professional, business-focused content than Instagram audiences. Your voice remains the same, but you emphasize different attributes. A playful brand might lead with wit on Twitter but emphasize expertise on LinkedIn while maintaining the same personality.

Navigate Cultural Moments Thoughtfully

Cultural moments and social conversations demand sensitivity. When significant news breaks or cultural conversations unfold, evaluate whether your brand should participate and how. Forced attempts to capitalize on trends damage trust. Authentic participation that aligns with your values and serves your audience strengthens it.

Evolve Your Voice as Your Brand Matures

As your audience matures or your brand evolves, your voice may need gradual refinement. A startup addressing early adopters might use more technical language and insider references than that same company speaking to mainstream customers five years later. These shifts should feel like natural evolution rather than abrupt reinvention. Core personality traits remain stable while expression matures.

Document guidelines for tonal adaptation so team members understand how to adjust for context without losing the brand voice. Provide examples showing how the same message might be delivered in a crisis versus a celebration, on LinkedIn versus Instagram, to loyal customers versus new prospects.

Test, Measure, and Refine

Building a trustworthy brand voice requires ongoing attention and iteration. What resonates with customers today may need adjustment tomorrow.

Gather Qualitative Feedback

Gather qualitative feedback through customer surveys, social media listening, and conversations with sales and support teams. Ask customers to describe your brand using personality traits and compare their descriptions to your intended voice attributes. Gaps between perception and intention signal areas for refinement.

Track Performance Metrics

Monitor how customers respond to different voice approaches. Track which email subject lines generate opens, which social media posts drive engagement, which website copy converts visitors to customers. Patterns emerge that reveal what language and tone resonate most strongly with your audience.

Run Voice Experiments

Test different voice applications through A/B testing. Send two versions of the same email with different voice approaches to segments of your audience and measure response rates. Try alternative versions of product descriptions and track conversion differences. These experiments provide concrete data about voice effectiveness.

Review Customer Service Interactions

Review customer service interactions regularly to identify where voice guidelines serve teams well and where additional guidance would help. If multiple team members struggle to apply voice attributes in specific scenarios, create examples addressing those situations.

Conduct Regular Voice Audits

Conduct periodic voice audits examining content across all touchpoints. Sample website pages, recent social media posts, email campaigns, customer service responses, and marketing materials. Evaluate whether the voice remains consistent and aligned with your defined attributes. Identify areas where voice drift has occurred and provide training or updated guidelines.

Establish a regular cadence for voice review and refinement. Annual comprehensive audits ensure your voice evolves intentionally rather than accidentally. Quarterly check-ins allow for smaller adjustments based on recent feedback and results.

Conclusion

Trust does not emerge from perfection. It grows from consistency, authenticity, and genuine care expressed through every interaction. Your brand voice carries those qualities to customers through the words you choose and the personality you project.

Building a trustworthy brand voice requires investment: investment in understanding your audience deeply, defining your brand identity clearly, crafting guidelines thoughtfully, implementing them consistently, and refining them continuously. This investment pays returns far beyond any single campaign or initiative.

Brands with distinctive, trustworthy voices build loyal communities that recommend them enthusiastically, forgive occasional missteps graciously, and choose them repeatedly over competitors. These customers become advocates who amplify your message more effectively than any advertising budget could.

View your brand voice as a strategic asset that appreciates over time. Every piece of content you create either strengthens that asset or weakens it. Every customer interaction either reinforces the personality you want to project or confuses it.

Start today by documenting your brand voice. Define the attributes that make you distinctive. Create examples that show those attributes in action. Share guidelines with everyone who communicates on your brand's behalf. Then commit to the ongoing work of listening, testing, and refining.

Your customers want to trust you. Give them a clear, consistent, authentic voice that makes trust possible.

by Jeanne Grunert

How to Increase Website Conversions: Finding the Problems That Cost You Customers

You've invested in your website. Traffic arrives steadily. Visitors browse your pages, maybe even linger for a while. Then they leave without taking action.

When your site attracts attention but fails to convert visitors into leads or customers, something in the user journey creates friction. The good news? Once you identify where the breakdown occurs, you can fix it.

Website Conversation Problems Come from Multiple Sources

Website conversion problems aren't usually caused by a single source. Typically, when we look at a client's lead-generation problems, we find one or more of the following issues. It may take time to identify the reasons your site isn't converting, but chances are it's one or more of the following problems.

Traffic Quality Problems

Your conversion challenge may begin before visitors even reach your site. When the people who arrive don't match your ideal customer profile, conversion rates inevitably suffer.

What is an ideal customer profile? It's a detailed description of your ideal customer. The right buyer. The person to whom you are selling. (And no, you aren't selling to everyone. The only 'products' that 'everyone' needs are air, and I am sure if a marketer somewhere could brand and differentiate air, they would do it.)

Broad or poorly targeted traffic sources send the wrong audience to your door. An ad campaign that casts too wide a net will generate clicks from people who were never going to buy. Search snippets that misrepresent your offering attract visitors whose expectations your site cannot fulfill.

Content plays a role here, too. Articles and resources that attract researchers rather than buyers will drive traffic without driving conversions. These visitors seek information, not solutions, as they're ready to purchase. They consume your content, gain value from it, and move on without ever considering your services.

Messaging and Value Proposition Issues

First impressions form within seconds. If visitors cannot immediately grasp what you offer and why it matters to them, they'll leave.

Vague or generic headlines fail to communicate your core value proposition. Users scroll past messages that don't directly address their needs. They struggle to understand what problem you solve or why you differ from competitors.

Many websites bury their benefits under layers of features and jargon. Technical specifications matter, but they don't answer the fundamental question every visitor asks: "What's in this for me?" When your messaging requires visitors to work hard to understand your value, most won't bother.

User Experience and Design Friction

Even compelling messaging falters when poor design gets in the way. Confusing navigation forces visitors to hunt for information they should find easily. Cluttered layouts overwhelm rather than guide.

Load times matter more than most businesses realize, especially on mobile devices. Every additional second of loading time increases bounce rates. Poor mobile responsiveness creates frustration for the majority of users who now browse primarily on phones and tablets.

Intrusive elements actively drive visitors away. Pop-ups that appear too quickly, auto-playing videos, and aggressive overlay ads interrupt the user experience. Calls to action that hide in weak visual design or confusing placement might as well not exist at all.

Weak or Missing Calls to Action

Visitors need clear direction. When calls to action lack clarity or conviction, users feel uncertain about what step to take next.

Generic CTAs like "Learn More" or "Submit" fail to communicate value or create motivation. Too many competing calls to action overwhelm visitors with choices, leading to decision paralysis. Too few leave users wondering what they should do after reading your content.

Timing matters as much as clarity. Asking visitors for too much commitment too soon in their buyer journey creates resistance. A first-time visitor rarely wants to schedule a consultation immediately. They need smaller, lower-risk steps that build trust gradually.

Trust and Credibility Gaps

Visitors arrive at your site with natural skepticism. They need reasons to believe you can deliver on your promises.

Social proof addresses this skepticism directly. Testimonials, case studies, and reviews from real customers demonstrate that others have trusted you and benefited. Without these elements, visitors have only your claims to rely on.

Trust signals reassure cautious prospects. Certifications, guarantees, security badges, and clear contact information all contribute to credibility. An outdated design undermines trust by suggesting your business may not be active or professional.

Missing or vague information about your company and team raises red flags. Visitors want to know who stands behind the service or product they're considering.

Offer or Lead Magnet Problems

Your offer must justify the action you ask visitors to take. When you request contact information in exchange for a resource or consultation, the perceived value must exceed the perceived cost.

Weak lead magnets fail this test. Generic checklists, thin guides, or irrelevant resources don't motivate visitors to share their email addresses. The offer must address a specific pain point your ideal customer experiences right now.

Forms create their own friction. Each additional field you add reduces completion rates. Asking for information you don't immediately need signals that you prioritize your convenience over the visitor's time.

Technical or Tracking Issues

Sometimes the problem isn't strategic but technical. Broken forms prevent even motivated visitors from converting. Malfunctioning buttons create dead ends in your conversion path.

Analytics errors can mask or misrepresent your actual conversion performance. When tracking doesn't work correctly, you make decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate data. Missing pixels, incorrect event tracking, or configuration problems all distort your understanding of what's really happening on your site.

Misalignment Between Content and Conversion Path

Content attracts visitors at different stages of awareness and readiness. Blog posts typically draw top-of-funnel traffic—people exploring problems and potential solutions. When these posts lack clear next steps, readers consume your content without moving closer to conversion.

Landing pages that don't match the keywords or ads driving traffic to them create immediate disconnect. A visitor who clicks an ad about solving a specific problem expects to find relevant information on the page that loads. When the messaging doesn't align, confusion and distrust follow.

Educational content serves an important purpose, but it must do more than inform. It should guide readers toward a logical next action, even if that action is simply reading another piece of content that moves them further down the funnel.

Lack of Urgency or Motivation

Without a compelling reason to act now, most visitors choose to act later—which usually means never.

Passive messaging allows visitors to remain passive. Active, persuasive language creates momentum. Limited-time offers, exclusive bonuses, or clear explanations of the cost of inaction all generate urgency.

The motivation to convert often comes from helping visitors visualize the gap between their current situation and their desired outcome. When you make this gap vivid and show them how your solution bridges it, conversion becomes more compelling.

Competitive Landscape

Your website doesn't exist in isolation. Visitors compare you to alternatives, often simultaneously browsing competitor sites.

When competitors offer clearer value propositions, better pricing, or stronger proof of results, they win the comparison. Price alone rarely determines the winner, but the overall package of value, proof, and ease of doing business does.

Understanding what competitors offer helps you differentiate effectively. You need to know what you're being compared against so you can emphasize your unique strengths and advantages.

Moving Forward

Increasing website conversions requires you to identify problems before you can solve them. The categories outlined here give you a framework to examine your site critically and spot specific issues that hold you back.

Start by reviewing your analytics to understand where visitors enter your site, how they move through it, and where they exit. Look for patterns that reveal which categories apply most directly to your situation.

Test changes methodically. Address the most significant problems first, measure the results, and continue refining. Conversion optimization isn't a one-time project but an ongoing process of understanding your visitors better and removing the obstacles that prevent them from becoming customers.

At Seven Oaks Consulting, we help businesses identify and resolve these conversion challenges. If you recognize multiple issues in your own website and want expert guidance in addressing them, we're here to help you turn more of your traffic into tangible results. Contact us today.

by Jeanne Grunert

Brand Messaging, Branding, and Positioning: Why Your Marketing Isn't Working (Yet)

Most businesses don't fail because they lack a great product. They fail because they can't explain why anyone should care. That’s brand messaging.

You might have the best solution in your industry. Your service could change lives. Your product might be revolutionary. But if you can't communicate that value clearly and memorably, none of it matters. Your audience will scroll past, click away, or choose a competitor who makes their decision easier.

Marketing isn't about shouting louder, spending more, or chasing trends. It begins with a clear, memorable message. When your brand messaging is sharp, your audience instantly understands who you are, what you do, and why it matters to them. Without that clarity, even the best tactics feel random and disconnected.

This is the foundation of messaging, branding, and positioning. Get these right, and everything else becomes simpler. Skip them, and you'll wonder why your marketing never quite delivers.

Brand Messaging Comes First

Before you think about ads, SEO, social media campaigns, or press coverage, you need one thing: a core message that tells the world what you stand for.

Your message is not your logo, your tagline, or your color scheme. Those are expressions of a message, not the message itself. The message is the identity you want people to remember when you're not in the room. It's what someone would say if asked to describe your business to a friend.

Think of your message as the North Star for every piece of content you create, every conversation you have, and every campaign you launch. When your message is clear, decisions become easier. You know what to say yes to and what to decline. You know which opportunities align with who you are and which ones pull you off course.

A Good Brand Message Answers Three Questions

Creating a powerful message isn't about clever wordplay or marketing jargon. It's about clarity and relevance. A good message answers three fundamental questions that every potential customer asks, whether consciously or not.

First: Who are you? This isn't about your job title or industry category. It's about your purpose. What problem do you exist to solve? What change do you want to create in the world? When someone encounters your business, they should immediately understand the need you address and the gap you fill.

Second: What do you do? Focus on the transformation you create, not just the service you provide. People don't buy products or services. They buy better versions of their lives. They buy relief, growth, confidence, convenience, or peace of mind. Your message should highlight the outcome, the before-and-after, the shift that happens when someone works with you.

Third: Why does it matter? This is the benefit, the "so what?" that moves someone from passive interest to genuine action. It's the reason your solution deserves their time, attention, and money. It's the meaningful difference between their current reality and the future you can help them reach.

If your audience can answer those three questions in one sentence after encountering your marketing, your entire strategy becomes effortless. Everything flows from that central clarity.

Branding Is the Language of Emotion

Branding is memory. It's the emotional imprint that remains after the sale, not the visual identity before it. When people talk about "brand," they often mean the wrong thing: logos, fonts, colors, design systems.

Those are assets, not brand.

Your brand is the meaning attached to your name. It's what people feel when they think of you. It's the associations, expectations, and trust that build over time through consistent experience and communication.

What Branding Really Includes

Your brand is how you're positioned against competitors. It's the mental space you occupy in your audience's mind. When someone in your industry comes up in conversation, does your name follow naturally? Do people think of you first, or do they think of you at all?

Your brand is the value you represent. Beyond the functional benefits of your product or service, what principles do you stand for? What do you refuse to compromise on? These values create connection with people who share them and differentiation from those who don't.

Your brand is the emotional benefits you deliver. How do people feel when they interact with your business? Confident? Inspired? Secure? Excited? These feelings build loyalty that transcends price and features.

Your brand is the category you own. The most powerful brands don't compete in crowded markets. They create new categories or redefine existing ones. They become synonymous with a particular approach, style, or outcome.

When your brand is clear, your competitors can imitate your ideas, copy your features, and match your pricing, but they can't copy your position in people's minds. That belongs to you alone.

Brand Messaging and Positioning: Why You, Not Them

Positioning defines where you stand in the market landscape. If brand messaging is who you are, positioning is who you are compared to everyone else. It's the frame through which people understand your value and make decisions about whether you're right for them.

Two businesses can sell the same product but position themselves completely differently. One sells vitamins as "healthy living" for proactive wellness seekers. Another sells the same vitamins as "pain relief" with a focus on immediate problem-solving. The product may be identical, but the position changes everything: the messaging, the audience, the price point, the marketing channels, and ultimately, the business model.

Positioning isn't about what you do. It's about the context in which people evaluate what you do. It's the comparison set in their minds. When someone considers your solution, what alternatives are they weighing? What trade-offs are they considering? Your positioning should make that decision obvious.

Great Positioning Makes You the Obvious Choice

Strong positioning doesn't just differentiate you. It makes you the only logical choice for a specific audience with a specific need. To position yourself effectively, you need to answer several strategic questions.

What gap do you fill? Look at your market honestly. Where are customers underserved? What needs go unmet? What frustrations persist despite existing solutions? Your position should address a real void, not an imagined one.

What do you offer that no one else does? This might be a unique process, a specialized expertise, a particular combination of services, or an underserved audience you focus on exclusively. The differentiation doesn't need to be dramatic. It needs to be meaningful and defensible.

What category can you own? You're not trying to be better at everything. You're trying to be best at something specific. The riches are in the niches, as the saying goes. The businesses that try to be all things to all people end up being nothing special to anyone.

Think smaller, not bigger. Narrow your focus until you can credibly claim leadership in that space. Then expand from a position of strength, not weakness.

How Your Message, Brand, and Position Work Together

These three elements don't exist in isolation. They form an integrated system that powers everything else you do in marketing.

Your message is what you say. It's the core idea you want people to understand and remember. It drives your content, your conversations, and your campaigns.

Your brand is what people feel. It's the emotional and psychological associations that build over time through consistent delivery of your message and your promise. It's earned through experience, not declared through design.

Your position is where you stand. It's your place in the market relative to alternatives. It determines which battles you fight and which ones you avoid. It shapes your pricing, your packaging, and your promotional strategy.

When all three align, your marketing becomes remarkably efficient. Every piece reinforces the others. Your audience develops clear expectations and strong preferences. Your team knows what to emphasize and what to ignore. G growth becomes sustainable because it's built on clarity, not confusion.

Brand Messaging: Keep It Crisp to Make an Impact!

If your brand messaging is fuzzy, your branding is shallow, and your positioning is generic, no tactic will save you. You can master SEO, run brilliant ad campaigns, create viral content, and build impressive followings, but without strategic clarity at the foundation, those efforts produce temporary spikes instead of lasting growth.

Marketing begins with clarity, ends with purchase, and everything in between is a demonstration of your message. Every touchpoint should reinforce who you are, what you do, and why it matters. Every interaction should build the emotional connections that transform customers into advocates.

Your goal isn't just to get attention. Attention is abundant and fleeting. Your goal is to be remembered when the moment of decision arrives. That requires something deeper than visibility. It requires meaning, relevance, and differentiation.

Start with your message. Build your brand through consistent delivery. Claim your position with confidence. Everything else will follow.

by Jeanne Grunert

Customer Service: Your Business's Secret Marketing Weapon

Most companies treat customer service as a necessary cost center, tucking it away in operations while pouring resources into flashy advertising campaigns and aggressive acquisition strategies. This approach misses a fundamental truth: exceptional customer service is one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal.

Customer Service, The Heart of Retention Marketing

Customer service sits at the heart of retention marketing, the practice of encouraging repeat purchases and ongoing business relationships with your existing customers. While acquisition campaigns dominate marketing budgets and strategy discussions, the numbers tell a different story. Acquiring a new customer costs significantly more than selling to someone who has already bought from you. Your existing customers already trust you, understand your value, and have experienced what you offer. Converting them into repeat buyers requires far less investment than convincing strangers to take a chance on your business.

Yet retention marketing remains underutilized, and businesses leave money on the table as a result. The foundation of effective retention marketing is not sophisticated email campaigns or loyalty programs, though these tools have their place. The foundation is good service, delivered consistently to every customer.

Defining "Good Service"

Good service means different things across industries and business models, but certain principles remain universal. It starts with quality. Providing the best work or product you can deliver sets the baseline for everything that follows. Customers who receive inferior products will not return, regardless of how politely you answer their complaints.

Beyond quality, good service means answering questions professionally and promptly. Your customers have busy lives and pressing concerns. When they reach out, they deserve responses that respect their time and address their needs directly. Delayed or dismissive communication erodes trust faster than almost any other failure.

Good service also means going the extra mile when customers ask for help. This does not require heroic gestures or unsustainable promises. It means making reasonable efforts to accommodate requests, finding solutions instead of citing policy limitations, and treating each customer interaction as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship.

Finally, good service requires solving problems that customers encounter when using your products or services. Problems will occur. Systems break, misunderstandings happen, and expectations sometimes exceed reality. How you respond to these moments defines your customer service more than any policy manual or mission statement.

Ready to Increase Retention Rates? Good Service Leads to Happy Customers!

Understanding these principles matters little if you cannot measure whether you achieve them. Three metrics provide clear insight into your customer service performance.

Reviews offer direct customer feedback on their experiences. Request Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn reviews systematically. Monitor these reviews regularly, not as a vanity exercise but as an early warning system. When negative reviews appear, respond promptly. Avoid defensiveness. Reach out to the customer and try to fix what went wrong. Many customers who leave negative reviews will update them if you address their concerns effectively. Even when they do not, your professional response shows prospective customers how you handle problems.

Measuring Service

Customer retention rate measures how many customers continue doing business with you over time. No universal benchmark defines a good retention rate because it varies by industry, business model, and customer type. What matters is measuring your retention rate consistently and taking prompt action when it declines. More importantly, take daily actions to improve service continuously, rather than waiting for the metric to signal a problem.

Customer lifetime value calculates the total value of a customer's relationship with your company from their first purchase forward. This metric helps you understand not just whether customers return, but how much additional value those relationships generate. High customer lifetime value indicates that your service keeps customers engaged and spending over extended periods.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Priceless

These measurements matter because good service creates something that no advertising budget can buy: authentic word of mouth marketing. People share stories about their experiences with businesses. When you deliver exceptional service, customers tell their friends, colleagues, and social networks. They post on review sites, mention you in conversations, and recommend you when others ask for suggestions.

Bad service also generates stories, but these stories damage your reputation and cost you business. Customers share negative experiences on social media, review platforms, and in personal conversations. Once published, negative reviews persist. You can sometimes get them removed or buried in search results, but doing so requires significant effort and often proves impossible. Prevention costs far less than remediation.

The marketing value of word-of-mouth recommendations exceeds traditional advertising in both cost-effectiveness and persuasive power. When a trusted friend or colleague recommends your business based on their positive experience, that endorsement carries more weight than any ad campaign. The person receiving the recommendation already has a relationship with the referrer, lending immediate credibility to their opinion.

This dynamic makes customer service a multiplier for your marketing efforts. Every satisfied customer becomes a potential advocate. Every resolved problem becomes a story about your commitment to making things right. Every extra mile you go becomes memorable enough to repeat to others.

View Service as a Marketing Method, Not a Cost Center

Most businesses already invest in customer service to some degree. The question is whether you recognize it for what it truly is: a marketing weapon. When you reframe customer service as central to your marketing strategy rather than a separate operational function, you unlock its full potential.

Start by ensuring your customer service standards align with your marketing promises. Nothing damages credibility faster than advertising claims that your service fails to deliver. Then empower your service team with the authority and resources to solve problems without excessive escalation. Speed matters, and bureaucratic approval processes slow everything down.

Measure the metrics that matter, respond to feedback systematically, and invest in continuous improvement. Train your team not just in policies and procedures, but in the principles of good service. Give them context about why their work matters and how it contributes to business growth.

Customer service is not glamorous. It happens in phone calls, email exchanges, and problem-solving sessions that never make it into marketing case studies. But these moments determine whether customers return, what they tell others, and ultimately whether your business thrives or merely survives. Treat customer service as the marketing weapon it is, and you give your business an advantage that competitors cannot easily replicate.

by Jeanne Grunert

What a Good Website Home Page Should Include

What should a good website home page include?

It's surprising how many business owners don't consider what a good website home page should include. Many home pages should actually be the company's "about" page because they are all about the company!

There's a tried and true formula for a good website home page that I'll share here. But first, is your home page really holding you back from getting leads, or is it something else?

Not Enough Leads? Is It SEO (Organic Site Traffic)or a Poorly Converting Home Page Holding You Back?

If you are not getting the desired number of leads or sales through your website each month, there are two questions you should ask yourself first to determine the possible root of the problem:

Am I getting enough traffic to my website? If yes, the problem could be your home page or other pages on your site failing to convert website visitors (traffic) into leads or sales. If no, then you have a search engine optimization (SEO) problem.

You first need to get qualified traffic to your site. Then, the site should be like a sales person and help you convert website visitors into leads or sales.

Is the traffic converting into leads or sales? If you are attracting organic search enginge traffic, or website visitors to your site, but you are not getting leads or sales, there are several possible reasons. The one reason we will explore today is a poorly designed and poorly messaged home page. Other reasons may be that you are attracting the wrong traffic (you are not attracting people who are interested in buying your products or services), your prices are too high, your products do not have all of the features customers desire, and more. In other words, there are a lot of marketing angles to explore. The one we will explore here is the design and layout of the home page.

Good Website Home Page Design and Messaging

I chose good website home page design and messaging as one possible reason why traffic is not converting into leads for several reasons.

First, this is a very common problem. Many businesses focus on the wrong things on their home page. They also design sites themselves and lack the expertise of a good web designer who knows the important of layout to lead customers through the sales process.

Another reason why I chose this topic is that it is a very easy fix, even for companies who DIY their websites. As I explained in my Monday Marketing Motivation video today, I met with a lovely business owner last week to discuss why her website wasn't converting organic search engine traffic from Google and Bing into leads on her site. She was getting plenty of visitors, but no leads.

What struck me as very obvious when I looked at the home page of her site was how inwardly focused it was. It was all about her company; how long they had been in business, who they served, what they did. Very meat and potatoes so to speak. It lacked empathy for the customer. It did not indicate that she knew her customers' pain points and could solve them. She does that every day and she is very good at that, but her website wasn't showing it!

I suspected - and the Google Search Console metrics proved my hunch - that customers were clicking though to her website, but when they got to her page, nothing resonated with them, so they left after 30 seconds or less.

We decided to tweak both the copy and the layout and use good website home page design best practices to see if that would convert more of her site traffic to leads.

Tweaking the Home Page Design: Test and Measure

Making tweaks like the ones we made to my client's site is easy enough that even if you DIY your website, you can make them yourself.

Here is what I recommend you do when tweaking the home page design:

Take a screenshot of the "before" home page
Write down your page metrics before making any changes (traffic, time on site, search position, number of leads per month)
Make the recommended changes (more on that, below)
Publish
Ask Google and Bing to re-index your page
Each month, for the next 3-6 months, note the metrics
Compare at the end of 3 or 6 months
If you have solved the problem, great! If not, try again, and tweak something else.

Numbers don't lie. Tracking metrics helps you see clearly whether or not your changes made an impact. And, by taking a screenshot of the 'before' page, you can easily replicate it and put the old page back in place if you decide it gave you better results before.

Best Practices for Home Page or First Page Design and Messaging

Now let's get down to the nitty gritty. What are the best practices for good website home page or first page design and messaging?

The page should be clean, load quickly, and immediately speak to the customer - your target audience. First thing's first: who are you selling to? Imagine that person in front of you. What problems do they bring to you to solve? That is the focus of your messaging - their problem, your solution.
The headline should be all about the solution to their problem.
Next, reiterate that you understand their problems.
Give people a clear call to action. What do you want them to do? Make an appointment, sign up for a newsletter, download something? Ask for it clearly and consistently and ask for it at the top of the page. Use the same language, same button size and shape, throughout your website whenever you ask for this action.
Include near the top of the page testimonials, client logos, or other proof points that demonstrate others have trusted you to solve their problems.
Include other proof points or trust indicators, such as membership logos, awards won, or similar icons that help customers understand your company is valid, legit and good to work with.
Tell people again how you solve their problem.
Ask them again for the call to action
Push non-essential (but good for SEO!) material into the footer or elsewhere. This includess your blog, any other material that helps drive traffic, job openings, and other essential pages that may not be directly related to the sales process.
Include plenty of relevant visuals (licensed stock photography, for example) or other visual items to break up the text.
Test all the buttons and links to make sure they go where you want them to!

Of course, you want to be sure your page looks great on mobile devices, and loads quickly, too. And need I say that you should follow up promptly on any leads? Of course you should! Make sure that customers know you care about them and their business by following up promptly on all leads, inquiries, and questions.

Good Web Design and Good SEO Go Hand-in-Hand

Good web design and good SEO work hand-in-hand to generate organic search traffic to your site and convert traffic into leads and sales. If something isn't working in this process, you'll feel like you're shouting into the void. You're doing all the right things; publishing great content, using social networking, running ads. But the sales or leads aren't there. You have to make smart changes, test and measure them, and then continue tweaking and analyzing those changes to continually improve your sales. With time, patience, and best practices, hopefully you will see incremental improvements.

by Jeanne Grunert

Why Email Newsletters Still Win at Marketing (And How to Do Them Right)

Let's talk about email newsletters. Yes, I know what you're thinking. Email? In 2025? With all the shiny new platforms and AI-powered everything? But hear me out, because email newsletters are still absolutely crushing it when it comes to marketing.

The Case for Email Newsletters (It's Stronger Than You Think)

While everyone's busy chasing the latest social media trend, email quietly continues to be one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience. It's direct. It's personal. And unlike that Instagram post that disappears into the void after three hours, your email sits right there in someone's inbox until they decide what to do with it.

The numbers back this up too. Email consistently delivers higher engagement and conversion rates than most other channels. When someone gives you their email address, they're basically saying, "Hey, I actually want to hear from you”. They are showing interest in what you have to say. Make it count!

You Own Your Email List (And That Matters More Than Ever)

Here's something most marketers learn the hard way: building your audience on social media is like building a house on rented land. Sure, it works great until the landlord changes the rules. Algorithm updates, policy changes, and account restrictions can mean your hard work disappears in an instant. One day your posts reach thousands of people, the next day you're lucky if a hundred see them.

Email is different. Your email list is yours. You control when you send, what you send, and who sees it. No algorithm stands between you and your audience. No platform decides your content isn't "engagement-worthy" enough. This type of ownership is rare in digital marketing, making email incredibly valuable.

Your Subscribers Actually Want to Hear From You

Think about what it means when someone subscribes to your newsletter. They've given you permission to show up in one of their most personal digital spaces. They're raising their hand and saying they're interested in what you have to offer. These aren't random people who happened to scroll past your content. They're folks who are genuinely more likely to engage with your brand, buy your products, and tell others about you.

With smart segmentation and personalized content, you can turn this interested audience into genuinely engaged customers. That's the kind of opportunity that makes email worth investing in.

How to Actually Do Email Marketing Well

Okay, so email is important. But let's be real: plenty of companies do it badly. You know the ones. The newsletters that feel like spam, the constant promotional blasts, the emails that look terrible on your phone. Let's talk about how to avoid being that company.

Start With People Who Actually Want Your Emails

This should be obvious, but apparently it needs saying: don't buy email lists. Just don't. Those lists are full of people who never asked to hear from you, and they'll treat your emails accordingly. Low open rates, high spam complaints, and a damaged sender reputation aren't worth whatever you paid for that list.

Instead, focus on building your list organically. Use clear opt-in forms. Offer something valuable in exchange for an email address. Make it easy for interested people to join, and you'll end up with a list that actually performs.

Tell People What They're Signing Up For

Nobody likes surprises in their inbox (well, except for surprise discounts, but that's different). When someone subscribes, tell them exactly what they'll get and how often they'll get it. Weekly tips? Monthly roundups? New product announcements? Lay it out clearly.

This transparency does two things: it sets proper expectations, and it builds trust. When you deliver exactly what you promised, people are more likely to stick around and engage with your content.

Your Subject Line Can Make or Break Everything

You could write the world's most amazing email, but if your subject line doesn't convince someone to open it, nobody will ever know. Keep your subject lines short, relevant, and intriguing. Make them personal when you can. And please, avoid anything that sounds like spam. You know the ones I'm talking about.

Test different approaches. Some audiences love straightforward subject lines. Others respond better to curiosity or humor. The only way to know what works for your subscribers is to try different things and see what happens.

Design for Phones (Because That's Where People Read)

Most of your subscribers are reading your emails on their phones. If your newsletter looks like a garbled mess on mobile, you've already lost. Use responsive design. Keep your layouts clean and simple. Make sure your fonts are readable and your buttons are big enough to tap without accidentally hitting three other things.

This isn't optional anymore. It's table stakes for email marketing in 2025.

Not Everyone Wants the Same Thing

Your subscribers aren't a monolith. Some are long-time customers, others are brand new. Some love product updates, others just want helpful tips. Treat them all the same, and you're leaving engagement on the table.

Segment your list based on behavior, preferences, location, or whatever makes sense for your business. Then send content that's actually relevant to each group. This approach takes more effort, but the payoff in engagement and conversions makes it worth it.

Every Email Should Give People a Reason to Care

This is where a lot of newsletters go wrong. They treat every email like a sales pitch. Buy this! Check out that! Limited time offer!

Here's the thing: if every email is promotional, people tune out. Balance your promotional content with stuff that's genuinely valuable. Educational content. Entertaining stories. Useful tips. Content that makes people think, "I'm glad I read that."

When you do have something to sell, your audience will be much more receptive because you've built up goodwill with all that value you've been delivering.

Show Up Consistently (But Don't Overdo It)

Pick a schedule and stick to it. Whether that's weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, consistency helps your emails become a familiar, expected part of your subscribers' routines. Use a recognizable sender name and a consistent format so people know it's you before they even open the email.

That said, consistent doesn't mean constant. Bombarding people with daily emails when they signed up for weekly updates is a fast track to unsubscribes. Respect people's time and inbox space.

Actually Get Your Emails into Inboxes

You can craft the perfect email, but it doesn't matter if it ends up in spam folders. Take the technical stuff seriously. Authenticate your domain properly. Keep your list clean by removing bounced addresses and inactive subscribers. Don't go overboard with images and links, which can trigger spam filters.

Monitor your sender reputation and deliverability rates. If you're seeing problems, address them quickly before they get worse.

Pay Attention to What's Working

Email marketing without analytics is like driving blindfolded. Track your open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. Run A/B tests on your subject lines, content types, and design elements. Look at what performs well and what doesn't.

Let the data guide your decisions. If certain types of content consistently get higher engagement, make more of that content. If your Tuesday sends outperform your Thursday sends, maybe switch your schedule. Keep testing, keep learning, keep improving.

Make It Easy to Leave

Nobody wants to trap people into receiving emails they don't want. Include a clear, visible unsubscribe link in every email you send. When someone opts out, process that request immediately.

This isn't just about being nice (though it is nice). It's also legally required in most places, and it protects your sender reputation. Plus, keeping people on your list who don't want to be there just tanks your engagement metrics anyway.

The Bottom Line

Your email list is one of your most valuable marketing assets. It represents real people who have chosen to let you into their inboxes. Treat that privilege with respect. Send them content that's worth their time. Be consistent, be authentic, and always strive to deliver value.

In a world where everyone's fighting for attention across a dozen different platforms, email gives you a direct line to people who actually want to hear from you. Use it wisely, and it'll pay dividends for years to come.

by Jeanne Grunert

Navigating the Digital Advertising Landscape: A Guide for Modern Marketers

Do you use digital advertising? In this week’s Monday Marketing Motivation, I touch upon the topic of digital advertising. It’s such a broad topic that I couldn’t cover everything in the 5-7 minute video, so I decided to dig in more deeply in this article.

What Is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising consists of online ads. These may appear in search engines such as Google and Bing or on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on.

Why Use Online Ads?

Like organic search, digital ads reach customers at the point in their buying journey when they are actively seeking information about products or services. This is why they are so powerful in the marketing mix. It’s like getting an instant appointment with a prospect who is knocking at your virtual door!

Core Features of Digital Advertising

Digital advertising is both precise and measurable. Targeted reach allows businesses to focus their efforts based on specific demographics, interests, and behaviors of their ideal customers. This ensures that marketing messages reach the most relevant audiences rather than being broadcast broadly to uninterested viewers.

Think about it this way: television, radio, and print (newspaper, magazine) ads reach a broad audience. This audience may, or may not, be interested in the product or service displayed. Yesterday, I saw three ads in a row for prepared, frozen meals. I don’t eat or serve prepared, frozen meals, but many people do. The company advertising frozen chicken dinners has to assume that the majority of people watching TV want fast and easy food, so they use broadcast ads.

However, many businesses, especially those that market to other businesses (called “B2B” or business-to-business marketing), need precise targeting. They can’t use “spray and pray” methods of advertising because it is unlikely that they will reach their target market using mass media. Many consumer-focused brands need precise targeting, too, and that’s where digital advertising shines.

Performance tracking is another aspect of digital ads. It provides detailed and quantifiable metrics such as clicks, impressions, and conversions. This data-driven approach enables marketers to see exactly how their campaigns are performing and make informed decisions about future investments. The ability to track return on investment in real time sets digital advertising apart from traditional methods, where results can be difficult to measure.

Broadcast ads are priced on a fixed basis, often referencing viewers and cost per thousand of viewers reached. Digital ads are budgeted like a checkbook. You set up an ‘account’ and ‘bid’ on a price per click, with the amount deducted from your account. This makes them more affordable for smaller businesses who may not have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on ads each month. It also enables easier and more affordable testing, so you can test new concepts, measure the results, and invest in what works.

Search Advertising: Capturing User Intent

Search advertising places your brand at the top of search engine results when users enter relevant keywords. These ads typically operate on a pay-per-click model, meaning you only pay when someone actually clicks on your advertisement.

Google Ads: The Market Leader

Google Ads dominates the search advertising landscape, processing billions of daily searches and offering outstanding targeting and reach. You can set your ad to appear only for specific keyword terms and phrases related to your products and services. Location filters enable local businesses to focus their advertising on specific geographic areas, while audience segmentation helps refine targeting based on user behavior and interests. This means that a restaurant in Farmville, Virginia, can show ads only to central Virginia residents. Let’s face it; if you’re in the Dakotas, you’re not going to drive to Farmville for dinner!

Google Ads reaches high-intent users who are actively seeking solutions to their problems. When someone searches for a specific product or service, they're often ready to make a purchase decision, making search ads particularly effective for driving conversions. The platform's extensive reach ensures that businesses can connect with potential customers at the exact moment they're looking for relevant solutions.

Bing Ads: The Overlooked Opportunity

Bing Ads are like the forgotten stepchild of the search engine advertising world, and that’s a shame because, for certain companies, they are an excellent choice. The platform tends to attract older and more professional audiences, making it particularly effective for B2B companies and businesses targeting mature demographics. I’ve seen it generate better results for B2B companies time and time again, so it’s worth testing if you sell services or goods to other businesses. Lower competition on Bing often results in cheaper cost-per-click rates, allowing businesses to stretch their advertising budgets further.

Integration with Microsoft products expands Bing's reach beyond just search results. The platform connects with various Microsoft services, providing additional touchpoints for reaching potential customers. This ecosystem approach can be particularly valuable for businesses targeting professional audiences who rely heavily on Microsoft's suite of business tools.

The Power of Search Advertising

Search advertising offers immediate visibility for relevant queries, putting your business in front of potential customers exactly when they're looking for what you offer. The high conversion potential stems from user intent - people clicking on search ads have already demonstrated interest by searching for related terms. This qualified traffic often leads to better conversion rates compared to other advertising methods.

Detailed analytics provide ongoing optimization opportunities, allowing marketers to refine their keyword strategies, adjust bids, and improve ad copy based on performance data. This continuous improvement process helps maximize return on investment over time.

Social Media Advertising: Building Relationships and Driving Action

Social media platforms provide rich environments for brand storytelling, engagement, and direct response advertising. Unlike search ads that capture existing demand, social media advertising can create demand by introducing products and services to users who might not have been actively searching for them.

Facebook and Instagram: Visual Storytelling Platforms

Facebook and Instagram offer access to a massive user base with sophisticated targeting options that go far beyond basic demographics. The platforms' advanced targeting capabilities allow businesses to reach users based on interests, behaviors, life events, and even connections to existing customers. This precision targeting helps ensure that advertising messages reach the most receptive audiences.

These platforms support various ad formats, including single images, videos, carousels, and stories, providing creative flexibility to match different marketing objectives. Visual storytelling opportunities make Facebook and Instagram particularly effective for B2C campaigns where emotional connection and brand personality play important roles in purchasing decisions.

LinkedIn: The B2B Marketing Powerhouse

LinkedIn serves as the premier platform for business-to-business advertising, offering unique targeting options that reflect its professional user base. Advertisers can target prospects by job title, industry, company size, seniority level, and many other professional characteristics. This granular targeting makes LinkedIn ideal for reaching decision-makers and influencers within specific industries or organizations.

The platform excels at promoting professional services, educational content like webinars, and thought leadership materials such as whitepapers. LinkedIn's professional context lends credibility to business-focused content and creates an environment where users expect to encounter industry-relevant information and solutions.

Emerging and Specialized Platforms

Twitter, now known as X, remains useful for real-time engagement and capitalizing on trending topics. The platform's fast-paced nature makes it ideal for timely campaigns and brands that want to participate in current conversations.

Pinterest represents a powerful platform for lifestyle, fashion, home decor, and DIY brands. Users often come to Pinterest with purchase intent, researching products and ideas they plan to implement, making it valuable for driving qualified traffic to e-commerce sites.

Benefits of Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising enables deep audience engagement through comments, shares, and direct interactions that can build a community around brands. This engagement creates opportunities for relationship building that extend beyond the initial ad impression.

Creative flexibility allows brands to experiment with different formats, messaging approaches, and visual styles to find what resonates best with their audiences. The informal nature of social media also permits more personality and creativity in advertising approaches.

Retargeting is also possible on social media. Retargeting means that the platform re-engages, or shows your ad again, to customers who may have visited your website or seen your ads before. This helps encourage buyers to revisit your site with the goal of more leads or sales.

Strategic Budget Planning for Digital Advertising

Budgeting digital advertising is both an art and a science. Most companies start with their best estimate and refine their budget based on demographics, targeting, and campaign results. A/B testing, or testing each new ad against the control or previous ‘winner,’ helps refine budgets and increase response rates over time. It builds on what works to maximize ROI.

How to Budget for Digital Ads

The first step is essential - define your goals. What do you want to accomplish? Brand awareness, lead generation, direct sales, customer retention, or something else? Identifying specific goals will help you focus and refine the entire campaign, including establishing the budget.

Next, choose the platform for your ads. Base your choice not on your favorite platform but on the demographics of the platform’s users. In other words, your ads should appear on platforms where your target audience likes to hang out. B2B ads may wish to test Bing, Google, and LinkedIn, while consumer-focused ads may wish to try Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.

I like to start with small ad budgets to test different approaches. Think about your first few campaigns as reconnaissance; you want to gather as much information as you can, learn from it, and move on to bigger and better things. Based on the metrics from the initial campaigns, you can then increase successful ones and sunset unsuccessful ones.

An important, but often overlooked aspect of digital advertising budgets is budget management. Keep an eye on your bank account, so to speak. Look at the metrics, including cost per click, conversion rates, and return on ad spend. Are you getting the most bang for your buck?.

Platform-Specific Budget Considerations

Google Ads typically requires higher minimum budgets due to competitive keyword costs, with most businesses starting their ad budgets around $500 monthly. However, highly competitive industries may require higher investments to achieve visibility and meaningful traffic volumes. This is why many companies prefer working with consultants and marketing agencies that specialize in Google Ads. (Note: Seven Oaks Consulting does have a partner ad agency that does this work for us, so let us know if it’s of interest!)

Facebook and Instagram advertising can be effective with smaller budgets, often starting around $300 monthly. The platforms' advanced targeting and optimization algorithms can work effectively even with limited spend, making them accessible to smaller businesses.

LinkedIn advertising generally requires higher budgets, typically starting around $1,000 monthly, due to the platform's premium audience and higher cost per click rates. However, the qualified nature of LinkedIn traffic often justifies the higher investment for B2B companies.

The Strategic Importance of Extended Campaign Duration

Don’t shortchange your ad campaigns by running them for a week and declaring victory (or losses). I recommend a minimum of three to six months of investment in an ad campaign to test, measure, and deliver information that can be used to improve future campaigns. If you can’t invest consistently in a digital ad campaign, now is not the time to run it.

Learning from Your Online Ads

All digital advertising platforms today use sophisticated algorithms that require time and data to optimize how, when, where, and to whom they show your ads. That’s why you need several weeks, if not months, to allow the ads to settle down (as I like to say) and start producing results. During the first few weeks of a campaign, the algorithms learn about your audience. They test different delivery strategies and identify the most responsive users. Cutting campaigns short disrupts this learning process and doesn’t provide a good return on investment.

Ads Build Recognition and Trust

There’s a reason why you see the same ads over and over again. Advertising success relies on repetition to build recognition and trust. Brand exposure, or seeing your company name, logo, and products repeatedly, imprints them in the viewers’ subconscious, helping them return to your company and products. Multiple touchpoints and multiple times seeing your ad improve brand recognition.

Accounting for Seasonal and Market Fluctuations

Here’s another often overlooked factor: seasonality.

All businesses experience natural seasonal shifts. Even technology and manufacturing companies see ups and downs in interest from customers. Consumer companies face even greater seasonal peaks and valleys. The Christmas rush, Black Friday, Mother’s Day, summertime…depending on what you sell, one season or month may be busy or slow. Longer campaigns offer more data, which smooths out potential biases from seasonal peaks and valleys.

Recommended Campaign Approach

So, how should you start a campaign? Focus first on strategy: where you should run your ads based on your customers’ platform or search preference. Then, establish your budget for at least three to six months of testing.

Next, conduct keyword research to develop your creative approach. Launch your ads.

The first month of digital advertising gives the algorithm time to adjust. During this time, watch carefully to ensure you’re reaching the desired target audience.

Months two and three represent the optimization phase, where insights from initial testing are applied to improve campaign performance. This might involve refining audience targeting, adjusting ad creative, or reallocating budget toward the highest-performing elements.

Months four through six focus on scaling successful strategies and maximizing return on investment. By this point, campaigns have sufficient data and optimization to support increased budgets and expanded targeting while maintaining efficiency.

Maximizing Digital Advertising Success

Digital advertising represents a powerful tool for reaching and engaging target audiences in today's connected marketplace. Success depends on understanding the unique strengths of different platforms, from search ads that capture existing intent to social media advertising that builds relationships and creates demand.

Strategic budget planning ensures that advertising investments generate meaningful returns while supporting long-term business growth. The commitment to extended campaign durations allows for proper optimization and relationship building that short-term approaches cannot achieve.

Whether focusing on immediate conversions through search advertising or building brand awareness through social media campaigns, digital advertising offers measurable, scalable solutions for businesses of all sizes. With thoughtful strategy, appropriate budgeting, and patience for optimization, digital advertising can drive significant growth and create lasting competitive advantages in the digital marketplace.

by Jeanne Grunert

Achieve Better Results Through A/B Testing

Let's be honest—marketing can feel like throwing spaghetti at the wall sometimes. You have this brilliant idea for a new headline or button color, but will it actually work? Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, there's a better way: A/B testing.

What Is A/B Testing?

Think of A/B testing as a friendly competition between two versions of your marketing content. You create version A (usually your current version) and version B (your new idea), then show each one to different groups of people. Maybe you're testing whether "Get Started Now" works better than "Start Your Free Trial" as a button label. Or perhaps you're curious if that bright orange header will outperform your current blue one.

The beauty is in the simplicity—you let your audience tell you what they prefer through their actions, not their opinions.

Why Testing In Marketing Matters To Your Business

Here's the thing: we're all terrible at predicting what other people will do. I mean, really terrible. That "obvious" improvement you're sure will boost conversions? It might actually hurt them. That design change you think looks awful? Your customers might love it.

A/B testing takes the guesswork out of the equation. Instead of making decisions based on what you think will work, you're making them based on what actually works. This means less risk, better ROI, and those "aha!" moments when the data surprises you.

Picture this: you change a "Buy Now" button from blue to red. Seems minor, right? But what if that simple change increases your conversion rate by 15%? Without testing, you'd never know you were leaving money on the table.

Where You Can Use A/B Testing

The great news is that you can test almost anything in your marketing toolkit:

Email campaigns are perfect testing grounds. Try different subject lines (does "50% Off Everything" beat "Your Exclusive Sale Starts Now"?), experiment with sender names, or test whether your audience prefers short, punchy emails or longer, detailed ones.

Landing pages offer endless possibilities. Test headlines, swap out hero images, move your signup form from the bottom to the top, or try different call-to-action buttons. Even small changes in form length can make a big difference.

Digital ads are another goldmine for testing. Does that lifestyle photo perform better than a product shot? Which headline grabs more attention? Test different ad copy, visuals, or even audience targeting approaches.

E-commerce product pages can benefit from testing product descriptions, customer reviews placement, promotional banners, or even the number of product images you show.

Website navigation and layout elements like menu structures, sidebar content, or footer information can all impact user behavior in ways you might not expect.

The golden rule? Test one thing at a time. If you change both the headline and the button color simultaneously, you won't know which change drove your results.

Getting It Right: Best Practices That Actually Work

Sample Size and Statistical Significance

This is where things get a bit technical, but stick with me. You need enough people to see each version for your results to be meaningful. If only 50 people see version A and 47 see version B, a small difference could just be random chance. Most testing tools will calculate statistical significance for you, but aim for at least 95% confidence before declaring a winner.

Timing and Test Duration

Don't rush this part. Running a test for just a day or two rarely gives you reliable data. You want to capture different user behaviors throughout the week—people browse differently on Mondays than Fridays, and weekend traffic often behaves uniquely. Aim for at least one full business cycle, and consider seasonal factors if relevant.

Setting Clear Goals

Before you start, decide exactly what success looks like. Are you trying to increase email signups? Boost product purchases? Reduce bounce rate? Having a clear primary metric keeps you focused and prevents you from cherry-picking results later.

Avoiding the "Early Winner" Trap

This one's tough because we all want quick results. But declaring a winner after just a few hours or when you see early positive trends can lead you astray. Let the test run its full course—patience pays off in accuracy.

Proper Randomization

Make sure your testing tool randomly assigns visitors to each version. You don't want all your mobile users seeing version A while desktop users see version B, as that would skew your results.

Advanced Considerations for Better Testing

Sequential Testing Strategy

Once you find a winner, don't stop there. Use that winning version as your new baseline and test another improvement. This compound approach can lead to dramatic improvements over time.

Monitoring Secondary Metrics

While focusing on your primary goal, keep an eye on other important metrics. A version that increases click-through rates might decrease average order value or customer satisfaction. You want the full picture.

External Factors and Timing

Be mindful of outside influences. Running tests during Black Friday, major news events, or seasonal peaks can introduce variables that won't be present year-round. Sometimes it's worth pausing tests during unusual periods.

Multivariate Testing

Once you're comfortable with basic A/B testing, you might explore testing multiple elements simultaneously. This is more complex but can reveal how different elements interact with each other.

Building a Testing Culture

The biggest challenge often isn't technical—it's getting your team comfortable with being wrong sometimes. Create an environment where "failed" tests are celebrated as valuable learning experiences. Document everything, share insights broadly, and make data-driven decision-making the norm.

Making A/B Testing Work for Your Business

Start small if you're new to this. Pick one element that you suspect could be improved—maybe an email subject line or a single button on your website. Run that test properly, learn from the results, then gradually expand your testing program.

Remember, not every test will give you a clear winner, and that's okay. Sometimes the biggest insight is learning that your current approach is already pretty good. Other times, you'll discover game-changing improvements hiding in the smallest details.

The Bottom Line

A/B testing transforms marketing from educated guessing into strategic optimization. It respects the complexity of human behavior instead of trying to predict it, and it gives you the confidence to make changes based on evidence rather than opinions.

Whether you're optimizing your first email campaign or running sophisticated tests across multiple channels, the principle remains the same: let your audience show you what works. They're the ones making the decisions that matter, so why not listen to what they're telling you?

The best part? You don't need to be a data scientist or have a massive budget to get started. Many email platforms, website builders, and ad platforms have A/B testing built right in. The hardest part is often just getting started—but once you see how powerful data-driven optimization can be, you'll wonder how you ever marketed without it.

by Jeanne Grunert

Choosing the Right Marketing Consultant

Tips for Choosing the Right Marketing Consultant: A Veteran Marketers’ Perspective

Choosing the right marketing consultant is an art. My dad used to say there were two types of people: those that talk about doing things and those that actually do them. I have found throughout my 30+ year career in marketing that this holds true for consultants, too.

Two Types of Consultants

I have seen consultants that “do”. They roll up their sleeves and dive into the company’s problems. What needs to be done? Who needs support and coaching? How can I help?

And then there are those that “do not.” These are the bloviators. The talkers. The incessant theorizers. They love to attend meetings, host meetings, and meet to meet.

The “doers” explore problems and offer solutions. They focus on tangible results and ROI.

The “do not” consultants love to throw money and people at problems. Not getting enough leads? Well, you aren’t spending enough. (That may be true, but it may not be. The do-not-do consultants immediately throw money at the problem.) Not getting the results that you need? Ah, you don’t have the right people, or your staff is too small. Hire my cadre of best friends to fill out your marketing department and you will see the results.

More often than not, the do-not-do consultants leave before the results are in. They leave behind another story: bloated teams, wasted budgets, and exhausted managers. The talkers love theories, but they hate hard work. They love to delegate the job to the staff while making themselves look like the heroes should any one of their trendy theories work and improve leads, sales, and ROI.

At Seven Oaks Consulting, We Are All Doers!

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a doer. I’m a roll-up your sleeves and dig-in kind of consultant. I mentor and teach, to be sure, but typically, I use situations as learning opportunities with my clients’ marketing teams to help them improve.

I know the theories, of course, and yes, I apply some of them. Brand story. EOS. Agile marketing. Each bears exploring. But the consultants avoid love to talk incessantly about theories without putting them into practice. When pushed, they rarely demonstrate theories in actual practice.

Finding the Best Marketing Consultant

How can you avoid the “do nots” and hire “can do” consultants? During the interview process, listen to the questions they ask. The do nots often leap immediately to the solution and insist that they have seen it all and therefore do not need to explore alternatives. The can-do consultants request data, plans, and results to date. They want to talk one on one with a few team members. They ask specific questions about what has been tried and what has failed.

Hire can-do consultants. Ask for references. Look at their work. Ask pointed questions during the interview process.

Some questions to consider include:

How would you solve this problem?
What experience do you have with X?
Why do you think this is happening?
What would you recommend in this example?

Should Marketing Consultants Provide Samples?

Do not expect the consultant to provide samples specific to your company or a written marketing plan for free. I have had potential clients steal sample plans and enact them. I’ve caught them doing this; we’ve met, given them a short marketing plan, and the next thing I know, I see the messaging and tactics all playing out. It’s not a coincidence. It’s happened to me too many times over my 18 years as a consultant, so now I rarely provide details in writing without a hiring agreement. However, during the interview, I am happy to give some industry perspectives, best practices, and a few ideas.

As a senior marketing consultant who has run a successful business-to-business marketing practice for over 18 years, I can help you weed out the talkers from the doers. More importantly, I can help you get the work done; the right marketing tactics make all the difference. And I promise not to talk theory without practical application. That’s a promise.

by Jeanne Grunert

Mailing Violation: Marketing Agency Fined for Lack of Disclosures on Direct Mail

I check several news sources daily to keep up with both local and world news. One story on the AP News caught my attention: Marketing Firm Fined $40,000 for 202 GOP Mailers in New Hampshire.

The story is interesting to me because of my background in direct mail. Before founding Seven Oaks Consulting in 2007, I had a long and happy career leading marketing and direct mail for some of the nation’s largest education companies. My master’s degree in Direct and Interactive Marketing from New York University included many courses in direct mail management, and I spent many hours over the years working with mailing houses, printers, and agencies through the New York tri-state area. I have even led workshops in direct mail for marketing agencies who need to shore up their knowledge of best practices.

The AP report was scanty and did not give background information about the case, so I searched the New Hampshire Department of Justice for the case and read through the PDF on their site that lays out the state’s case against the marketing agency, Deliver Strategies. Deliver Strategies is a marketing agency specializing in political marketing for candidates running for office. Direct mail is often used for political marketing.

According to the document found on the New Hampshire DOJ site, the case began when it was discovered that 189,000 political mailers sent to residents in New Hampshire failed to contain the appropriate disclosure language (paid for by) and return address. Investigation into the mailers led to a tangle of mistakes that began with the client and ended with the mail house.

Mistakes make throughout this case include:

Deliver Strategies acquiescing to the client’s request not to put the return address and disclosure on the mail piece.
Trusting that the client’s lawyers had reviewed the mail piece and given it a green light to proceed without the disclosures. (I wonder if they received written confirmation from the client on this).
The mail house, upon questioning the name to put on postal form 3602-R, taking it upon themselves to search online for the candidate’s name and address and putting it on the form. Meanwhile the candidate neither authorized nor paid for the mailer. The candidate knew nothing about it. It was paid for through a political action committee (PAC).

Reading through the DOJ document, I kept shaking my head. I understand completely how such mistakes happen. The agency wants to please the client. The agency asks for, and receives, reassurance that the legal team has blessed the mailer. Meanwhile, the mailing house tries to do what it thinks is correct and ends up screwing up everything further.

I think the moral of this story is that if a client – or an agency – sends you a creative proof that you feel is wrong, you need to question it. Dig in your heels. Do not go with the flow.

Digital Strategies questioned the client about the lack of return address or disclosure, but in the end, went along with it up on reassurance of its legalities. That’s a reasonable call to make in my opinion as an agency owner. If they did not suggest taking off the return address or omitting the disclaimer, the fault, in my opinion, lies with the client. I hope that the agency asks for the fine to be repaid, counts its blessings, and moves on

by Jeanne Grunert

Marketing Basics

Summary: How to Build a Brand Voice That Customers Trust

Key Foundations

Understanding Your Audience

Defining Brand Identity

Crafting Your Voice

Brand Voice in Content Marketing

Building Consistency

Using Storytelling

Prioritizing Clarity and Honesty

Adapting While Staying Consistent

Testing and Refining

Taking Action

Building a Brand: It's More Than Visuals

The Connection Between Trust and Consistency

Understand Your Audience

Identify Demographics and Psychographics

Align Voice With Customer Expectations

Use Research to Guide Language Choices

Define Your Brand's Core Identity

Clarify Your Mission and Values

Define Your Brand Personality

Determine Target Emotions and Positioning

Craft Your Brand Voice

Select Core Voice Attributes

Create a Voice Chart With Examples

Ensure Authenticity Over Imitation

Why Brand Voice Matters in Content Marketing

Voice Drives Content Discoverability

Voice Creates Content Differentiation

Voice Builds Audience Connection Through Content

Voice Improves Content Consistency Across Formats

Build Consistency Across All Touchpoints

Map Every Customer Touchpoint

Train Teams in Voice Application

Adapt Voice for Different Platforms

Scale Consistency as You Grow

Use Storytelling to Strengthen Trust

Share Origin and Behind-the-Scenes Stories

Highlight Customer Experiences

Demonstrate Appropriate Vulnerability

Prioritize Clarity and Honesty

Eliminate Jargon and Exaggeration

Communicate Transparently About Policies and Products

Address Mistakes Openly

Admit What You Don't Know

Adapt Without Losing Your Core Voice

Understand the Difference Between Voice and Tone

Adjust for Platform Differences

Navigate Cultural Moments Thoughtfully

Evolve Your Voice as Your Brand Matures

Test, Measure, and Refine

Gather Qualitative Feedback

Track Performance Metrics

Run Voice Experiments

Review Customer Service Interactions

Conduct Regular Voice Audits

Conclusion

Website Conversation Problems Come from Multiple Sources

Traffic Quality Problems

Messaging and Value Proposition Issues

User Experience and Design Friction

Weak or Missing Calls to Action

Trust and Credibility Gaps

Offer or Lead Magnet Problems

Technical or Tracking Issues

Misalignment Between Content and Conversion Path

Lack of Urgency or Motivation

Competitive Landscape

Moving Forward

Brand Messaging Comes First

A Good Brand Message Answers Three Questions

Branding Is the Language of Emotion

What Branding Really Includes

Brand Messaging and Positioning: Why You, Not Them

Great Positioning Makes You the Obvious Choice

How Your Message, Brand, and Position Work Together

Brand Messaging: Keep It Crisp to Make an Impact!

Customer Service, The Heart of Retention Marketing

Defining "Good Service"