There's a version of website messaging that sounds good in a meeting. It's aspirational. It gestures at transformation. It uses words like "reimagine" and "unlock" and "the future of." It feels like it belongs on a homepage.
And sometimes it does. If that's how your buyers talk about the problem, use it. But if it isn’t, there’ll be a gap between how your buyers describe their problem and how you've chosen to describe your solution. This gap is where conversion breaks down.
The source of the language is what matters
When your team sits down to figure out website messaging, they bring everything they know about the product. The vision behind it. The problem it solves. The roadmap. The three months you spent getting the positioning right with your team.
Your buyers bring none of that.
They bring a job they're trying to get done. A problem they've been sitting with for six months. A phrase they'd type into a search bar at 9am when it's annoying them most.
That phrase might be aspirational or interesting. Or it might be completely functional (and boring?) — something like: "best way to communicate effectively with a distributed team."
Either way, this is what's sitting in their head when they land on your page. How good messaging sounds and how well it converts doesn’t correlate. How well it matches what’s already in the prospects head is a better predictor.
The job-to-be-done doesn't care about your internal brief
The jobs-to-be-done framework is useful here. Buyers hire products to do a specific job. When they're evaluating whether your product is the right hire, they're checking one thing: Does this company understand the job I'm trying to do?
The fastest way to answer yes is to use the language they already associate with that job. Not language you've crafted to sound like you understand it. The actual words and phrases that came out of their mouths when you asked them.
If no one has asked them, there's a gap. The closer your team is to the product, the more that gap gets filled with internal assumptions about what buyers care about.
Boring to you isn't boring to your prospects
You might push back here: Messaging still has to be attention grabbing. And that’s correct. But if your goal is to drive conversions, trying to grab attention by being interesting and creative is where things go wrong.
Because when you’re so close to your product, positioning, and messaging, deciding what’s "interesting" or “boring” to your prospect is impossible.
For your buyers, the most interesting thing you can say is the thing that proves you understand their problem. And if your buyers describe that problem in plain, functional terms, plain, functional copy will outperform something more creative — not because creativity is wrong, but because it's your creativity, not theirs.
The messaging that sounds obvious to you is often what stops a prospect mid-scroll and makes them think: this company gets it.
Your buyers will tell you what to put on your pages
Mirroring your buyer's language removes the gap between how you describe your solution and how prospects describe their problem.
When website messaging comes from speaking and listening to your prospects, what you’re saying and what they’re thinking match. You enter the conversation happening inside their heads.
That language could be functional and “boring,” or creative, aspirational, and “interesting.” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with creative or aspirational language if it came from your buyers. If that’s how they talk about their problems, that’s how you should talk about your solution.
But when the language comes from internal brainstorming, there’s a problem because the goal is to generate pipeline, not sound good.
For your company, functional messaging might be the key. Or it might be creative messaging. The most important question to ask when looking at your messaging is: Is it grounded in buyer language, or in your team's language?
Listening is the hard part
Effective, conversion-focused messaging doesn’t always feel like “good” writing. But it's not a creative writing activity. Getting messaging right is more like listening carefully to customers and prospects, and then simply writing down what they say.
The difficulty isn’t creating the messaging, it's getting buyers to articulate what they mean — not the polished version they think you want to hear — and then having the confidence to put that on the page without second-guessing it.
The next time you're reviewing your website, ask one question: Did any of this come from a buyer conversation? If the answer is no, start there.