How the Words You Choose for Your Brand Decide Whether a Client Trusts You
A person you haven't met yet is reading your brand this evening, deciding whether you understand her or not. A reading of how the words behind your brand build client trust before you do.
Sophie O.P.
9/21/20264 min read
The cursor is blinking on the home page you are rewriting, and it has been for twenty minutes. You know what you do, you know it is good, and the people who have paid you know it too. The problem is that a woman you have never met is going to land here some evening in October, and everything she decides about you will be decided, mostly, from the words you leave on this page.
She will not walk into a studio, or hold anything you have made before she buys it. If she were sitting across from you at a table, you could earn her trust with your tone of voice, a pause, the way you looked at her when she asked the hard question. But she is not at the table. She is at her laptop, with three other tabs open, and every one of those small proofs has been taken away from you. The only thing left in your hands is the words you write on the page.
The internet is full of advice about those words, and most of it reaches for the same handful of tricks. Mirror her language back to her, stack the testimonials higher, use this exact structure to the letter (or it won’t work). For premium brands, these tactics are nothing but a sure way to scare your client away. She senses the machinery underneath and steps back.
There's quite a simple way to get out of that blank page with words that actually hold your value and make that woman decide that your work is just what she’s looking for.
Before any of it works, you have to know exactly who you are writing to.
Every choice below depends on how your particular client will receive it. Not a demographic. Her, specifically. What makes her curiosity spark when she reads? And, on the other hand, what could make her close the tab after two lines?
Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy at Princeton spent years mapping first impressions and found we read two things in sequence: whether someone means well toward us, and whether they can deliver. We read the first before the second, and warmth is judged before competence, with more weight in how we react.
Your client is deciding whether you understand her before she decides whether you are any good. You cannot write a line that reads as understanding until you have decided, with some precision, who is reading.
Name the fear she has not said out loud.
Once you know her, you have to find the worry she never puts into words.
Your copy will spend most of its energy describing what you offer. But what she needs, before she can hear any of it, is the smallest sign that you understood what she was afraid to say when she opened her laptop. Say it plainly, in her language, before you say anything else.
Let’s take a florist that offers a weekly subscription, for example. Her client's real fear, the one she never says out loud, is that she will get the leftover flowers nobody wanted at the shop, or that they will arrive at her door already in their last breath.
Replace every adjective she cannot check.
If a wedding photographer writes "beautiful photos, memories that last a lifetime" on her homepage, she risks sounding like every other wedding photographer in the history of wedding photography. Adjectives that vague can be claimed by anyone, whether they are true or just partly.
A good rule of thumb is to be as precise as possible. “Fourteen hours beside you on the day of the event. Four hundred to six hundred images edited by hand, in your inbox within four weeks.” tells her what she is getting and, underneath, tells her you have done this enough times to know your own numbers, and numbers, unlike adjectives, are harder to fake.
Precision reads as competence, and once competence lands on the warmth she already felt, she is ready to take the final step.
The trust is won after she has already leaned in.
Trust is not won by sentences alone. It is won by everything holding together, one small proof after another, until her instinct stops checking and she just belongs. The words open the door, the rest of the brand has to be the room she was hoping to walk into.
Which returns us to the document open on your laptop, the cursor still blinking. You do not need a better verb. You need to see her face before you write the first word, and then write for that face and no other, the woman at her laptop waiting to be understood by someone who has never met her. If your words find her there, everything you built behind them will do the rest.
If you are still deciding who your client is, or wondering whether your copy is really speaking to her, The Reading is our brand consultancy service. Bring your question, small or foundational, and we return with an honest reading of what is there and where to go next. Explore The Reading.
“Before your first delivery, we ask about the flowers you love and the ones you would rather not see again. After that, every arrangement is cut the morning it arrives, so it blooms on your table, not in a warehouse.”
That paragraph alone sends a calming message to whoever is reading: “I understand you, you can trust me, I have this all figured out”. See? That is the warmth that gets her to lean in.