Try this test, it takes two minutes. Open your website's homepage, copy the introductory text, and swap your company's name for a competitor's.
Does it still make sense? If so, that copy isn't yours. It's the sector's default text — bespoke solutions, dedicated team, commitment to quality, trusted partner — and it reads exactly the same on every other site the same person is about to request a quote from.
Why everyone writes the same thing
It isn't a lack of imagination. It's fear, and a reasonable one at that.
Saying something specific turns someone away. Write "we mainly work with industrial companies" and whoever runs a restaurant closes the tab. Because nobody wants to lose a customer who hasn't even shown up yet, the copy gets written so as to exclude no one — and the result is text that speaks to no one in particular.
The paradox is that the page that excludes no one also convinces no one. Anyone looking for a supplier is looking for signs that this one is right for them. Vagueness isn't a sign.
You don't invent a voice in a brainstorming session
There's an idea that a brand's tone of voice gets decided in a meeting, with adjectives on a page: approachable, confident, relaxed. That's vocabulary, not voice.
A company's voice already exists, and it's heard somewhere else: in the way the owner explains the work on the phone when they're not trying to sell anything. That conversation has opinions in it, things they'd advise against, a way of putting things that's theirs alone.
The work isn't creating a voice. It's fetching that one and putting it on the website — which is exactly where it usually disappears, replaced by the solemn language people assume a company website ought to have.
Three questions that produce copy no one else can write
- What work do you turn down? A company that says what it doesn't do becomes instantly more credible about what it does.
- Where do you disagree with your industry? If there's a common practice you think is wrong, say so and explain why. It's the one paragraph nobody else can copy, because they'd have to believe it.
- What do your customers say when they're happy? Their words, not yours. They're almost never the ones already on the site.
Notice that none of these questions is about creativity. They're all about taking a position — and it's for lack of one, or reluctance to put it in writing, that most copy ends up identical.
Same voice, different formats
A related mistake: finally having a voice, then publishing it everywhere in exactly the same form. The same video cut for four platforms, the same caption, the same image.
Follow someone on two channels and you notice the repetition and switch off. Follow them on three and you assume it's a bot.
What stays the same is the position — what you believe and how you say it. What changes is the format and what's shown: finished work in one place, how you got there in another, the answer to a question someone asked this week in a third.
Start with one page, not the whole brand
You don't need a full branding process to fix this. Pick the page that gets the most visits, rewrite it using the answers to the three questions, and watch what happens to enquiries over the following two months.
If you want to go deeper — what the company is, for whom, in what voice and with what look — that's branding work, and we've written about how it goes in branding and rebranding, step by step. The written part is copywriting.
Tried the test and failed?
Send us your website address and tell us who your customers are. We'll tell you what, in your copy, could belong on any other site in your sector.