“We are a young, dynamically developing company” on your web does not work any more. Try this:

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"We are a young, dynamically developing company" copy on your web does not work any more. 
In the article, I discuss how to obtain a cool texture for your website without struggling with the text and without inundating future readers with watery content.

I'm Pasha Molyanov, the head of the "Sdelaem" ("Let's Do It") agency. We create content for businesses, launch remote editorial offices, and, among other things, design landing pages.

When clients come to us for a new website, I often inquire about how they came up with the old one. The process typically goes like this: a marketer or company leader solemnly declares, “Let’s create a corporate website!” Then everyone starts scratching their heads and begins to laboriously present themselves:

→ Individual approach to each client…

→ Working with Scrum and Agile…

→ Our story began back in 2003…

→ We love our work more than life…

→ More than mom…

In general, employees do their best to praise themselves and their company. It’s good if they do it sincerely, but even with such content for the website, there remains a problem:

This is how every other company writes about itself. It’s a dull nonsense that can be placed on the website of almost any business without losing its meaning. Both plumbers and dentists and photographers individually cater to each client—just that it doesn’t say anything about the business ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

For a website to turn out genuinely impressive, preparation is key. Dig up information about the business and its customers. It’s worth compiling the main advantages of the company and also understanding the interests and needs of the customers. At the intersection of these realms, a good commercial website will emerge.

What information about the business is worth seeking for a good copy

The task of a corporate website is to introduce the user to the company and convince them that you’re impressive. It’s crucial to structure the narrative so that the reader has no lingering uncertainties after viewing the page. To achieve this, it’s essential to address three overarching questions:

Question 1: “What do we do?” Provide information about the product directly on the first screen. It should be unequivocal, clear, and concise. To formulate key points, consider the following additional questions:

• What is the essence of our product?

• How can the product be described in a couple of sentences?

• Who needs the product and why?

• In what situations is the product beneficial?

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The complex Digital Foreign Trade service has been encapsulated in a couple of sentences by our company’s specialists. These highlight the main aspects, with details available on subsequent screens.

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Question 2: “Why is what we do considered impressive?”

Having introduced the website visitor to the company, it’s now essential to convince them of our professionalism. To achieve this, gather information that highlights the company’s advantages and distinguishes it from competitors. Here are some guiding questions:

• How is our product superior to competitors?

• What features are exclusive to our product?

• What are we particularly proud of?

• What do customers praise most frequently?

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The document workflow service EnDocs lists all its advantages in a concise list, then further elaborates on each of them in detail.

Question 3: “How does it work?”

Explain to the reader the mechanics of interacting with your business. Users should understand how the service is provided, what the product looks like, and how to use it. This alleviates concerns before making a purchase. Consider the following points:

• How is our product structured?

• What happens after placing an order?

• What additional perks do we offer?

• What aspects are typically unclear to buyers?

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Dasha.AI, the conversational AI, can be a complex product for the average user. That’s why the company has placed a video explaining its functions on the second screen to make it more understandable.

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All the information for the future website can be squeezed out through independent brainstorming, but it’s time-consuming, challenging, and it’s easy to miss important details. Instead, it’s better to use more reliable methods. More about them in the next section ↓

How to extract meaningful information about the product

When a company has been operating for a while, it accumulates a wealth of valuable data about its own product. This includes marketing statistics, customer correspondence, technical support reports, and much more. All this data should be extracted and processed. Where to dig:

Talk to employees. Inside any company, there are specialists who can share interesting information about the product. A sample interview list might look like this:

• Company Director: Most likely, they know almost everything about the business. You can inquire about how the product is structured, its purpose, and why it is designed the way it is.

• Product Manager: This specialist can provide additional information complementing what the director shared. As they are usually more involved in operational work, they can share finer details that may be overlooked by the director.

• Sales Department Manager: This employee has a better understanding of what motivates potential customers to make a purchase. You can find out which product features seem more attractive to the audience and which ones might be off-putting.

• Marketer: This professional can provide insights into the company’s strategies for product promotion and what proves to be more effective. This data can be a basis for crafting future text.

• Technical Support Operator: This employee knows the challenges customers face. They can share information about which parts of the product are more prone to issues, what tends to break most frequently, and what customers struggle with. This information allows for a more detailed exploration of nuances and helps navigate controversial details.

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Most often, employees willingly engage and even propose their own solutions for gathering information.

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Send the brief to the product manager. It’s a straightforward method of information gathering: you work through the questions in the document once, and then you can use it dozens of times in similar situations. The product manager will independently approach all specialists in the company and extract valuable data from them.

Briefs come with their drawbacks—sometimes, documents are filled in haphazardly, during smoke breaks or lunch breaks. As a result, the information in the file turns out fragmented and not detailed enough—details still need to be extracted independently.

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Fragment of the brief we send to clients. In the document, we include an example so that the client better understands what information to provide.

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Refer to the knowledge base. The company almost certainly has repositories from which you can extract a bit more data. This includes the old website, product presentations, sales instructions, technical support scripts, and marketing reports. Ask the company specialists if you can access these files and thoroughly sift through them—perhaps you’ll discover interesting details.

When you receive the files, immediately click on all the links and open all the archives. It would be awkward if the client provides links, and you come back for access a week later.

If you gather information about the product following this algorithm, you’ll likely have more than you need. Don’t force-fit it all onto the website. Leave space for the client.

Where to get information about the client

When the entire landing page is dedicated to the company, it turns into continuous self-admiration. Clients will find such content uninteresting—what’s crucial for them is understanding what they will gain from your product. To achieve this, gather information about the audience, their interests, and needs.

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What is important to the reader versus what you wrote.

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Talk to the employees again. Consult with the director, product manager, sales department manager, marketer, and technical support operator. Inquire about how customers choose a product, what factors they consider, and what problems they solve with it. This will give you an initial understanding of the audience.

Questions to ask include:

• Who uses our product?

• Into which segments can they be divided?

• Where can these people be found?

Surveying employees in this case is just the first step in gathering information. Beyond that, extensive research begins. Ideally, after the interviews, you’ll compile a list of information sources. This could include a collection of blogs followed by the audience, contacts of regular customers, or a database of customer reviews.

Explore social media. Find relevant public pages and groups, join thematic chats, and subscribe to competitors’ pages. Then, read comments on posts, follow discussions, and note popular topics. You need detailed answers to five questions:

• What do people find confusing?

• What questions do they commonly ask?

• What can’t they find?

• What frustrates them?

• What do they praise and why?

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I have a community called “Overheard in Copywriting” with 30 thousand subscribers. When launching a new product for authors, we draw inspiration from the discussions in it.

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Listen to recorded calls and review correspondences. You can gain access to them through sales representatives, account managers, and technical support. It’s beneficial if you’re provided with the password to a work account so that you can review everything yourself. Ideally, gaining access to the CRM system allows you not only to extract compelling arguments but also to see the outcomes of the conversations.

In CRM, you can filter calls that resulted in a sale. By listening to them, you can understand which arguments or statements are most effective in convincing people to make a purchase.

Conduct surveys. Create a list of questions that will help better understand the audience. For each company, these questions will be unique, so it’s better to focus on global blocks that need to be covered:

• What does our average buyer look like?

• What convinces the user to make a purchase?

• What prevents users from making a purchase?

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For creating surveys, we often use Google Forms. It’s a free tool, users don’t need to register, and the data can be easily uploaded to CRM.

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Once the questions are ready, it’s time to distribute the survey. You can reach out to the existing customer database and also publish the questionnaire on social media, your website, and send it to customers via email.

If the existing customer base is insufficient to gather enough information, consider joining relevant communities. If you sell fishing hooks and lines, reach out to the administrator of a “Fishing Club”; if you offer services for digital marketers, contact the owner of an advertising-related community. It’s likely that you’ll have to pay for placement in an external community, but the insights you gain will justify the investment.

To obtain more surveys, you can use survey services. For example, you can organize information gathering through Yandex Vzglyad. In the service, you can create a form and then launch the survey. The target audience will see the questionnaire, but you’ll need to pay for promotion.

5 rules for conducting in-depth interviews

A complex but highly effective way to gather important information about clients is to conduct in-depth interviews with them. Request contacts for a few clients from company employees; in most cases, 10 people are sufficient. Call them and inquire extensively about their interests, needs, perceptions of the product, and decision-making motivators.

During interviews, focus on five principles:

1. Don’t sell or praise the product. Sometimes we do this unconsciously when describing a company’s product or service. Neutral characteristics can be easily presented in a way that makes them look advantageous and appealing. This leads to two distortions:

• People agree with you not to offend you.
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• In the moment of the interview, the person might show interest in the product, but in reality, they won’t actually make a purchase in the future.

2. Don’t believe compliments. During interviews, people may offer compliments out of politeness or enthusiasm. It’s not guaranteed that these praises accurately reflect reality. You might even choose not to record compliments to avoid distorting the research with them.

3. Don’t talk about the future. Immediately discard questions in the spirit of “what if… would you buy…”. They don’t contribute to sales because many people simply don’t know what they really want. Right now, the idea may seem cool and interesting to them, but when you come to them with the product, they’ll likely have more important matters to attend to.

Instead of hypothetical reasoning, it’s better to talk with the audience about the past and present:

❌ Would you use an orbital laser with auto-targeting on your car to warm up the engine in half a minute?

✅ How do you usually warm up your car’s engine?

Questions about what is already present in the client’s life will provide much more insight into their needs. Theorizing about the future makes it much more difficult to obtain information that aligns with reality.

4. Ask open-ended questions so that people can elaborate and provide more information:

❌ Do you think this product will solve your problem?

✅ What do you currently see as an issue for yourself?

5. Don’t impose the desired answer. Interviewers often try to confirm an existing hypothesis. Therefore, they unconsciously steer towards the answer they want to hear. This leads to a distorted picture: the buyer agrees with the interviewer on everything, is ready to buy anything, and doesn’t see any flaws in the product.

At the end of all your research, you’ll have a wealth of information that can be used on the website. However, there’s no need to cram everything in – the reader’s head will explode before they buy the product. Organize and structure the data beforehand, extracting the most important elements.

How to link information together

A great website highlights the product’s advantages and takes into account the buyer’s interests. We already have data on both aspects. Now it’s a matter of weaving everything together, discarding the unnecessary, and retaining the essential.

When preparing landing pages, we gather information into five groups:

• What sets the company apart from competitors.
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• What concerns buyers more profoundly.
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• What is unclear to users.
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• What is important to the audience.
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• What solves the problem for consumers.

Almost always, the information we place in these categories finds its way into the final version of the website.

Conduct a consolidated analysis. Read through all your notes again and highlight information that connects customer queries with your solution. For example:

Customer Concern: Not enough time to monitor contractors.

How You Solve It: Clients in your agency are accompanied by an account manager who sends a weekly report on tasks.

Website Text: You won’t have to spend a lot of time monitoring progress – every week, we send a detailed report on tasks. You will always be informed about the project’s progress even without deep immersion.

Segment Your Audience: Organize customer data to better understand which segments to target with website content. Here are common methods:

• Use Customer Avatar descriptions – profiles of the average customer. Describe their age, interests, and why they turn to your company. Multiple avatars may emerge, and you can work with all of them.
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• This method is very visual. When crafting texts, you can envision a real person rather than focusing on dry data. However, it’s not commonly used due to its time-consuming nature.

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Example of a Target Audience Portrait for a Self-Employed Service. When designing the website, one can envision this young woman and carefully consider the information she would like to see.

Name: Anna

Age: 28 years

Occupation: Copywriter, freelancer

Lifestyle: Anna values freedom and flexibility in her work. Being self-employed and active, she often finds herself on the go – in cafes, at events, or in the park. Her day is filled with work, creativity, and socialising.

Problems and Needs:

• Financial management: She wants an easy way to track income and expenses to plan her budget effectively.
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• Legislation: Tax-related and self-employment rules interest her, but she prefers the information to be presented in an accessible and understandable way.
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• Insurance: Concerned about her future, she wants to understand how to ensure insurance protection for herself.

Expectations from the website:

• Mobile-friendly interface: Considering her active lifestyle, it’s essential for her to manage all aspects of her business from her phone.
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• Clear articles and guides: Information about taxation and insurance is presented in simple language.
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• Income tracking tools: The ability to manage her finances and generate reports easily.

When designing the website, the designer and copywriter can imagine how Anna interacts with the content and tools, making them as user-friendly as possible for her.

You can simply make a sign with different groups and write down the needs, motivators, interests. Everything is approximately the same, but without representing a specific person.

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Here’s a simplified table with different groups and their corresponding needs, motivators, and interests:

Target Audience Groups	Needs	Motivators	Interests
Freelancers	Efficient financial management	Budget planning, financial security	Technology, productivity tools, self-improvement
Small Business Owners	Streamlined business processes	Increased revenue, cost savings	Business growth, industry trends, networking
Creative Professionals	Accessible legal and tax information	Compliance, risk mitigation	Artistic trends, design tools, legal insights
Remote Workers	Flexible work solutions, insurance options	Work-life balance, job security	Remote collaboration tools, travel, workspaces

This table provides a general overview of the diverse target audience groups, their specific needs, motivators, and interests. Designers and content creators can use this information to tailor the website to meet the expectations of each group effectively.

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Create a list of hypotheses. Review all the gathered information and brainstorm ideas for the future website. Highlight the company’s advantages that align with the audience’s needs. Present the theses in a way that is clear and beneficial to the potential user you have identified.

To filter out wild ideas that may arise, present the ideas with reasoning: “Let’s include X on the website because our clients want Y. This will convince them that our product is A and alleviate concern B.”

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Hypotheses that we formulated before designing one of the landing pages. It’s only after confirming such decisions that we should proceed to develop the prototype.

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Who should write text for the site?

After preparing the hypotheses, the next step is to defend them before the team. Those that survive the collective brainstorming session will be implemented on the website. When it comes to writing the text, there are different approaches:

1. Do it Yourself: This is a cost-effective option if you’re on a tight budget. If you can dedicate several hours a day to the website, you can manage all the texts within a week.
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2. Hire a Professional Copywriter: Hiring a good copywriter is crucial. Opting for a cheaper specialist might result in low-quality work. Sometimes fixing poorly written text can cost more than hiring a quality professional from the start. The cost of a copywriter could range from 30,000 to 50,000 rubles.
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3. Delegate to a Marketer: A marketer can outline the structure and then find a more affordable copywriter to produce decent texts. The expenses in this case would include paying the marketer for their work and an additional 10,000 rubles for the copywriter.
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4. Engage an Agency: Turning to an agency is a great option for a turnkey solution. Agency specialists will conduct research, identify copywriters, and then design and develop the website. While it provides a hassle-free experience, development costs start from 50,000 rubles.

If you’re interested in content marketing, subscribe to my Telegram blog → @molyanov

Every day I share my experience of attracting clients using blogs, social networks and the media.

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