Setting the tone - who are you talking to?
I am currently working with a client whose main target audience is the golf industry and after 12 months of trading the co-founders have decided their website content needs a revamp.
Although the company could still be considered a startup due to its relatively young age, the directors have started the critical process of finding their niche. The existing site was concise (perhaps a little too much so) with the necessary marketing mechanisms; call to actions, downloadable documents and information about the services on offer. There was just one glaringly obvious omission; the About Us page.
In an industry full of small businesses, the directors knew how important it was to inject personality into their virtual shop window.
The company is driven by two young, ambitious brothers with first-hand knowledge of the business of golf. Their main objective (in a nutshell) is to use their ground-up experience to help others in golf with creative solutions to their commercial challenges. With such a strong foundation under their belts the About Us page should be a walk in the park. Of course, they can relate to their customers in a commercial arena but they really are funny guys (in a dry, matter-of-fact way) and they wanted to inject some personality into their Bios and dazzle potential customers with their ability to find the humour in what is a very testing industry.
The trouble is, in contrast to the cool new generation of golfer you see on your television screens, many leaders of golf businesses in the UK are, lets just say, a little more traditional. Following much debate and research, the brothers decided that despite their desire to bring a more contemporary approach to golf, it was far more important to extol the virtues of their skills, reassuring any potential client of their ability to produce results. Their clear understanding of the commercial golf sector led them to settle on fuss-free, direct communication of their values as a company and their objectives as a team.
In summary, one of the most important things to think about when it comes to your website content is to consider who will visit and how you want to communicate with them. In this case my clients knew that when taking into account the dynamics involved in both theirs and their customer's businesses, the tone was top of the priority list.