A while ago I sat down with a client who’d just had a beautiful new website built. She had worked on her colours, her photography, her copy. She was proud of it. Rightly so.
Then she asked her sister to take a look. The first thing her sister said was, ‘Oh I love it. But I didn’t realise you did that.’
Her sister had known her for forty-something years. Had been at the launch dinner. Had seen the Instagram posts. And still couldn’t quite say what she did.
That’s the bit that stayed with both of us.
Not because her sister was being unsupportive. Because if the person closest to her couldn’t articulate the business clearly, then the strangers landing on her website probably couldn’t either.
Why this happens to all of us
In the last post I talked about Innocent and how their brand was clear from day one. The honest follow-up to that is that most of us can’t see our own brand the way they saw theirs. We’re too close to it.
We know what we mean. We know what we offer. We know what makes our work different. And because all of that lives so loudly in our own heads, we forget that it’s not always landing on the outside.
There’s a gap between what you think you’re communicating and what people are actually receiving. Closing that gap is most of the work of building a strong brand.
The good news is, you don’t need to pay anyone to help you find it. You need three people, a coffee, and about half an hour.
The exercise
Pick three people who know you and know your business a bit, enough to have an opinion, not so much that they’ve memorised your homepage. We’ll come back to who in a minute.
Ask them three questions. Don’t prep them. Don’t send the questions in advance. You want their first answer, not their polished one.
Question one: What do you think I do?
This sounds patronising and it isn’t. You’re not testing them. You’re listening for the words they reach for.
If you’re a reflexologist and three people in a row say ‘something to do with feet, isn’t it?’ then that’s information. If you say you specialise in menopausal health and not one of them mentions it, that’s information too.
Pay attention to how vague or specific their answer is. Vague means your positioning hasn’t travelled. Specific means it has.
Question two: Who do you think I’m for?
This one is gold. Because the people closest to you have watched you work for years. They’ve seen who lights up about it, who refers you, who comes back. Their gut answer is usually more accurate than your own, because you’ve been thinking about it for so long you’ve abstracted it into a target market description, and they’re just remembering actual humans.
Listen for whether their answer matches the audience you’re trying to reach. If you’re aiming for busy mums in their forties and your best friend says ‘oh, retired women mostly’, that’s worth knowing before you spend another six months marketing to the wrong people.
Question three: What would you say about me if you were recommending me to someone?
This is the most important question of the three. Because this is the version of your brand that travels.
People don’t quote your tagline at parties. They don’t recite the headline on your homepage. They use their own words, the words that stuck with them, to describe you to someone else. Those words are what your brand actually is, out in the world. Not what you think you’re saying. What’s being received.
Listen for the phrases that come up more than once. Listen for the bits they remember. Listen for what they leave out.
Who to ask (and who not to)
This bit matters more than the questions, honestly.
Ask one person who has actually worked with you or bought from you. A past client. A customer who came back. The voice of someone who’s been on the receiving end of your work is worth more than almost anything else you’ll hear.
Ask one person who knows you well as a person but doesn’t really know your business. A close friend. A sister. Someone who’ll be a bit honest with you. You want their fresh-ish eyes.
Ask one person you trust to be straight with you. Not the one who’ll be nice. The one who’ll tell you what they actually think. Most of us know exactly who this is in our lives. We tend to avoid asking them things. Ask them this.
Don’t ask your partner. Not because they don’t love you, but because they’re inside the business with you. They’ve heard you rehearse the answers. They’ll repeat back roughly what you’ve already told them, even if they don’t mean to.
Don’t ask people who only know you through Instagram. Their answer will tell you about your social content, not your business. That’s a different exercise.
And don’t ask other small business owners in your field. Their answers are too informed. They’ll fill in the gaps for you, which is the opposite of what you need.
What to do with what you hear
Write it down. Verbatim if you can. The exact words they used.
Then look at the three sets of answers together and ask yourself two questions.
Where are they agreeing? If three people who don’t know each other reach for the same word or the same phrase, that’s the truth of your brand. That’s probably already a strength. Lean into it.
Where are they wide of the mark? If all three of them describe you in a way that doesn’t match the business you’re trying to build, that’s not their fault. That’s the gap. That’s what your marketing isn’t doing yet.
Sometimes the gap is small and easy to fix, a clearer line on your website, a tweak to your bio, more specificity in your captions. Sometimes it’s bigger and the work is to look at your whole positioning again. Either way, you can’t fix what you haven’t seen, and this is the cheapest, fastest way I know to see it.
A small warning
This exercise can sting a bit. Especially if you’ve been at this for a while and you thought you’d been clearer than you have.
That’s not a sign you’re bad at this. It’s a sign you’re a human running a business mostly alone, talking to yourself a lot of the time, and naturally drifting away from how it lands with other people.
Everyone I’ve ever done this with has come away with at least one thing they didn’t know. Usually two or three. None of them have regretted it.
The discomfort is the point. It’s where the next bit of clarity comes from.
And then?
Once you’ve got the words, you can start using them.
In your bio. On your homepage. In the way you describe your work on a discovery call. The phrases your customers and friends actually use are nearly always better than the phrases you’ve been polishing for months. They’re certainly more honest.
This is the bit Innocent got right from the start, the language on the bottle sounded like the language a person would use. They didn’t translate themselves into corporate. They just wrote the way they spoke and trusted that to do the work.
You can do the same. You just need to know what your own voice sounds like from the outside first.
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We work through positioning, voice, and messaging properly in the Marketing Mix Lab, with feedback, examples, and the kind of conversations that help you actually hear your own brand for the first time. The September cohort opens soon. Want to know more? Click on the link below!