The internet is busy. It’s filled with jargon, buzzwords, and walls of text. Businesses will often use intellectual or industry-specific language in an attempt to sound smart. However, this can turn off readers and turn them away from the business or the brand. A business’s messaging is often centered on what it wants to say rather than what its audience wants or needs to hear.
This is where Click Rain’s people-centered messaging comes into play. It drops the ego and focuses on serving the human on the other end of the screen.
By simplifying the message and communicating naturally, brands become more approachable and relatable to their customers, creating space for a real conversation. Ensuring these five essentials, we can create messaging for your brand that not only breaks through the noise but also sticks:
Accessible content: Make sure your message is easy to navigate and understand, regardless of users’ physical or cognitive capabilities.
Write for people, not search engines: Keep your messaging focused on the reader, and your search rankings will improve.
A balanced message: Making sure what you want to say is conducive to what the reader wants or needs to hear.
Strategic context: Keep important information front and center.
Connection first, conversion second: Build trust with your audience before you try to sell them on anything.
At Click Rain, our people-centered messaging goes hand in hand with our mission to simplify digital, enabling us to create comprehensive yet comprehensible websites and other digital media.
Writing for humans ensures we write accessible content. While accessibility is typically specific to websites, it can be applied to other digital media.
Accessibility removes barriers for readers, so that anyone—regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities—can understand the message. As it relates to websites, we create content using common vocabulary to clarify what each page is about.
By simplifying the message, we respect users’ time, reading level, and learning capacity. The reader doesn’t have to spend extra time deciphering the message; they are met with simple, clear content that is easy to understand.
This also applies to content you may not think about right away, such as text on a button. We provide more context for where the button will lead the viewer. Instead of a button that says “Click Here” to lead users to a form-fill page, it says “Fill Out the Form”. Prioritizing concise, accessible content gives users more mental space to take action on your site and less time wasted trying to understand what it’s about.
Accessibility is layered in a website’s code, ensuring functionality, readability, and more. At the end of the day, accessibility is about people. When we write in a way that’s accessible to everyone, we create a space where anyone can become knowledgeable about the subject matter.
While our world is shifting towards AI search and writing for search engines is entering the conversation, Google makes a different argument.
In their helpful content document, Google said that writing for people is actually more beneficial for your search rankings than writing for search engines. Google ranks sites that provide useful, people-first content higher than those that don’t.
The article encourages you to ask yourself a series of questions to ensure your content is people-first, including:
Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience?
Ensuring your site supports the user is crucial to its success. If your site prioritizes experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), it’s on the right track to performing well in the search engine rankings.
Sometimes what the client wants us to say doesn’t necessarily line up with what their audience needs to hear. When that happens, we work with the client to get to the meat of the message. Asking ourselves, “So what?” helps us determine which features of the client’s business to highlight to attract customers.
We want to bridge the gap between what is relevant for the user and what is true about the brand.
The messaging strategy starts with understanding users’ pain points and finding ways to relieve them through our content. Knowing what they lack gives us a better roadmap for what features we want to push across all media.
Once we understand what the audience needs to hear, we begin writing. We’ll promote products or services, ensuring content is accurate and trustworthy, but also gripping for the audience.
Keeping context at the center of your website lets users understand your business and what you’re selling without multiple scrolls.
Furthermore, users sometimes access a site on different devices, so you should be mindful not only of content length but also of how it appears on screen.
One user on a mobile device may need condensed information that fits on their screen for quick reading. In contrast, another user on a laptop has more screen space for content and may be curious about your brand's story, but might feel overwhelmed if there are too many words on a single page.
It’s essential to be aware of all user types when writing so that your messaging is concise, easy to skim, and not too lengthy. Don’t draw out the context and take your users on a journey they don’t have time for. Keep your information front and center, and your users will have a better on-page experience learning who you are and taking action.
As a business, you want to create conversions on your website. Whether that’s directing people to make a purchase or contact the team for more information, you want people to take action on your site. However, it’s very hard to make a conversion without the initial connection.
When it comes to a website, you have to explain who you are and how you benefit the user before you create a call to action that encourages them to make a decision. Not rushing the decision-making process gives you a better chance of driving conversions than being too hasty.
At Click Rain, we believe in “others before self”; it encourages our employees to put each other first. This feeds into the overarching people-centered culture at Click Rain, which then spills over into how we advocate for our clients’ customers through messaging. We create messaging centered on connection, not conversion, ensuring readers are treated as individuals first, not just another interaction.
Creating connections works in tandem with all the other essentials we’ve listed in this blog. Writing content that is accessible, people-first, balanced, and comes at the right time lays the groundwork for a connection to be formed, trust to be built, and a customer who returns again and again.
In an increasingly technological world, people-centered messaging is your best move to stand out from the clutter. Ensuring your message is clear, informative, and not too busy will go a long way when customers browse the web for a product or service like yours.
Talk with the Click Rain team today to see how we can advocate for your customers and provide people-centered messaging that benefits their experience and your bottom line.
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