You know your offer is great. Your team knows it’s great. Your existing customers probably know it’s great too.
But what about new prospects? What happens when they land on your website? Can they see just how great your offer is?
If prospects land on your website and immediately find themselves wading through a sea of technical terminology, sprawling service descriptions, and sentences that make their eyes glaze over, there’s a good chance they aren’t able to see the value of what you do.
Complex B2B businesses often struggle to clearly explain what they do.
And it’s not because they don’t understand their service or product offering. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. They know it so deeply that they wind up overcomplicating it for their prospects.
Here’s how to take your complicated B2B business offering and make sure it’s value is communicated clearly on your website (without dumbing it down or stripping away everything that makes it valuable).
First, I want you to know that clear messaging isn’t the same as a simple offer
Your business might genuinely be complicated.
Perhaps you offer several interconnected services, your business has acquired multiple other businesses to create one mega-business, or your solutions needs to speak to different industries and teams. Or maybe the work itself is highly specialised, technical, or regulated.
The complexity of your business isn’t necessarily a problem.
The problem comes when you make your audience process it all at once.
Your website needs to be able to communicate your business offering in words your audience understands.
You can have the most complicated business in the world but I bet there’s a clear message behind what you do, who you do it for, and why they should choose you.
Start by simplifying your messaging (and I mean the whole message)
What usually happens when businesses try to clarify their messaging is that they will edit individual sentences. They shorten a paragraph here, replace a bit of jargon there, chop a few words out of the homepage headline, or run it through AI and ask it to “make this snappier”.
That can help. But complicated messaging is rarely a sentence-level problem. The bigger problem is usually that the business is trying to communicate too much at once. They haven’t decided what to prioritise.
When every feature, service, audience, benefit, and brand claim is given equal weight, your prospects has to work out the hierarchy for themselves.
Most won’t.
Your website copy should make your prospects lives easier not harder. So, make sure your copy isn’t unnecessarily complicating things for your target audience.
Before you start polishing your website copy, get clear on the core message behind each of these questions:
- Who is this for?
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- What outcomes do we help them achieve?
- What should they choose us over anyone else?
- What evidence makes those claims believable?
You should be able to answer those questions for each page on your website. And if you can’t, a short, snappy headline won’t save you.
As for how you get the answers to those questions, you need voice of customer (VoC) data. I’m talking about customer surveys, interviews, testimonials, case studies, customer support tickets, sales call transcripts, social media mentions, forum discussions…. soooo much data.
It’s the only way to truly get to the real answer behind those questions. And, luckily for you, it’s the exact type of work I love doing. So, if it’s been a while since you last dug into your audience data, get in touch to see how I can help with VoC data analysis and messaging development.
How to decide what to focus on when you’re simplifying your messaging
Simplifying your messaging isn’t about squeezing your entire offer into the fewest possible words.
You need to decide what your audience wants and needs to know. For example, your tech company might use an impressive combination of platforms, integrations, and proprietary processes. But your buyer’s first concern might be whether you can reduce reporting delays or bring fragmented data together. If that’s the thing they care about most, that’s the message you should lead with.
Once you’ve shown you understand their wants and needs, you can then start explaining how you help and talking about your unique approach.
A useful rule is:
Start with the customer’s problems and desired outcomes. Then introduce your business offerings as evidence that you can solve it.
That approach lets you simplify the way to speak about your complex offering by picturing it through the eyes of your audience.
By doing that, you’ll change your messaging from “we deliver innovate, end-to-end digitral transformation solutions through a suite of integrated technologoies and proprietary processes” to a much easier to digest message of “replace disconneted systems and manual processes with one joined-up way of working with data”.
The second version doesn’t explain the whole offer. It just gives the prospect a clear reason to keep reading.
The problem with trying to say everything everywhere
Another common problem I see technical B2B businesses make is this: They make the same broad claim everywhere.
Their homepage, service pages, campaign pages, and About page all make the claims about how their experienced, innovative, customer-focused, and tailored.
There’s a time and a place to introduce those messages. But you don’t need to do it on every single page.
Clear website reveal information gradually, and only when it matters. The homepage established relevance and creates direction, encouraging people to navigate deeper through your website. Service pages explain specific problems, outcomes, and approaches while positioning your service as the solution. Case studies provide evidence. About pages strengthen trust. Supporting content answers deeper questions and build authority.
Rather than trying to make every single page carry your entire business sales pitch, focus on making each page do its own job well.
And if you’re planning to talk about how “innovative” your product is or how it’s “tailored” to your customer, make sure you’re backing it up with real evidence too.
Do Voice of Customer research and use your target audience’s actual words
One of the quickest ways to make B2B messaging harder to understand is to write it entirely from inside the business.
Internal teams naturally talk in the language of capabilities, delivery models, product categories, and organisational structure. You’ve got your own jargon and ways of speaking about things.
Your customers, however, tend to talk about what’s gone wrong, what they need to change, what they’re trying to achieve, and what they’re worried might happen next.
Compared to your target audience, you’re simply too close to your product. You know it so damn well… and that’s kind of your downfall.
The way your customers talk is a lot more emotionally charged… even when they’re being entirely practical. It’s part of being human. We’re emotional beings. So, your messaging should reflect those human emotions that exist within the scenarios related to your product or service.
Your company might describe its offer as a “scalable, cloud-based business intelligence ecosystem”.
Meanwhile, your customer is simply thinking “We’ve got data in six different systems and nobody can trust the reports”. They’re frustrated. They’re tired. There’s emotional weight behind the practical problem.
Both descriptions could refer to the same problem. Your “scalable, cloud-based business intelligence ecosystem” just might be the thing they need to solve that issue of fragmented data and untrustworthy reports. But only one of those descriptions sounds immediately familiar to the person experiencing it.
So, before you start talking about your “scalable solution” you need to first talk about your customer’s pain-points, needs, motivations, and experiences in the real, human, emotive words that make them feel seen and heard.
Write your website copy from a user-led perspective and you’ll see how much it impacts engagement and conversions.
Where to find Voice of Customer insights
You don’t need to launch a six-month research programme before writing your website copy.
It’s likely you’ve already got tons of valuable VOC insights inside your business ready for you to dive into.
You can use:
- Sales call recordings and notes
- Customer surveys and interviews
- Enquiry forms
- Onboarding conversations
- Testimonials and case studies
- Support tickets
- Reviews
- Search queries and on-site search data
- Conversations with customer-facing teams
- Social media and forum discussions from your target customers
When analysing VOC data, you want to look for repeated language around the situation that prompted them to look for help, the problems they’re experiencing, the impact it had, what they’ve tried, what makes them hesitant to take action, what they hope to achieve, and what they look for in a supplier… amongst other things.
When I’m conducting VOC research, I codify insights against a number of behavioural motivations. I then use this to create a clear picture of your users’ needs and develop a user-led messaging strategy that’s backed up by real data.
Write in your customers’ words without blindly copying them
Voice of customer research doesn’t mean you just paste a transcript onto your homepage. But it gives you the bones for what your messaging should sound like if you want it to connect with the right people.
Identify the patterns in VOC data and preserve the language that your customers genuinely use. Then, bring that to life through your website and use it to translate your expertise into something that aligns with what they’re actually experiencing.
Good B2B messaging creates a bridge between what your customers already understand and what they need to learn from you. They aren’t necessarily thinking “I need this particular solution”. Instead, they’re thinking more in terms of “I want to solve this problem/achieve this goal” so your messaging should reflect those needs, not just speak in features and benefits.
Speaking your customers’ language makes it a heck of a lot easier for them to see how you can help.
Understand what your audience needs from each page
One reason B2B websites become bloated is because you try to communicate everything, everywhere, all the time.
But your website doesn’t need to explain everything in the hero section. It just needs to help someone understand enough to scroll down to the next section.
When writing clear website messaging, I live by the rule of one. This essentially means that your company website should focus on one thing at a time: One offer, one audience, one action.
On your homepage, you want to find the common thread that connects all your offerings and all your target audiences. That then becomes the one message for your homepage.
So, instead of trying to sell 18 different services to 5 different audiences you find the one clear message that connects them all.
Find the clear message you need to communicate in each section, and on each page, of your website. Then connect them all together to create a joined-up journey that encourages people to keep moving forward.
Then, your service pages should each focus on one clear thing. Ideally, it should focus on one service, be written for one audience, and clearly communicate what one problem it solves and what one goal it helps them achieve. And it should have one clear call-to-action.
Then, you can pepper in the supporting elements like proof points, benefits, and lower-ticket conversion actions.
Before writing any page, ask:
- Who is mostly likely to visit this page?
- What problem might they be experiencing that we can help we?
- What goal are they trying to achieve?
- What one service or product can we present as the solution?
- What information do they need to feel confident moving forward?
- What questions are they trying to answer?
- What do we want them to do next?
The answers to those questions will help shape what the page says and clarify what action you want visitors to take after landing on the page. It should also help prevent you from getting distracted by other information that’s not relevant.
Different pages need to answer different questions
Every page on your website has a job to do.
Your homepage helps visitors understand:
- If they’re in the right place
- the broad problem you solve
- the main ways you help
- why your business is credible
- where to go next
On service pages, your website visitors likely need:
- more detailed explanation of the problem
- the business impact of solving it
- the solution you can offer them
- how your approach works
- evidence that you can deliver
- a sensible next step
As for people visiting your case studies, they might be wondering:
- have you solved a problem like ours before?
- do you understand businesses like ours?
- what did you actually do?
- what changed as a result?
And people landing on your blog articles are likely looking for information to help them solve problems, understand things better, and evaluate their options.
Page intent is important so make sure you map out where each page on your website sits within the wider user journey. Some pages, like blogs, will sit at the awareness stage, case studies and comparison guides can help at the consideration stage, and service pages and sales page are more valuable at the conversion stage.
Every page should offer a meaningful next step
The action you want someone to take won’t always automatically be “contact us”.
That might be appropriate for a high-intent service page. But someone reading an informative article might be better off being directed towards a related guide, a case study, an on-demand webinar, service overview, or diagnostic offer.
Consider what next step your audience might expect to take after visiting each page on your website, then create a user journey that aligns with those expectations.
It’s also worth noting that not every page visitor will be ready to convert straight away so you should also consider building in lower-effort conversions actions. That might mean asking them to:
- explore a relevant service
- read a customer story
- compare possible approaches
- download a useful resources
- book an audit or consultation
- start a conversation with your team
Clear messaging doesn’t just help people understand the page. It helps them understand what step to take next… and B2B website messaging done well makes it easy for them to take that next step.
Finally, connect the full user journey
People rarely experience your website in the neat order shown in your navigation.
What’s more realistic is something like this:
They land on an old blog post through Google → They read another blog post that’s linked from the first one → They click on your About page → They close your website and disappear from three weeks → Then, they stumble across your LinkedIn → They click to read a case study on your webiste → They open a service page → They leave your website again → They come back a month later and read your service page again → They download a free playbook → They get added to your email marketing list → Months go by of them occasionally reading your emails → They click a link in the email to visit your website → They go to a sales page → They fill out the enquiry form
The user journey isn’t a smooth, straight line. It’s squiggly and messy with more loops than a white knuckle rollercoaster. But, every time they engage with your company’s website or marketing activity, they gain another piece of the story.
If each of those pieces of your marketing strategy don’t connect, the journey will breakdown.
When writing your website copy, you need to assess how each individual page fits into that wider journey. The message needs to be consistent between each page and with your other marketing channels.
If every page is created separate from the wider journey you end up with messaging that changes from page-to-page, value proposition that shifts depending on what people are engaging with. One page might make bold promise that another completely contradicts. High-traffic articles will lead to dead ends. And useful proof will sit three clicks away from the service it validates.
Even the strongest page will underperform if it isn’t connected to the wider user journey that it sits within.
Give every page a job
Think of your website as a interconnected journey rather than a collection of standalone pages.
The best way to do this is to physically draw it out and then draw lines between your pages to see how they connect. You’ll soon see where connections are missing.
Before drawing the connections between the pages on your website, each page should do at least one of these things:
- attract the right people
- help them identify their problem
- present a possible solution
- demonstrate your expertise
- answer a question or objection
- build trust through evidence and expertise
- help them compare their options
- move them towards a commercial conversion
You also need to get clear on the intent behind the page. Does it exist purely for educational reasons, is it there to help people weigh up their options, or is it designed to get them to convert? This page intent can then by mapped to various stages of the marketing funnel, be it awareness, consideration, conversion, or to uphold post-conversion phases of loyalty and advocacy.
Once you know the role and intent of a page, you’ll find it easier to identify what should come before or after it.
If someone lands on an educational article, which service pages or case studies should it link to? If they’re exploring a service, where can they see proof? If a case study builds confidence, does it also offer a clear route to the related service and how to get in touch?
Internal links and calls to action aren’t just SEO or design details. They help turn scattered content into a coherent journey for your audience.
Keep the core message consistent while adding deeper detail
Connected doesn’t mean repetitive… and that’s where many B2B businesses go wrong when trying to make their messaging consistent. They end up making each page say the same thing so visitors wind up not being able to tell the difference between your different service offerings and why they should choose one over the other. Worse, they end up not being able to tell your business apart from your competitors because you all sound the exact same.
Your central positioning should stay consistent across the website. But, and this is the important part, each page should add deeper detail that’s unique to the focus of that page.
Think of it as progressive clarity that reinforces your brand positioning and deepens your value:
- the homepage gives visitors the big picture of what your business does
- service pages explain how that specific service solves a particular problem
- Case studies prove you can do it
- Articles help buyers understand the problem, approach, and options
- Sales pages make it easy for people to take action
- Industry pages make that relevance specific to that sub-audience’s unique needs
Rather than repeating the same message across each page, see where you can add deeper value.
Clear B2B website messaging is just complexity that’s well organised
Complicated B2B offers often become confusing online because the website mirrors the business from the inside out.
Clear messaging lets your target audience see the best parts of your complex offering. Clear messaging done right starts with knowing what your customers need, prioritises the most important message, and uses words they recognise. It gives every page purpose and connects those pages into a journey that builds trust, authority, and conversions.
If your website contains all the right information about your business but isn’t connecting with your target audience or driving conversions, my Conversion Copy Audit can help you identify exactly where the message has become unclear… and what you need to change.
You’ll get a focused review of three key pages, practical recommendations, sample rewritten copy, and a walkthrough explaining how to make the journey clearer and more persuasive.
Find out more about the Conversion Copy Audit.
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