Client said my landing pages felt 'corporate' and it hurt until I realized she was right

I was doing digital strategy for a local coffee shop in Portland. Spent two weeks on their landing page. Lots of buzzwords like optimize and scale. Client read it and just said 'this feels like a bank website.' I was annoyed at first. But she was right. I was writing for search engines and not for actual humans. Changed the whole thing to simple sentences and real customer quotes. The bounce rate dropped from 65% to 42% in a month. Has anyone else had a client call out something obvious you were missing?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_luna9d ago

That client quote about the bank website is actually gold. Had something similar happen with a client who ran a vintage clothing shop in Austin. I was all over the place with trendy design terms and she just looked at me and said "this reads like you're selling me a timeshare." She was completely right. I was so focused on making it look professional that I forgot the whole point was to feel authentic and approachable. Sometimes the best feedback is the most blunt because it cuts through all the noise you built up in your head. Those simple customer quotes are usually way more powerful than any clever copy we try to write.

pipera506d ago

Read a great piece in Harvard Business Review a while back about how customers actually trust plain language way more than fancy marketing speak. Something about how our brains are wired to see simple words as more honest. That vintage shop lady basically proved the whole theory in one sentence. It's like when you overthink a gift and the person just wanted a nice card and a coffee. We spend all this time trying to sound smart but really people just want to know you get them. Those blunt client moments are honestly the best lessons because they're impossible to argue with.