Read your homepage headline out loud. Now answer honestly: has a customer, ever, in the wild, described your product using those words? If not, you’re paying a silent tax on every visitor: they arrive, read a sentence written from inside your company, don’t recognize their problem in it, and leave. Traffic was never the issue. Translation was.
The fix costs a week and no money: stop writing copy and start collecting it.
Where the words live
- Five customer conversations. Ask three questions and shut up: What was going on that made you look for something like this? What had you tried, and what was wrong with it? How would you describe what we do to a colleague? Record them (with permission) so you capture phrasing, not your summary of it.
- The ones who left or never bought. Churned users and lost deals speak the purest dialect of the pain, unclouded by politeness. One honest “why didn’t this work for you” conversation is worth five happy ones.
- Reviews of your competitors. Public review sites are thousands of customers describing the problem, the disappointments, and the wish list, in their own words, for free. Note the exact phrases in one-star and five-star reviews; both are copy.
- Your own inbox and sales calls. The questions people ask before buying are your FAQ. The moment in a call where they lean in is your headline.
Turning the pile into copy
Dump every collected phrase into one document and highlight repeats. When three different people describe the pain the same way (“drowning in DMs,” “the spreadsheet finally broke,” “losing bookings to the chains”), that phrase outranks anything your team brainstorms, because recognition beats cleverness every time a stranger lands on your page. Headline states their problem in their words; subhead states your fix in plain ones; proof follows immediately. That’s the whole formula.
Then test it where it counts
Swap the headline on your highest-traffic page and watch conversion, not compliments. Borrowed words routinely outperform polished ones, and when they do, roll the same language through your ads, your emails, and your founder posts so the whole funnel finally speaks one language: the customer’s. As a bonus, plain customer-language pages are exactly what AI search engines lift into answers, so the same fix that converts humans also feeds the machines doing the summarizing.
One week, five conversations, one headline swap. If you’d like a second pair of ears on what your customers are actually saying, that’s literally part of the Brand Audit, but the tape recorder works fine without us.