A lot of business owners write their marketing like they’re submitting it for a performance review. Every sentence is polished, safe, and accurate, and none of it sticks. If people read your content and forget it by lunch, the problem probably isn’t your expertise. It’s that there’s no person in it.
Most of us were trained to sound “professional.” Keep it formal, keep yourself out of it, let the credentials do the talking. That works in some places. Marketing usually isn’t one of them, because marketing is one human deciding whether to trust another human. That’s true whether you’re a solo consultant or a law firm with a marble lobby.
I learned this the slightly embarrassing way
When I started writing my own marketing, I wrote like a very competent robot. I came from programming, then an MBA, and I was determined to sound like the smartest, most buttoned-up person in the room. The copy was correct. It was also dry, and it didn’t get much of a response.
What changed things was putting more of me into it. My actual opinions, the way I’d explain something across a table, the occasional dry joke. People started responding, because now there was someone to respond to.
Professional and personal aren’t opposites. You can be precise, credible, and still sound like a human being. The goal isn’t to swap expertise for personality. It’s to stop hiding the person who has the expertise.
Information alone doesn’t convert
Most of what you know, your prospect can find for free. Search results, YouTube, AI tools, a competitor’s blog. Facts are a commodity now.
What they can’t get somewhere else is your take: how you think about the problem, what you’ve seen go wrong, what you’d tell them to skip. That’s what makes someone think “I want her working on this,” instead of “good article” and back to scrolling.
Where AI fits (and where it doesn’t)
AI tools are genuinely useful for structure, research, first drafts, and getting unstuck. But an AI tool doesn’t know your stories, your values, or the weird thing that happened with a client last spring that taught you something. If you don’t feed it those things, you get content that is accurate, tidy, and indistinguishable from everyone else’s.
The fix isn’t to avoid AI. It’s to treat it like a capable assistant who has never met your customers. Give it your raw material: voice notes, old emails you’re proud of, opinions you hold strongly. Then edit the output until it sounds like you again.
Formal writing has its place
Research papers, contracts, compliance documents, technical reports: formal language is right there. The readers are specialists, they’re looking for precision, and personality would get in the way.
But notice who reads those documents. Usually it’s people who already know you or already need what you’re offering. A formal white paper rarely turns a stranger into a client. Connection does that, and connection comes first.
What I look for when writing for clients
When I write blogs for clients, the first thing I do is go back through what they’ve already written: emails, social posts, old newsletters, transcripts if they have them. I’m looking for the moments where they sound like themselves. A strong opinion. A funny aside. The way they explain something to a nervous customer.
That material is the raw ingredient. When a client gives me plenty of it, the writing comes alive. When there’s nothing personal to work from, the content is harder to make memorable, with or without AI, and it tends to perform that way too.
Carolyn P. is a good example. The posts I’ve worked on for her started with her own writing, in her own voice. However much I edited or reorganized, the heart of each piece was still hers, and you can feel it when you read them. You can’t fake that, and you don’t have to if you start with the real thing.
How to put more of yourself into your marketing
You don’t need to overshare or turn every post into a diary entry. Start here:
- Say what you actually think. If you disagree with common advice in your industry, say so and explain why. Opinions are memorable. Summaries aren’t.
- Use real situations. “A homeowner calls us after the third contractor didn’t show up” beats “customers value reliability.”
- Write the way you talk. Use contractions. Read it out loud. If you’d never say a sentence to a client’s face, rewrite it.
- Keep a running file of your own words. Good email replies, things you said on a sales call, questions customers keep asking. That’s your best content source.
- Admit what you got wrong. A mistake you learned from builds more trust than another list of credentials.
- Keep the substance. Personality is the delivery, not a replacement for being useful.
If you’re not sure what your voice even is, that’s a brand question before it’s a copywriting question, and it’s worth sorting out once so everything else gets easier.
One question before you publish
People buy from people. Your expertise gets you considered; your personality is what makes someone remember you and reach out. Before you publish the next blog post, email, or page of website copy, ask one question: does this sound like a person I’d want to work with? If not, put yourself back in.
If you’d like help finding and writing in your own voice, book a strategy session and let’s talk it through.
Featured photo by Sable Flow on Unsplash