The Formality Trap
Why your marketing copywriting needs more humanity, less professionalism
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One of the biggest mistakes I see across the board in business copywriting is the aim to appear formal, clinically sterile, and “professional.”
While this might feel like the safe choice, formal marketing copywriting usually translates to:
🍞 Bland
🍞 Vague
🍞 Personality-less
🍞 Unrelateable
🍞 Forgettable
Probably not what you were going for!
Let’s break down the temptation to dilute your copywriting with formality and what to do instead.
The Temptation to Mask with Formality
Many folks have the mistaken impression that the smarter, more expert, more important you are, the more formally you would present yourself.
So the greater the gap you feel between how smart you consider yourself- how expert you consider yourself- how important you consider yourself- the more you will be tempted to mask your marketing in a cloak of formality.
I don’t know about you, but the most successful people I know don’t try to sound successful because they just are successful. So however they talk is what a successful person sounds like. And they know that.
Experts confident in their expertise don’t waste energy trying to talk like an expert. Because they know they are an expert. So how they talk is how an expert talks.
Someone with mastery of a complex, difficult subject matter doesn’t seek validation by impressing everyone with how complex and difficult the subject matter is. They make their knowledge helpful to others by explaining it in an accessible way. Didn’t Einstein say, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself”?
My point is that the more you try to sound like an expert, the less confidence you appear to have in your expertise.
And if it is the job of marketing to convince your ideal customers that you are best equipped to help them, the emphasis of your copywriting should be far less on what you sound like and far more how you can help your particular customer with their particular problem.
It’s not a resume. It’s a conversation.
Or, at least, it should be.
Vulnerability is actually better for your marketing.
When I read marketing copy that is overly formal, I tend to think one of two things:
Oof, they are not feeling very confident in themselves, their business, or their offer.
Someone who has no idea how to market wrote this.
Because formality tends to obscure vulnerability.
But good marketing *requires* vulnerability.
Here’s why:
Visibility is inherently vulnerable.
Yet you need to be visible in order for people to buy. Otherwise, they won’t know your solution is an option!
You have to make yourself a safe space for the vulnerability you’re asking customers for.
Which usually means allowing vulnerability from yourself, in your marketing.
Especially if you are helping to alleviate shame of some kind.
If your customers feel ashamed of experiencing the problem in the first place, they’ll feel much more comfortable relating to someone who can empathize with first-hand experience than someone who popped out of the womb utterly perfect in this area.
Someone declining to buy has nothing to do with how good or worthy you are as a person- but so many of us accidentally conflate these things.
The decision to buy is a matter of how much they think they will benefit from your offer. But when you are confusing sales for an acceptance or rejection of your value as a person, OF COURSE you’ll want to appear perfectly in an attempt to minimize the risk of rejection.
The paradox is that when that’s the focus of your marketing, you won’t sell as much. Because you’re not talking *to your people* about what matters to them.
When it’s just about how you want them to see you, your marketing is only asking- not giving.
But when marketing is about your aligned customer, you have the opportunity to give them immediate value simply by being lucky enough to stumble across your marketing.
Because you better believe they’ll form a positive impression of you when your marketing alone genuinely helps them with something they’re struggling with.
It’s vulnerable to imbue yourself with the power to validate yourself.
When the secret goal of your marketing is to validate how you think you’re “allowed” to see yourself based on how others react- you’re doing a bit of a bait and switch.
Like stereotypical used car salesman vibes: “I’m offering you something that sounds great but probably isn’t, because I want your money more than I want to do right by you.”
Deciding you’re not allowed to believe in the value of your offer until your sales validate it is actually assigning nonconsensual emotional labor to your customers. It’s asking others to buy something that you don’t buy yourself. It’s asking others to believe something that you don’t believe yourself. So you can feel better and profit. Which - I’m going to hold your hand while I say this - is a form of manipulation and gaslighting. The kind of tactic that has most of us feeling gross about marketing.
BUT. If you recognize yourself in this dynamic, it’s likely NOT because you’re a sleazy slimy manipulative meanie. (I typically don’t attract those folx in my consensual sales marketing!)
It’s because you’ve been deeply conditioned to believe that validation only gets to come from outside in and it’s “wrong” to let it come from inside out.
And that’s where we need an identity shift.
So that you know you’re allowed to grant *yourself* permission to be confident.
To see the potential for the value you provide.
To charge money for it.
To be worthy of receiving the money you want and need in all your glorious vulnerability and imperfection.
To charge a price to access your gifts before someone comes along and says you’re “allowed” to set that boundary for access to your labor, your energy, your genius.
And shifting your identity feels vulnerable.
Dropping a mask you’ve worn forever feels vulnerable.
Trusting yourself because you gave yourself permission to feels vulnerable.
But this is the kind of vulnerability that gets you real paid as an entrepreneur.
Exceptions… Kinda
Now you might be saying, “But Isa, I am in a clinically sterile profession! I’m being paid for my KNOWLEDGE- not my ability to empathize!”
OK, maybe emotive, casual, or super personality-ified isn’t the right strategy for picking which keywords to focus your SEO strategy on.
But, I don’t care what profession you’re in, research shows buying is an emotional decision based on how a person thinks they will feel when they buy.
If you’re a doctor with no bedside manner and your clinic’s marketing has no indication of empathy or willingness to entertain nuance in your patients’ unique cases, you’re going to have a hard time in private practice.
If you’re a lawyer who disdains your client and has no empathy for their situation, you better have a fantastic track record of making your clients a whole fuck ton of money or no one will want to work with you. And even then, if there is another lawyer who can make clients as much money without making it a miserable experience to work with them, who genuinely cares about the human behind the client, who do you think customers will prefer to work with?
Mere formality doesn’t give people much connect with.
Not nearly as much as marketing that communicates personality, values, and humanity.
Formality belongs to an outdated notion of “professionalism.”
Thanks to social media, marketing is *constantly* evolving, *constantly* being innovated. You don’t go viral for doing it the same way everyone else does. The opposite!
So if you want to stand out from the vast sea of competition, if you want to impart a strong pull to work with you- specifically you, you better be recognizable as, well, you.
That’s why uber-formal, polished-sounding marketing copy doesn’t do much for you.
Because formality sanitizes, smoothes over, blends you in.
And blends you into what?
An old notion of work that required us to check our humanity at the door? That for ages openly discriminated against women, people of color, queer folk, people with disabilities, and other marginalized identities? And while that discrimination might not be as commonly out in the open these days, you can’t argue the continued pay disparity! That’s the old institution of work that got to define what “professionalism” is.
Do you want to be “professional” by that yardstick?
Or did you go into business for yourself to create better options?
If you did, sound like it. Stop trying to assimilate into systems you’re trying to transform.
Boring doesn’t sell.
I associate formality with wordiness. Lots of decorum and talking around things.
But can you recall a single verbose tagline or slogan?
Probably not. The ones you remember tend to be short and impactful.
Nike’s infamous “Just do it” is just 3 words.
If I say: “Taste the rainbow” I bet you instantly recall the taste of Skittles.
If I say, “Easy, breezy, beautiful…” I bet you’ve joined in to say “Covergirl” with me.
We like it so short there is no time to lose their attention!
We like it so right to the point there is no time to lose their attention!
We like it so iconic it establishes instant relevance!
There isn’t time for polite, vague formality. We only have seconds (or less) to capture a web visitor's attention!
Sounding like everyone else doesn’t sell.
Look, the truth is your customers have infinite other options. Not just the sea of competition, but DIY or doing nothing at all.
Marketing is only effective when it makes buying a no-brainer. As in, they don’t have to think hard about it and get caught up in the analysis paralysis trap.
But, whenever you’re asking for an investment, you’re kinda asking customers for a trust fall. Trust that they will benefit the way you say they will. Trust that you’re a reputable brand that won’t screw them over. Trust that they can expect quality service.
Which is why customers typically need to feel familiar with a brand and encounter marketing messaging several times before they feel psychologically safe enough to buy.
So, part of getting the sale is getting them to remember who you are and have positive associations with your brand.
How you gonna do that if your marketing copy is all formality and no personality?
Sounding “like everyone else” does not give your customer the sense of safety you think it does.
Sounding like you does.
Write How You Talk
So if formality isn’t the move, what is?
It’s easier than you think. Write how you talk. Especially if you’re a coach, 1:1 service provider, or personal brand.
Yes, you want them to get a sense of what it’s like to work with you from your marketing. (YOU are the biggest selling point for working with you!)
But, the best part is that when your marketing sounds like you, it is instantly differentiated. You’re instantly distinguishable from the competition. Because nobody does you better than you.
Sound like too much work? We can take it off your plate. We can build a whole website in the voice of the best possible version of you- and it can be done with less than 3 hours of work on your part. Just show up for our strategy session at the start of the project, send us background info you already have, and we’ll work our magic and hone it til you love it. Learn more here.
