The phrase initially went viral to describe bizarre, algorithm-chasing visuals—think mass-produced pictures of a shrimp Jesus or physics-defying cartoons aimed at toddlers (aka Baby Slop). But while consumer feeds are drowning in weird imagery, B2B marketing is drowning in something much more insidious: text slop.

Generative AI makes it incredibly easy to produce blog posts, social updates, and sales emails at a massive scale. Right now, this feels like a competitive advantage to a lot of teams. Marketing budgets suddenly go much further, allowing massive B2B content production and sweeping SEO programs to be executed at a fraction of the cost.

But the inevitable is happening: everything is starting to sound exactly the same.

The internet is becoming jam-packed with content that looks technically acceptable and grammatically flawless, but is emotionally bankrupt and devoid of original insight.

I’m not the first to notice it, either. Your audience is noticing. And now, CMOs and marketing leaders are realizing that using AI slop as a substitute for human judgment and a unique point of view is a massive liability.

The Budget Trap: Scaling Output at the Expense of Impact

A massive reallocation of marketing budgets is driving this surge in AI-generated content. Facing pressure to “do more with less,” B2B teams view generative AI as the ultimate efficiency hack.

McKinsey & Company estimates that generative AI can increase marketing productivity by up to 15% of total marketing spending. To stretch their dollars, companies are cutting specialized writers and agencies, pouring those funds into AI licenses and automated workflows to maximize volume.

The strategy is simple: lower the cost per asset, increase the output.

But prioritizing publishing volume over narrative control creates a dangerous cycle. In a 2025 study published in the International Journal of Market Research, researchers S. Ozturkcan and A.A. Bozdağ define this cycle as AI Washing and AI Booing:

• AI Washing: Companies overstate their use of AI, turning it into a hollow buzzword to seem cutting-edge.
• AI Booing: The inevitable public backlash when the content fails to deliver value, resulting in disappointment, fatigue, and degraded brand trust.

Optimization and scale cannot manufacture meaning. When efficiency becomes your only goal, you may end up pushing your buyers away with obvious AI slop.

Does AI Slop Kill Conversions?

B2B buyers are actively punishing brands that trade original insight for AI-generated volume. In high-stakes purchasing decisions, trust is the only currency that matters. When a prospective buyer reads a 2,000-word AI slop article that says absolutely nothing, they don’t just leave the page—they disqualify the vendor.

Analysts at Gartner predict that as AI slop floods the internet, brands will face severe visibility and trust hurdles, leading 80% of enterprise marketers to establish dedicated content authenticity functions by 2027 just to combat brand dilution. Buyers are scrutinizing content harder than ever, and the consequences of shipping unguided slop are immediate:

• Skyrocketing Bounce Rates: Buyers instantly recognize the generic cadence and fake confidence of unguided AI. They bounce within seconds to find a vendor with actual lived experience.
• Loss of Brand Authority: If your insights are just aggregated summaries scraped from your competitors’ websites, you offer zero unique value. You stop being a thought leader and become an echo chamber.
• Pipeline Stagnation: B2B buyers consume content to validate your expertise before they ever talk to sales. AI slop fails this validation test. It explicitly signals that you don’t understand their specific pain points well enough to write about them.

You cannot convert a buyer who doesn’t trust your expertise. By treating content creation as a mere data-entry task for an LLM, companies are actively degrading the very trust they need to close deals.

The Growing Divide Between Governed vs. Unguided AI Slop Content

As content strategist Daniel Hebert recently pointed out, the problem with most AI slop output isn’t that a machine touches it. The problem is that nobody gives the machine enough truth, constraints, structure, or standards to work with. Hebert argues that the real divide in modern marketing is between governed and unguided content.

When a marketer types “write a 1,200-word blog post about B2B SaaS attribution” into an LLM, the resulting draft suffers from classic slop symptoms. If you know what to look for, the tell-tale signs of AI writing are glaringly obvious:

• Generic, “me-too” framing
• Fake, unearned confidence
• Zero lived point-of-view
• Plausible-sounding claims that aren’t grounded in the reality of your specific product or an audience’s actual pain

The problem here isn’t the AI—it’s the lack of a content operating model.

If your content strategy consists of treating an LLM like a vending machine, you aren’t running a content system. You’re gambling. As I’ve noted before, effectively using AI for writing website copy requires strict guardrails, not just a handful of generic prompts.

Google is Actively De-Indexing AI Slop

If the loss of buyer trust isn’t enough to make you rethink an automated content factory, consider this: Google is actively punishing it.

The search engine is no longer passively letting AI-generated spam clog up its results. Starting with the massive March 2024 Core Update and continuing through aggressive algorithmic sweeps in late 2024 and 2025, Google has completely overhauled its spam policies to target what they formally call Scaled Content Abuse.

According to extensive tracking by Search Engine Journal, Google’s definition of this abuse explicitly targets “creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it’s created.”

When brands use AI to stitch together programmatic content solely to manipulate search rankings, Google doesn’t just lower their rank—they de-index the pages entirely. Hundreds of websites were wiped from search results overnight during these initial rollouts.

And they aren’t just targeting small-time spammers. Google also launched a massive crackdown on Site Reputation Abuse, widely known as “Parasite SEO.”

Search Engine Journal reported that Google began issuing severe manual actions and algorithmic penalties to major publishers and brands who were caught hosting third-party, unguided AI content or affiliate pages just to leverage their domain authority.

The message from Google is clear: If you are using AI to pump out volume without close first-party oversight, editorial judgment, and original value, your content won’t just fail to convert, it might get your domain penalized.

The Anti-AI Opportunity is Actually a Human Opportunity

So, how do you stand out in a sea of AI slop?

The next wave of B2B marketing advantage won’t come from who can publish the most. It comes from restraint. The companies that win treat their brand voice as a competitive moat. They publish fewer, sharper, and highly opinionated pieces.

To do this, you need to think in layers:

1. Governance & Truth: Defining your source of truth, brand voice, and market point-of-view before a single word is drafted.
2. Blueprinted Execution: Matching the structure of the content to the actual intent of the buyer journey, rather than relying on generic prompt templates.
3. Strategic Orchestration: Pacing production strategically based on demand, rather than publishing randomly just to fill a calendar.
4. Quality Gates: Implementing a strict editorial mechanism to reject drafts that are generic, off-voice, or disconnected from the core product story.

Going back to ‘old-fashioned’ content production is never going to happen. Instead, to make these new AI tools work, you need to define and enforce strict standards.

Stop Publishing AI Slop

The stakes for B2B content are higher than ever. If your recent blog posts can be swapped with a competitor’s and no one notices, your brand is already at risk.

You don’t need to ban AI tools to create great content, but you do need to relocate where the human judgment happens. That is exactly what I do at CopyAdsContent.com.

As a freelance B2B copywriting partner, I don’t just fill pages with words. I bridge the context gap that algorithms can’t cross. I work directly with your team to:

• Extract the raw, brilliant, lived insights from your founders and Subject Matter Experts.
• Encode your unique product truth and brand voice into a repeatable system.
• Build the governance and quality gates necessary to ensure every piece of content actually means something to your buyers.
• Deliver sharp, opinionated, and high-converting copy that cuts through the noise.

Efficiency does not guarantee effectiveness, and scale does not guarantee impact.

If you are ready to stop churning out generic content and start publishing copy that leads with human insight, let’s talk.

Imagine a B2B buyer has just performed a high-intent Google search to solve a burning operational bottleneck. They open your homepage alongside seven other tabs from your direct competitors. They are not reading; they are hunting. They give your site exactly five seconds to answer three basic questions:

• What do you do?
• Who is it for?
• Why should I care?

If your hero section reads like a soup of corporate placeholders — something like “Leveraging strategic solutions to optimize modern enterprise synergy” — they don’t pause to decode it. They close the tab and consider a competitor.

You might instinctively assume this is a copy problem. You look at your bounce rates and think, “We just need a punchier copywriter.” But you cannot rewrite your way out of unclear positioning. Vague website messaging is simply a writing symptom of a much deeper strategic disease.

As globally recognized B2B positioning expert April Dunford frequently highlights, your positioning is the absolute foundation of your sales pitch. When your website copy is built on vague abstractions, it doesn’t support your sales process—it actively sabotages it. Your reps end up spending the first half of every discovery call trying to undo the prospect’s confusion and clarify what your product actually does.

Your website shouldn’t be an obstacle your sales team has to apologize for or correct. It should be doing the heavy lifting before a call is ever booked.

The Cost of Confusion (Backed by Data)

When you publish a landing page with unclear messaging, you aren’t just offending copywriters; you are actively draining your revenue pipeline.

Recent enterprise data shows that the modern B2B buying journey has radically shifted toward an autonomous, self-directed path where your website acts as your primary Closer.

1. The 10-Second Filter

According to user experience research by the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), users form a first impression of a website within mere milliseconds, but they typically decide whether to stay or leave a page within 10 to 20 seconds.

If you want a prospect’s attention for longer than that, you must communicate your core value proposition within that initial window. If your site fails the informal “5-second test,” you are paying to drive traffic that immediately bounces.

2. The Dark Funnel Shortlist

Data from 6sense’s B2B Buyer Experience Report reveals a stark reality for vague websites: buyers delay contacting a vendor until they are roughly 61% to 69% of the way through their total buying journey.

By the time a prospect actually initiates outreach, they have already independently established their purchase requirements and built a mental shortlist of preferred vendors.

In fact, 6sense found that 95% of buyers ultimately purchase from a vendor that was on their “Day One” shortlist. If your website copy is too abstract to land you on that initial list, your sales team won’t even get the chance to pitch.

3. “Value Clarity” Dictates Deal Size

Gartner research highlights that winning a high-intent B2B deal requires what they call Value Clarity—a buyer’s explicit understanding of how a solution improves outcomes for their specific role and business context.

Buyers who achieve value clarity early in their digital research are twice as likely to report a high-quality, high-dollar deal compared to those forced to navigate a confusing, low-confidence buying experience.

The Qualitative Smoke Detector: “Sales Correcting the Website”

While the quantitative data from Gartner and NN/g paints a grim picture for the balance sheet, the sharpest qualitative signal of broken messaging happens right on your discovery calls.

When your digital footprint is ambiguous, inbound prospects arrive misaligned.

Instead of diving into a high-value strategic conversation, your sales reps are forced to burn the first 15 minutes of the call playing defense—correcting basic misconceptions, explaining what the product actually does, and filtering out completely unqualified leads.

If your reps are constantly opening calls with, “Let me back up and clarify what we actually do,” your website is actively introducing friction that elongates your sales cycles and drags down close rates.

Most founders reading this think their copy is the exception. It almost never is. You’re too close to it to see what your buyer sees.

Real-World Teardowns of B2B Websites with Unclear Messaging

To understand what value clarity looks like, we have to look at how successful B2B brands transitioned away from abstract category statements and into hyper-focused positioning.

Harry Dry’s 3-Part Fluff Filter

To audit whether your messaging is positioning or just marketing fluff, run it through the framework popularized by Harry Dry of Marketing Examples:

The Fluff Test Question	The Bad Fluff	The Good Positioning
Can I visualize it?	“Streamlined workflows for modern teams.” (No visual context)	“AI that catches billing errors before invoices are sent.” (Highly visual)
Can I prove it true or false?	“We help businesses grow.” (Unfalsifiable; everyone claims this)	“We book qualified sales meetings with cybersecurity executives.” (Falsifiable)
Can a competitor copy paste this?	Yes. Every B2B SaaS on Earth uses this language.	No. Only a highly specialized vendor can back this claim up.

Case Study: Loom

Image Source: Wynter

• The Before (Abstract Category): Early on, Loom leaned into high-level, generic hybrid-work messaging, framing itself broadly as “an essential tool for the modern workspace” or using taglines like “Show it, say it, send it.” While catchy, any communication tool on earth could claim to be an “essential workspace tool.”
• The After (Sharp Positioning): “Loom on. Meetings off.” They backed this headline up with a concrete metric: “Get 29% fewer meetings.”
• Why it works: They stopped describing the mechanics of video recording and focused entirely on the alternative they were replacing: painful, calendar-clogging meetings.

Case Study: Zuko (Form Analytics Software)

Image Source: Wynter

• The Before (Feature-Heavy Jargon): Zuko’s early homepage was cluttered with technical explanations of form analytics mechanics, paired with an unprovable corporate promise of “reducing marketing budget waste.”
• The After (Outcome-Driven): “Get more form submissions.” They cut the fluff, changed their headline to a direct consumer outcome, and paired it with a clean screenshot of the actual product UI.
• Why it works: B2B buyers don’t wake up wanting “form analytics platforms”; they wake up wanting more people to complete their checkout or signup forms.

The 3-Layer Solution Framework

If your website is failing the 5-second test, do not open a blank Google Doc and start tweaking adjectives. Follow this strict, top-down prescription.

Layer 1: Positioning First (Before Any Writing)

Before a single word is typed, you must gain absolute clarity on four foundational business metrics:

• Who specifically is this for? (Not “businesses.” Define the exact role, company size, and specific situation—e.g., Head of People at mid-market tech companies scaling from 100 to 500 employees).
• What acute problem do they have right now? What pain point triggered their Google search today?
• What is the alternative they are comparing you to? (Including manual spreadsheets, hiring an intern, or simply choosing to “do nothing”).
• What do you do that the alternatives cannot touch?

Layer 2: Establish the Message Hierarchy

Once the positioning is locked, map your homepage hero section using a strict structural template designed for the skim-reader:

• HERO HEADLINE: The ultimate outcome the buyer wants, written in their exact words
• SUB-HEADLINE: Who specifically it is for + exactly how you deliver that outcome
• PROOF LAYER: Recognizable logos, data-backed results, or a named testimonial
• PRIMARY CTA: One single, clear, high-contrast call-to-action repeated throughout

Layer 3: The “Sales Call Test”

Read your homepage copy completely out loud. Ask yourself: Would my top sales rep ever say these exact words to a living, breathing prospect on a discovery call?

If a human being would sound ridiculous saying it out loud, it is marketing-speak. Rewrite it until it sounds like natural, professional human conversation.

B2B Messaging Anti-Patterns to Delete Immediately

Audit your current site right now and purge these conversion killers:

• “Solutions” as a noun: If you describe your company as an “enterprise software solution,” you have said nothing. Tell the user exactly what the software is (e.g., automated payroll software).
• The “We help businesses…” opener: This is a flag of weak positioning. If you help all businesses, you help no one.
• Adjective Stacks: Stringing together empty descriptors like “innovative, robust, cutting-edge, results-driven, and seamless.”
• Literal Cliché Graphics: Hero images featuring generic corporate handshakes, standard stock laptops, or pixelated cityscapes. If your image doesn’t provide product or service context, delete it.
• The Triple-CTA Paradox: Placing three competing buttons side-by-side in your hero section ([Get Started] [Book a Demo] [Learn More]). This forces the buyer to map their own journey. Pick the single most effective action and stick to it.

Make Your Website’s Messaging Crystal Clear

If your homepage fails the 5-second test, no amount of rewriting will save it. You’ll just produce clearer versions of the same vague claim.

The fix runs in this order: positioning, then message hierarchy, then copy, then design.

Most agencies run it backwards — pretty layout first, words last — which is why the rebuild never actually fixes the problem.

At CopyAdsContent, I work the order in reverse: nail the positioning, map the message hierarchy, then let the words dictate how the page gets built.

If your website is making your sales team work harder than it should, let’s talk.

“We’ve been in business since 1988.”

You’ve probably seen a line like the one above slapped across a local business website, branded t-shirts, and the side of company trucks.

Just as Lysol kills 99.9% of germs, I’d bet 99.9% of buyers don’t care about how long you’ve been in business — making the statement completely useless (from a website conversion perspective).

Sure, surviving for a full century might earn you a polite nod and give you something to post about on LinkedIn for a month or two, but longevity doesn’t make you the most capable option to solve a buyer’s immediate problem.

Maybe I’m biased, but the way I trained myself to approach website copywriting is to tune into the one frequency that visitors actually care about:

WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)

By the way, WIIFM is just the modern shorthand for a much older copywriting principle.

Robert Collier, one of the most successful direct-response copywriters of the early 20th century, put it like this in his 1931 book The Robert Collier Letter Book:

“Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind.”

Your buyer is already mid-conversation with themselves about their problem when they land on your site. So if your copy is entirely focused on your own history, your own process, and your own beliefs, ‘we’ copy might be hurting you more than helping.

The Origins of “We” Syndrome

Here’s my theory on why this happens.

Most business owners are great at the sales conversation. They’ve had hundreds of them, and they often say things like:

• “We can come by Thursday at 3.”
• “We’ll inspect the roof.”
• “We’ll provide a quote within 48 hours.”

That’s perfectly fine language — for the sales stage, when the buyer has already raised their hand.

Unfortunately, “we do this” and “we do that” language doesn’t work on visitors who are still in the pre-sale stage. Usually, at this stage, people are still gathering information and comparing their options. Rarely are they ready to be sold on the spot.

This means your pre-sale copy has a different job: it needs to tell visitors whether you’re worth a phone call.

At this stage, the conversation in your buyer’s head looks something like:

• “I have this problem, who can solve it, and can I trust them?”

When your headline simply says, “We’ve been in business since 1995,” it doesn’t answer a single one of those three questions.

So why do businesses keep publishing websites smothered in “we” copy?

Because it feeds the corporate ego. This is the dirty little secret of bad website copy: it gets approved because it makes the founders, owners, and stakeholders feel good.

When upper management reads a homepage that says, “We are the industry-leading experts with a proprietary process,” their brain lights up.

YES, THIS IS US! THIS SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE WHAT WE DO!

It validates all their hard work, so they approve the copy immediately. But a website isn’t supposed to be written for the CEO; it’s supposed to be written for the stranger who just discovered you and doesn’t have a reason to care yet.

The Psychology of Ego-Driven Copy (and How to Fix It)

Now that we know why the “We” Syndrome happens, let’s look at how to fix it.

To write copy that actually converts, you have to understand how buyers process your words. As I covered in my piece on cognitive overload, every visitor has a limited mental workspace — and every ‘we’ on your page takes a chunk of it.

This pause is what copywriters call the translation tax.

Every time your website screams “We do this” or “Our process is,” you are forcing the buyer to do the heavy mental lifting of translating your internal features into their external benefits. That tax creates friction. And as every good marketer and business owner knows, friction kills conversions.

David Ogilvy, widely considered the “Father of Advertising,” understood this better than anyone.

He famously preached that you should never address your audience as a faceless crowd. You aren’t writing a corporate press release; you are writing a personal letter to one single buyer on behalf of your product, service, or offer.

“The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.”

Translation for the 21st century: stop talking down to buyers with corporate brag-speak. Write to them like they’re a smart person who’s busy.

Look, when your copy is flooded with “We,” you shatter that intimate connection. You position your company as the hero of the story, relegating your buyer to a mere bystander.

Here are four practical ways to flip the script and put your customer back in the spotlight:

1. Shift from Features (“We”) to Benefits (“You”)

The easiest way to cure the “We” Syndrome is to look at your copy through the lens of features versus benefits.

• “We” statements are your features. They describe the mechanism or the service you provide.
• “You” statements are your benefits. They describe the actual outcome the buyer gets to enjoy.

2. Apply the “So That” Rule

Whenever you catch yourself writing a “We” statement, simply add the words “so that you…” to the end of the sentence. Whatever comes after those words is your actual, psychological hook.

• Bad (Ego): “We offer 24/7 technical support.”
• Good (Customer-Centric): “You get your questions answered anytime, day or night.”
• Bad (Ego): “We build high-converting websites.”
• Good (Customer-Centric): “Turn your website traffic into booked sales calls.”

3. Neutralize When “You” Becomes Too Personal

While “You” is the natural antidote to “We,” leaning too heavily on it can occasionally backfire.

In highly regulated industries — legal, financial, medical — or in enterprise B2B where a dozen stakeholders are reading the same page, “You are losing money every day you wait” can feel accusatory or presumptuous. It assumes a relationship that doesn’t exist yet.

Cross-cultural copy is another minefield. Japanese and German business communication, for example, lean formal and indirect. A blunt “You need this” can read as rude.

When you need to neutralize, you’ve got three good moves:

Drop the pronoun and lead with the verb.

• Too aggressive: “You will save 10 hours a week with our software.”
• Neutral: “Save 10 hours a week on manual data entry.”

Frame the outcome instead of the buyer.

• Too personal: “You’ll cut your reporting time in half.”
• Neutral: “Reports that used to take 3 hours now take 20 minutes.”

Use third-person proof.

• Too personal: “You’ll close more deals.”
• Neutral: “Teams using [X] close 30% more deals in their first quarter.”

All three pull the spotlight off both parties and put it on the result — which is what the buyer actually wants to see anyway.

4. Pass the “You-to-We” Ratio Test

A brutal but effective test is to pull up your homepage, hit Ctrl+F, and count how many times you say “We,” “Us,” or “Our.” Then, count how many times you say “You” or “Your.” If the ego words outnumber the customer words, it’s time to hire me to rewrite them.

Wait! Is It Ever Okay to Use “We”?

To be clear, “We” is not a forbidden word. It simply belongs in the right context. Once a buyer is genuinely interested in your offer and moves out of the purely selfish discovery phase, “We” statements become necessary. Here is exactly where to use them:

• The About Page / About section on your homepage: This is the one place on your website where visitors expect you to talk about your history, your team, and your culture.
• Bottom-of-the-Funnel Logistics: Once they are looking at pricing, FAQs, or onboarding steps, they need to know what you are going to do for them (e.g., “We will deliver your first draft within 48 hours”).
• Taking a Stance: If you are expressing a core company value or taking a strong stance in your industry, “We believe…” is a powerful way to draw a line in the sand.

Ready to Stop Talking About Yourself?

Go to your homepage right now and use the Ctrl+F test to count how many ‘we’ statements you’ve used — then read them out loud.

If it sounds like a corporate diary entry — “We’ve been in business since 1995, we specialize in, we pride ourselves on” — your buyers don’t see how you add value and don’t have a reason to convert.

You can fix this yourself by rewriting the page. Try not overfocus on who you are, but instead show them what they get.

Then again, that’s the part most business owners can’t do alone, because they’re too close to their own story. They’ve been telling the “we” version for years and untangling it takes someone with fresh eyes and a copywriter’s mind.

Hey! That’s where I come in.

I’m a pro at rewriting ego-driven websites into customer-centric ones that turn strangers into buyers.

Contact me or book a landing page roast — I’ll tell you exactly where the “we” is costing you conversions.

Imagine someone landing on your website right now.

They’ve got a real problem to solve, 15 minutes to make a decision, and three+ tabs open to your competitors.

As they start scrolling they’re immediately hit with a dense, 7-line paragraph of industry jargon, there’s an image slider moving too fast, three to five different CTA buttons screaming “Click Me,” and a pop-up asking them to subscribe to a newsletter.

Oops, guess what just happened? They closed the tab and forgot you forever.

This is a common problem with B2B websites, where unchecked cognitive overload actively drives qualified leads straight to a competitor with a simpler website.

What is Cognitive Load?

In UX and psychology, cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory resources used by a person at any given moment.

For your B2B website, it’s the mental effort required for a visitor to read your copy, process your layout, understand what you sell, and figure out what to do next.

If we break it down, there are two main types you need to manage:

• Intrinsic Cognitive Load: The natural complexity of what you are selling. B2B software, logistics, and enterprise services are inherently complex.
• Extraneous Cognitive Load: The way you present that information. This is where most websites fail due to messy design, jargon-stuffed paragraphs, and chaotic messaging that artificially inflate the mental tax on your reader.

You can’t do much about the intrinsic complexity of your industry, but you are entirely in control of the extraneous load. When you fail to manage it, you create a massive barrier to entry for an audience that is already stretched thin.

How Mental Overload Sabotages Your Sales Process

Imagine trying to negotiate a complex B2B contract on the tarmac of a busy airport with jet engines screaming overhead. To get anything done, you only have two choices:

1. Move the meeting far away from the traffic
2. Invest in a pair of heavy-duty noise-canceling headphones

In both scenarios, the outcome is the same — you are actively blocking out the sensory overload to get back to a functional baseline of focus.

Your B2B buyer is experiencing the digital equivalent to being on that tarmac. When cognitive load is too high, their brain chooses the path of least resistance: escape.

According to UX studies from Google, users form a judgment about your website in just 50 milliseconds. Their findings show that high visual and textual complexity directly correlates with a lower perception of trust.

In other words:

Highly complex, overwhelming websites are instantly perceived as less beautiful and less trustworthy.

Research from the Nielsen Norman Group also reveals that exceeding a visitor’s working memory directly leads to friction and task abandonment — most notably when it comes time to fill out your lead forms. If requesting a demo feels like taking a standardized test, they are very likely to bail.

Drawing on cognitive load research, there are four known principles that consistently reduce friction:

• Structure: Create a ruthlessly logical path to the finish line. Break intimidating walls of text or massive lead forms into digestible, step-by-step chunks so the buyer never feels overwhelmed.
• Transparency: Set clear expectations upfront. Tell the buyer exactly what happens when they click “Book a Demo” or “Download” so they aren’t anxious about being trapped in an endless sales cadence.
• Clarity: Eradicate ambiguity. Use simple, precise language so your visitor never has to guess what a button does, what a form field requires, or what your product actually means.
• Support: Anticipate their friction points. Use strategic microcopy (short, helpful text near your forms or CTAs) to answer objections and guide them smoothly through the conversion process.

But clarity is only half the battle; the other half is volume.

Take everything you just read about mental fatigue and multiply it by Hick’s Law. This foundational UX principle dictates that the time it takes for a person to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number and complexity of choices in front of them.

When a buyer can’t figure out your value proposition within five seconds, the mental tax simply becomes too expensive to pay.

The direct result of this frustration? Sky-high bounce rates and plummeting website conversions.

Minimizing Your Website’s Cognitive Load

Buyers are demanding frictionless experiences. McKinsey’s 2024 B2B Pulse survey found 54% of buyers likely to switch suppliers cite poor digital experiences as the reason.

Today’s buyers prefer a self-guided journey, which means your website must be simple, easy to navigate, and deliver information with absolute clarity. This also means your sales rep is removed from the equation, forcing your website’s copy to do all the heavy lifting.

Here are some modern strategies for minimizing cognitive load to keep visitors engaged and moving toward a conversion:

Cut the Visual and Verbal Clutter:

Meaningless corporate jargon and crowded design elements force your visitors to work entirely too hard.

• Kill the jargon: Replace buzzwords like “synergistic paradigm shifts” with a clear, direct explanation of exactly what you do.
• Break up text walls: Keep sentences short and paragraphs to three lines or fewer.
• Format for skimmers: Use bolding and bullet points to naturally guide the reader’s eye to your most critical benefits.
• Ditch the filler: Remove redundant links and irrelevant stock photos that add noise without actively selling your service.

Build on Existing Mental Models

People already expect websites to behave a certain way based on thousands of prior visits. Don’t reinvent the wheel—lean into their habits to reduce the learning curve.

• Stick to standard layouts: Place your logo in the top left, your navigation at the top, and your primary Call to Action (CTA) in the top right.
• Use expected labels: Choose clarity over cleverness. Label your menu with “Pricing” instead of vague terms like “Investment Opportunities.”
• Prioritize familiarity: By using recognizable structures, you allow the user to stop thinking about how to use your site and start thinking about your offer.

Offload the Mental Heavy Lifting

Never require a visitor to memorize information or process complex decisions all at once.

• Use progressive disclosure: Hook them with the high-level benefit first. Provide a button for the deep technical specs rather than dumping them all on the homepage.
• Adopt the “One Page, One Goal” rule: Never ask a user to book a demo, subscribe to a newsletter, and download a whitepaper at the exact same time. Give them one clear next step per landing page.
• Summarize feature lists: Transform dense, manual-like feature dumps into quick, scannable bullet points so their brain can process the value immediately.

Ready to Lighten the Load?

A buyer’s attention is a precious resource, and as a B2B brand, your copywriting and design must allocate it carefully.

If your website traffic is high but your conversions are flat, your buyers might not be rejecting your offer — they may just be rejecting the mental effort required to buy it.

To become the obvious leader in your industry, you need messaging that gets straight to the point, paired with a user experience that kills the friction.

That’s exactly the kind of work I do.

As a copywriter with web development skills, I don’t just write the words that sell; I build the cognitive-friendly, high-converting websites that B2B services like yours need to turn traffic into revenue.

We all love a quick fix. Just as a quick injection promises instant volume for thin lips, an AI prompt promises an instant facelift for a bare website.

This worries me. Especially as web designers are relying more and more on AI — instead of hiring me — as a cost-effective cosmetic procedure.

I understand why, though. I also build sites for clients and there’s nothing worse than waiting on clients to write their own content. This is famously the number one bottleneck that stalls a new website’s launch.

Meanwhile, when you use AI for writing website copy, you now get gorgeous, hyper-intelligent Lorem Ipsum. It fills the empty spaces on a mockup instantly, saving time and making the design look complete.

Is there anything wrong with that?

It really depends on the person behind the keyboard:

• Do they actually know how to write for conversions or optimize for search?
• Or are they just filling empty space, hoping you like it enough to pay their final invoice?

We all know the effectiveness of AI depends entirely on how you prompt it, and whether or not your hired hand is actually reading, revising, and improving the copy.

Which is why I believe we need to be far more cautious. Relying on AI blindly—literally copy-pasting the output to a live site without a human eye ever reading a single line—is, in my opinion, negligence.

Whether we’re talking about your face or your website, artificial enhancements are risky.

When you rely too heavily on injected “fluff,” you often end up with an over-inflated, unnatural mess that is painfully obvious to everyone but you.

And just like a botched cosmetic procedure, the consequences range from looking exactly like everyone else to causing actual, lasting damage to your business.

So let’s take a look at what that looks like.

AI “Filler” in the Real World

Recently, I was working on a project for a commercial roofing company in Ontario. During my research phase, I started analyzing local competitors and noticed a significant number of them were relying heavily on AI to churn out SEO blog posts.

The examples below are based entirely on what I saw out in the wild. I’ve rewritten them slightly because I’m not here to name and shame a company that might just be experimenting with an AI content strategy. I am actually all for experimenting.

But, since I’m often the one responsible for a client’s brand message—and ultimately, their reputation—I’m the guy who reads every single word on a page, whether it was drafted by me or an AI.

And when you actually sit down and read the output, the “botched filler” becomes impossible to ignore.

Here’s what I saw which reaffirmed my belief that AI writing is just like a lip filler treatment gone wrong.

1. Paragraphs Bloated with Transitional Fluff

AI loves to clear its throat before it speaks, padding sentences with meaningless runway that adds zero value to the reader.

• Example: “Furthermore, in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, it is absolutely crucial to bear in mind that navigating the complexities of a commercial roof replacement requires a comprehensive approach.”
• If was writing this: Commercial roof replacements are complicated.

2. Repetitive Phrasing & Circular Arguments

Because AI predicts the next most likely word, it often gets stuck in a loop, saying the exact same thing three different ways in a single paragraph just to take up space.

• Example: “Our commercial roofing solutions are highly durable. We pride ourselves on providing long-lasting flat roofs that stand the test of time. Ensuring the ultimate longevity of your building’s roof is our top priority.”
• If I was writing this: We maintain flat roofs that last decades, protecting your investment.

3. Over-Exaggerated Adjectives

AI tries to mimic enthusiasm but lacks a human understanding of nuance. It ends up turning everyday, blue-collar services into grand, poetic events.

• Example: “Experience a revolutionary paradigm shift in bespoke TPO membrane installation,” or “We weave an unprecedented tapestry of asphalt and fiberglass to elevate your commercial property.”
• If I was writing this: We install high-quality TPO membranes and reliable asphalt roofing in Toronto.

4. Superlatives and “Shaming” Demographics

To create a false sense of urgency, AI relies on sweeping, hyperbolic generalizations that usually end up insulting the reader’s intelligence or competence.

• Example 1: “Most property managers make the catastrophic mistake of completely ignoring their flat roofs until it’s too late.”
• Example 2: “While the vast majority of small businesses fail to realize the undeniable importance of a watertight roof, the smart ones take immediate action.”
• If I was writing this: Don’t wait for a ceiling leak to check the condition of your flat roof. Catching wear and tear early saves you money.

This is the “duck-lip” effect of AI copywriting. On the first read, a sentence might look voluminous and plump. But when you actually let it sink in, it is confusing and hollow.

Once You Start, You’ll Never Stop

Here’s what genuinely concerns me about both lip filler and using AI to write copy: once you start it, you rarely stop at just one session.

Once a business owner or a “hopeless” web designer saves three hours using ChatGPT to draft a homepage, the psychological threshold for what is considered “good enough” plummets.

Just a little playful banter after I spotted a spelling mistake in Josh’s LinkedIn post.

Suddenly, you start injecting it everywhere. It creeps into your email newsletters, your social media posts, your product descriptions, and your LinkedIn updates.

What makes it worse is that AI is literally programmed to keep you hooked.

Every time it generates a response, it follows up with a helpful little nudge:

• Would you like me to adjust the tone?
• Should we expand on this section?
• Shall I turn that into a carousel for you?

AI is designed to keep you prompting ad infinitum.

Eventually, you develop “filler fatigue.” You lose perspective on what your actual, authentic brand voice sounds like, blinded to how artificial your marketing has become.

Just Another “K-Pop Idol” Face of Copywriting

I’ve been living in Asia for over 11 years now, and the cosmetic surgery culture here is wild. Back in 2014, I cycled to Seoul. I remember seeing young women walking around the streets with black eyes and bandages. Young and naive, I honestly thought I was witnessing the aftermath of some kind of street brawl or abusive relationship.

When I mentioned it to my Couchsurfing host, they laughed and explained the plastic surgery phenomenon:

• Everyone was getting procedures to chase the exact same, standardized K-pop idol look.

Fast forward to 2026, and that homogenization has only gotten worse.

AI is doing the exact same thing to brand identity.

When every business in your industry is using the same few Language Models to write their copy, everyone starts sounding identical. Your brand becomes bland, overly polite, and stripped of any unique edge or personality.

You lose the very thing that makes people want to buy from you.

Just like chasing a synthetic standard of beauty, using AI to sound like everyone else ensures nobody remembers your face in the crowd.

But hey, at least it looks good, right?

Dissolving AI’s Filler

Now, full disclosure: this article was co-written with Gemini as part of my 30-day AI writing challenge.

Before you call me a hypocrite, remember that I’ve been writing copy for hundreds of clients over the past 10 years. I know what good copy looks like, and I know how to edit.

AI for writing website copy is incredibly helpful.

I use it for brainstorming and battle-testing ideas. If I give it enough context — usually by feeding it transcripts from my discovery calls and creative meetings with clients to extract their actual knowledge, voice, and concepts, along with my own independent research — AI is pretty damn good at piecing those ideas together into passable, usable content.

It makes generating FAQs fast and easy, and it’s great for churning out SERP titles and meta descriptions.

But again, what I’m seeing out in the real world is the exact opposite of that careful process. I am seeing the same AI patterns and the same robotic writing styles being injected over and over again.

If you want your business to sound just like every other competitor, go ahead and sign up for a ChatGPT Plus. For $20 a month, you can use AI for writing website copy which would be far cheaper than hiring me.

But if you ever need a hand finding your actual voice—and keeping the artificial fluff off your website—I’m always here to help.

Does This Sound Familiar?

You’ve spent money on your website, but you’re not entirely sure if it’s working. The traffic is inconsistent, the leads arrive in waves you can’t predict, and every week someone in your inbox tells you they have the answer which you haven’t tried yet.

You’re not alone. Most companies I work with are sitting in one of three places:

• You don’t know which bet to place. Every piece of marketing advice you’ve read contradicts the last one, so you keep researching, keep bookmarking, keep waiting for the strategy that feels certain enough to commit to.
• You placed bets and got burned. You hired someone to run your SEO for six months, paid for ads that didn’t yield a return, or invested in a website redesign that didn’t help your business make any new revenue.
• You want to bet bigger. Something on your website is actually working, and you’d like to scale it without breaking the thing that made it work in the first place.

All three places share a missing piece: a clear way to spend money on your website which results in more, tangible wins than expensive losses.

So let’s start there.

Why Every Marketing Dollar You Spend is a Bet

When you spend money on your website marketing, you’re not buying a guaranteed outcome. You’re placing a bet that a specific investment will produce a specific result, based on the data you have and the conditions you’re working in.

Some marketing bets pay off in 90 days.

Others take a year and a half before you can honestly tell whether they worked.

Some look like losers for the first six months and then spontaneously compound into your biggest source of new business.

The trouble is that most business owners aren’t betting at all. They’re just spending then praying that what they do — or who they hire — will get them the results they desire.

But what exactly are marketing bets?

A marketing bet is a deliberate commitment of money and time to an outcome you’ve named in advance, knowing it might not work.

There are exactly three places your website earns its keep, and each one is a different kind of bet with a different timeline, a different funding requirement, and a different way of telling you whether it’s working.

That last part is what separates a bet from a plan.

Jennifer Lim Lund draws the line clearly in a post worth reading in full:

Most B2B marketing teams operate at the activity level:

• You publish a few blog posts,
• Refresh the homepage,
• Run a campaign
• Tweak the copy
• Then stay in motion without ever committing to an outcome you’d be willing to be wrong about

That’s exactly what goes into a plan. It also feels productive because you’re doing things, and the doing is what makes you feel in control. But none of it specifies a result you’re betting on, which means none of it can actually fail — and anything that can’t fail can’t really win either.

Marketing bets are different. A real bet on your website sounds like this:

“We will spend $15,000 and six months building a site that converts visitors to inquiries at 3% or better, and if it doesn’t, we’ll have the data to figure out why.“

That kind of bet is full of unknown variables, which is the point. It’s also why having the right strategy is what makes the bet worth placing in the first place — and sets the stage for how you can win it.

The 3 Website Marketing Bets You Can Easily Win

These are the three areas I’ve built my copywriting services around. They’re also the bets I’m often hired to work on for B2B clients, and have a track record of winning them.

Those bets are:

• Website copywriting that gives visitors a clear reason to stay and act
• Conversion optimization that turns more of your existing traffic into qualified inquiries
• SEO content that brings the right B2B buyers to your site through search

Each of these bets are different, come with a different timeline, require a different funding requirement, and signal progress in different ways.

Here’s how each one breaks down.

The Bet for Website Copywriting That Converts

Website copywriting is the bet that the right words on your core pages will get the right buyers to recognize themselves, trust you, and move toward a decision.

Your website’s copywriting is only as good as your research, and the best place to start is the alignment between two conversations:

1. The one your sales team has with real buyers
2. The one buyers have with themselves when they’re trying to describe and solve their problem.

Good B2B website copy draws on both sales language and customer language.

Sales language is fairly straightforward to extract. It comes from your team’s discovery calls, the way they handle day-to-day objections, and capturing every question buyers ask before a deal closes.

Customer language comes from the buyers themselves. It comes from your testimonials, sales call recordings, market feedback, and competitor research.

For example:

• G2 reviews of competitor products often surface the exact words your buyers use to describe what they tried before and why it didn’t work.
• Reddit threads in your buyer’s niche show you how they vent about the problem when nobody’s watching.

That research only matters if it leads to a decision. The decision is your positioning — the specific lane you’re choosing to compete in, the buyer you’re choosing to serve, and the version of the problem you’re choosing to solve.

Before you invest in copy, place a positioning bet

Robert Kaminski and the team at Fletch PMM call this your Minimum Viable Positioning — the smallest, clearest explanation of who you serve and what you do.

Their model breaks positioning into market elements (persona, company type, context, problem) and product elements (category, capability, feature, benefit), and you evaluate each one for clarity.

Wherever your messaging is clearest, that’s your anchor. Wherever it’s vague or missing, that’s where the bet hasn’t been placed yet.

The model works because it forces you to commit to specifics. You can’t lead with “we help businesses grow” when the canvas asks you to name the exact persona, the exact problem, the exact category. The blanks get filled in or the bet stays unplaced.

Here’s how I turn the research into a positioning bet for clients:

1. Cluster the language. Group the sales and customer language into themes — the recurring problems, the failed alternatives buyers tried first, the moments of urgency, the language of the win.
2. Pick the buyer you’re staking the claim on. Choose the one buyer profile where your offer is unambiguously the right answer. Not the broadest. The clearest.
3. Name what you replace. Positioning is always against something — a competitor, a manual process, a DIY workaround. Name it, and explain why your answer wins.
4. Write the one-line position. We help [specific buyer] go from [specific problem] to [specific outcome] without [specific friction]. If you can’t write that line cleanly, the bet isn’t ready to place yet.

Once the position is set, the copy on every core page flows from it:

• Your homepage names the buyer and the problem
• Your service pages acknowledge the alternatives and why you beat them
• Your proof points name the outcomes in the language buyers actually use

The Bet That Turns Paid Traffic into Measurable Pipeline

Landing pages are the bet that a specific message, taken to a specific audience, on a single-purpose page, paired with paid traffic, will produce a measurable action at a cost the business can actually live with.

This is the fastest of the three website marketing bets. It’s also one that gets killed first before it’s ever had a chance to succeed.

What bets are your landing pages making?

A landing page is not your homepage with a “Book a Demo” button bolted on.

It’s a single-purpose page built around one offer, one audience, and one decision the visitor is being asked to make.

Strip out the navigation, the alternative paths, the everything-for-everyone messaging, and what you have left is a highly-focused page doing one job for one person.

When you pair that page with paid traffic from Google or LinkedIn, you’re placing a bet on three things at once:

1. That the audience you’re targeting is the right one
2. That the offer you’re making is one they actually want
3. That the page itself converts well enough to justify ongoing spend

If any of those three are wrong, your bet loses. Which is why the real bet is on your landing page, and not the ad itself.

How to build high-converting landing pages

A high-converting landing page does five things, and it does them in this order:

1. Headline with message match: the headline matches the ad or source that brought the visitor here. Click an ad about “shorter sales cycles for B2B SaaS” and the page should say something about shorter sales cycles for B2B SaaS in the first thing the visitor reads. CXL’s landing page research has shown that breaking message match is one of the fastest ways to lose a visitor inside three seconds.
2. Benefits the buyer actually cares about: not features, not feeds-and-speeds, not internal language. The outcomes the buyer is trying to reach when they clicked the ad in the first place.
3. Credibility — proof the offer is real. Testimonials with names and titles, case study numbers, logos, recognizable certifications. Not hand-picked anonymous quotes.
4. Expectation manager — what happens after they click the button. Who contacts them, when, how, and what they’ll get. Visitors don’t fill forms when they can’t see the next three steps.
5. One call to action — one button, one decision, one path off the page. CXL frames this as the attention ratio — the number of links on the page versus the number of conversion goals — and the target is 1:1. Every additional link is a chance for the visitor to leave without doing the thing you paid to bring them in for.

Most B2B landing pages fail not because the traffic is bad, but because the page is asking the visitor to figure out too much, trust too much, and decide too much, all at once.

Paid traffic needs at least 90 days to learn

When it comes to paid campaigns I often turn to Silvio Perez at AdConversion for ideas and best practices. He’s managed over $100M in B2B ad spend and makes the case that most B2B companies don’t actually run paid media programs. Instead, they run isolated ad campaigns which get killed too early because the common theme is:

• More campaigns, more spend, more “testing,” and almost always worse results.

In reality, the first quarter of paid traffic on any landing page is not a campaign. It’s a learning exercise where you’re paying to find out:

• Which audience converts
• Which offer holds
• Which version of the headline pulls
• Which proof points persuade.

The owners who pull the plug in week three because the page hasn’t produced revenue yet aren’t watching a failed bet — they’re walking away from a hand before the dealer lays their winning card.

Here’s what a real paid program looks like over 90 days:

Days 1–30: Baseline

• Ship the first version of the page and point traffic at it
• Resist the temptation to change anything for the first two weeks
• You need clean data before you can test against it
• The questions you’re answering: Is the audience targeting roughly right? Is the cost per click in the range you forecasted? Is anyone converting at all, even at a low rate?

Days 31–60: First iterations

• Start testing, one variable at a time (i.e., headline, hero offer, CTA button copy, the proof section)
• Create only two variants, not five
• Let each test run long enough to produce a signal, not a hunch
• By day 60 you should know which version of the page wins, which audience segment converts best, and which of the five page elements is doing the most work

Days 61–90: Compound the winners

• Stop testing what isn’t moving the needle
• Double down on the audience that’s converting, the offer that’s holding, the headline that’s pulling
• Push more budget into the combination that’s actually working
• Start tracking cost per acquisition as a real number, not a noisy one
• This is where the bet starts to look like a bet that’s going to pay

If at the end of 90 days the leading indicators are flat — no decrease in CAC, no improvement on conversion rate, no quality lift in the leads — then yes, it might be time to walk away from this bet.

Now, paid campaigns are one of the biggest gambles you can take with your marketing spend. You’re paying for every click, every impression, every test — and the meter never stops running. It’s why I’m skeptical about ad-only projects but also why I only offer ad-related services when I’m already working on a client’s landing page.

Personally, my favorite marketing bet of all time (the “BOAT”? lol) is the one where the traffic shows up for free: from search engines.

The Bet That Earns You High-Quality, Pre-Qualified Traffic

SEO content is the best marketing bet, imo. It offers you consistent, useful publishing on your site which, over time, will make you the obvious search answer when your buyers start Googling for what you do.

But, there’s one disclaimer here.

This is the longest of the three bets, the slowest to pay off, and the one bet often abandoned three feet from gold.

Despite SEO blog content being the most difficult bet to win, once you can figure how to make it work, the traffic you get is often pre-qualified and free (well, technically not free. You did pay a writer to make it, or perhaps you rely on a $20 ChatGPT subscription. I prefer Claude, btw).

Plus, Google is likely going to change its algorithm again and bury organic results below ads, PAA, and AI overviews. Forcing us all to pay for ads anyway.

Why I continue betting on SEO in the AI era

Search has changed so much since “the rise of AI.”

For example, AI Overviews siphon clicks as LLMs race to answer questions directly. Plus, Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) are now dominated by Reddit and big-brand sites that manipulate results through parasite SEO (e.g., Forbes).

Search Engine Land recently reported that AI Overviews now appear on around 16% of queries, and Ahrefs research shows they cut click-through rates for top-ranking pages by as much as 58%.

Fact is, SEO is harder now than it was three years ago, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a lie.

Ryan Law at Ahrefs put it cleanly in a post he shared in 2025:

What keeps SEO at the top of the list, even as the returns shrink, is the kind of traffic it delivers.

That intent — the buyer typing a question into a search box, looking for an answer — is more valuable than any audience targeting parameter you can buy on a paid platform.

Capturing that traffic, even at lower volumes than five years ago, still beats most other channels on cost per qualified lead.

What SEO content can do for a B2B website

It’s common for business owners to think of blogging as a traffic play. It is, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what your blog can do.

A well-published B2B blog is doing four jobs at once:

1. Educate prospects so they arrive at your sales conversations already half-convinced and pre-qualified
2. Attract search traffic from buyers who are actively looking for what you do
3. Reinforce your money pages through strategic internal linking that passes authority to the service and landing pages where conversions actually happen
4. Give your founders and leadership a place to express their thinking, which is the thought leadership play most B2B companies fail at because they treat the blog as a content factory instead of a publishing platform

That last one is underrated.

A blog gives the people at the top of your company (or the people who influence buyer’s decisions) a place to share their point of view, develop their thinking in public, and build a body of work the market can actually engage with.

Each piece then becomes a fishing line you can cast on social media, repurpose into newsletter content, reuse in sales conversations, and link back to from future articles.

But this only works if the content is good.

AI slop published at scale to “win SEO” is the fastest way to lose the bet. Search engines are already filtering for it, buyers can spot it, and your money pages get dragged down rather than lifted up by a library of empty posts.

A quick case study from my client’s blog

I built a new website for a B2B client in Canada back in 2023. The first year after launch was rough. Traffic was low, leads were sporadic, and I ended up making aggressive changes to the site over the next six to eight months — restructuring pages, rewriting copy, tightening the SEO foundation.

They finally broke even and started seeing real ROI by the end of year one. Then in year two we started betting on SEO blog content. Over the past sixteen months, their blog content alone now drives:

• 4x the click-through rate of the rest of the site (0.4% vs 0.1%)
• Average search positions nearly twice as strong (page two vs page four)
• Over a third of all clicks to the entire website

None of that is a viral spike or a paid traffic surge. It’s a slow build, month over month, with each new piece adding to what’s already ranking and pointing readers back to the pages that actually drive revenue.

What can you expect from starting a blog today?

The honest timeline for an SEO bet is twelve to eighteen months before you can fairly say whether it’s working.

Ahrefs studied two million pages and found that only 5.7% reach the top 10 search results within a year, even for low-competition keywords. For high-volume keywords (10,000+ monthly searches), the number drops to 0.3%.

In other words: most pages don’t rank, and the few that do take time. You need enough posts in the ground to give yourself real chances.

The first six months almost always look like failure:

• A handful of impressions show up in Google Search Console, but no one’s clicking
• A keyword moves up a few spots, but it’s not on page 1
• The analytics dashboard looks flat, week after week

It’s no wonder companies cancel their SEO programs at month seven. Heck, I’ve been cut a few times despite my SEO articles becoming top performers on my ex-client’s website.

Would that be an example of a bad marketing bet?

Anyway, my point is folding your hand at month seven kills momentum to get SEO to really work.

Here’s a few signals I look at to ensure I’m winning the SEO long game:

• Impressions rise first, usually within 60 to 90 days
• Keyword positions move up between months three and six
• Clicks arrive in volume around month six and pick up from there
• Backlinks trickle in once you have a body of work worth referencing
• Revenue from organic traffic shows up last, but only if you’ve been targeting commercial and transactional intent keywords

If you’re unsure how to execute an SEO blog strategy for your website, I offer weekly and bi-weekly blog content packages. They’re perfect for B2B businesses ready to commit consistent, quarterly blogs that can help you:

• Drive relevant, qualified traffic from the searches your buyers are actually running
• Educate and nurture new customer relationships
• Position you and your leadership team as thought leaders with quality content you can share on LinkedIn and other social channels

Best of all, if you run on a WordPress website, my team and I can handle uploading, formatting, and scheduling the content for you.

Reach out and let’s talk about what your SEO bet should look like.

No More Bets, Please!

You’ve now seen the three website marketing bets worth placing.

• Website copywriting — the bet that sets the foundation for every other bet. You win this by having the right words on your core pages, targeted to the right buyers who recognize themselves, trust you, and know how to act.
• Landing pages with paid traffic — the bet with the highest and fastest ROI potential. You win this when the right message, on the right page, against the right audience, produces measurable pipeline at a cost you can live with.
• SEO content — the bet most businesses give up on too early. It wins through consistent publishing that delivers steady, inbound leads for months and years to come.

The businesses that win at marketing aren’t placing the most bets. They’re placing the right ones, sticking with them, and watching the leading indicators that tell them when to keep going and when to walk away.

Before you place another marketing bet, ask yourself which of these three you’re already running, which one you’ve been underfunding, and which one you’ve been abandoning three feet from gold.

If you want this to feel less like betting and more like winning, let’s talk.

The idea is: before you optimize a funnel, before you A/B test a CTA, before you do anything else, your messaging has to resonate with the market you’re trying to reach. If it doesn’t, nothing downstream matters.

I agree with all of it. But I think there’s a deeper layer underneath that most B2B sites are skipping.

Resonance might get a reader to keep reading but:

• Does it get a champion to forward your page to their VP of Finance?
• Does it get a CFO to clear a budget line?
• Does it get an end user to advocate in the next internal meeting?

Each of those are key decisions, and how you communicate that on your website will either help the reader make it or confuse and stall them out.

In this article, I’m going to talk about that layer, which I’ll call: message-decision fit.

First, what is message-market fit?

“Message-market fit” is term I obsess over when I’m writing copy for B2B websites.

The core claim is that messaging is a product-market problem, not a copywriting problem.

It’s where B2B sites fail not because the writing is bad, but because the messaging — the underlying claim about who you serve, what problem you solve, and why someone should care — was never validated against the people it’s supposed to reach.

Wynter’s whole methodology is built on this.

They run message testing with verified buyers from your target segment, and they’re measuring specific things:

• Clarity (does the reader understand what you do)
• Relevance (does it sound like it’s for them)
• Value (does it solve a problem they actually have)
• Differentiation (does it stand out from the competition).

Message-market fit means those four scores are high enough to keep the reader reading. It’s the floor, not the ceiling.

If any of those scores low, no amount of CTA optimization fixes the page.

Where message-market fit stops working

A page can hit all four of those scores and still not move a deal forward.

That’s because B2B buying isn’t a single act of resonance. It’s a sequence of decisions made by a group of people, often in parallel, as well as in disagreement with each other.

Gartner’s research puts the typical B2B buying group at six to ten decision-makers, each gathering four or five pieces of information independently. The committee then has to converge.

Resonance gets one person nodding. Convergence requires something else. It requires copy that helps each member of the committee make the specific decision they’re in the middle of making right now.

B2B buying is a series of decisions, not a funnel

The funnel metaphor has done the marketing world dirty. It suggests a buyer enters at the top, slides down through specific stages, and either converts or drops off.

That isn’t how committees buy.

Gartner’s buying jobs framework is more practical. A committee is doing six jobs, often in parallel and rarely in order:

• Problem identification
• Solution exploration
• Requirements building
• Supplier selection
• Validation
• Consensus creation

Reframe those as decisions and the website’s job gets sharper:

• Is this a problem worth solving now?
• What kind of solution do we need?
• What must this solution do?
• Which vendor?
• Are we sure?
• Are we aligned internally?

Six decisions, all co-existing at once, all needing different forms of evidence expressed in a web page’s copy.

Because of this, homepage copy that answers the first decision when the reader is making the fourth one isn’t a resonance problem — it’s a decision-fit problem.

The three readers and the decisions they’re making

A committee of six to ten is too many people to write copy for.

The classic sales frameworks — Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling, for example — name four buying roles:

1. Economic buyer
2. User buyer
3. Technical buyer
4. Coach

That model is built for sales conversations, where you can adapt to each person in the room and ask follow-up questions.

Website copy doesn’t get that luxury. The same page has to do work for all of them at once. So I find it useful to collapse the four into three, because the user buyer and the technical buyer are usually evaluating on similar evidence — does this fit my workflow, will it actually work — and asking different versions of the same decision.

That leaves three readers, each making a fundamentally different decision on the same page. Understand which decision each one is making, and the copy gets a lot easier to write.

The champion: deciding whether to spend political capital

The champion is the person who first noticed your company and started gathering information. They may not be your buyer. Instead, they are someone who has to convince the buyer at their company — their CFO, their VP, their CEO.

The decision they’re making isn’t “should we buy this.” It’s “should I stake my reputation on this in the next meeting.”

That changes everything about what they need from your web pages.

They don’t need to be sold because they’ve already sold themselves. What they need is ammunition:

• Numbers they can quote in a Slack thread
• A one-pager they can paste into a deck
• A framework that makes them sound smart when they bring it up.

The champion is reading your site as a future presenter, not a future buyer. If your copy doesn’t give them something forwardable, you have lost them — not to a competitor, but to the awkwardness of having nothing concrete to bring back to their team.

Most B2B sites fail this reader by writing for the buyer instead. The champion lands on a page that’s trying to convince them, when they don’t need convincing. Instead, they need the ability to convince someone else.

The economic buyer: deciding whether the risk is defensible

The economic buyer is the person who signs. By the time they’re reading your page, the champion has usually already pitched them and they’re checking the work.

The decision they’re making isn’t “is this interesting.” It’s “is this defensible to my own boss if it goes wrong.”

That word—defensible—is the name of the game. In B2B, most buyers are more afraid of looking stupid than they are excited about saving money. They aren’t just buying a solution; they are staking their professional reputation on you. Your copy needs to act as a safety net for their career, providing the evidence, references, and logic they need to prove this was the ‘smart’ choice if things ever get bumpy.

Economic buyers are pattern-matching against risk. They need:

• Pricing transparency: This doesn’t always mean a flat monthly fee for high-ticket B2B, but it requires a pricing framework or a “starting at” range. If they have to hunt for a price, they can’t build a business case—and if they can’t build a case, they can’t defend the purchase to their boss.
• Implementation timelines: They need to plan around resource conflicts. If you don’t tell them how long it takes to get live, they assume it’s a six-month nightmare that will blow their budget.
• Social proof from peers: They aren’t looking for “cool” companies; they want references from organizations that look exactly like theirs. This proves the solution is a safe, repeatable bet.
• Believable business cases: They need ROI data they can repeat almost verbatim when their CFO asks why they approved this. Your copy should give them the script for that conversation.

What they don’t want is:

• A manifesto
• Bold claims and bullshit numbers without proof
• To hunt for pricing

For an economic buyer, the website experience is a sample of the product experience.

Every point of friction they encounter—like a ‘Request a Quote’ button where a price should be, or a vague claim without a case study—is viewed as evidence of future risk

They aren’t just looking for information; they are looking for defensibility. They are already mentally rehearsing the difficult conversation where they have to justify this expense to their boss.

So if your site replaces specifics with flowery adjectives, you aren’t inspiring them; you’re leaving them without a script to defend the purchase when the CFO asks, ‘Why this vendor?’

The end user: deciding whether daily life gets better or worse

The end user is the person who will actually open the software on Monday morning. They have the least formal power in the committee and the most informal power — because if they hate using it, the renewal dies a year later.

The decision they’re making isn’t “is this a good company.” It’s “do I want to live with this thing every day.”

That decision gets made on a very different kind of evidence. End users want:

• Product specifics
• Screenshots that look like the actual interface (not stylized illustrations or AI crap)
• Workflow details.
• To know how it handles the annoying edge case they deal with every Tuesday.
• Some signal that the people who built this have used it.

What they’re trying to figure out is whether your product will solve their problem or become their problem. Vague claims read as a warning sign here — when copy is generic, end users assume the product is too (at least, that’s what I do).

B2B sites that fail here do so by writing exclusively at a ‘strategic altitude’.

They speak in the broad ‘innovation’ terms that CEOs love, but they ignore the reality that specificity is a form of risk reduction. While a VP wants to hear about ‘digital transformation,’ the end user and the CFO both want to know if this software is going to break their current integration on Tuesday morning.

When you refuse to get into the weeds of the workflow, you aren’t being ‘visionary’—you’re being risky.

What message-decision fit failures look like on a service or product page

Failure one: hiding the features

There’s a copywriting cliché that goes “features tell, benefits sell.” It’s half right. Benefits sell when the reader is still asking “why does this matter to me.” Features sell when the reader has already crossed that line and is now asking “how does this actually work.”

Service and product pages that lead with benefits and never get to features lose the end user and the technical buyer in the first scroll. These readers aren’t asking why anymore. They’re asking how. And when the page won’t tell them, they assume the answer is “badly” — or that the company is hiding something.

The fix isn’t choosing features over benefits either. It’s recognizing that different readers need different evidence, and a service page has to deliver both.

Lead with the benefit that frames the decision. Back it up with the feature that proves you can deliver. The reader who needs the benefit gets it. The reader who needs the feature finds it.

Failure two: benefit statements that don’t say anything

“Streamline your workflow.” “Unlock growth.” “Empower your team.”

These read as benefits because they’re written in the grammar of benefits—verb plus aspirational outcome. But they are essentially the junk food of B2B copy: they look like a meal on the page, but they provide zero nutritional value for a buyer trying to make a case.

If you can’t verify it, it isn’t a benefit; it’s a claim. Consider the difference:

• Junk Food Copy: ‘Streamline your HR and empower your team.’
• Decision-Fit Copy: ‘Reduce payroll processing time from 3 days to 4 hours while eliminating manual data entry for managers.'”

They don’t actually name a problem, a mechanism, or a result. They could be pasted onto any service page in any category and still kind of fit, which is the giveaway.

From a decision-fit standpoint, generic benefit statements fail every reader.

The champion can’t forward them because they don’t say anything quotable. The economic buyer can’t build a business case on them because they don’t connect to a number. The end user can’t tell if the product will actually help because the claim is too vague to verify.

A useful benefit statement names the specific problem the reader has, the specific mechanism your service uses to solve it, and the specific outcome they should expect.

The further you can move from generic verbs toward concrete nouns and numbers, the more decision-shaped work your B2B copy does.

Failure three: features without context

The opposite failure shows up on more technical service and product pages. The page is a list of features — twelve of them, sometimes twenty — with no framing for why any of them matter.

This is the page written by an engineer or a product manager for an audience they assume already knows the category. It serves the technical buyer reasonably well and fails everyone else.

The champion has no narrative to bring to their team. The economic buyer can’t tell which features are differentiators and which are table stakes. Even the end user, who you’d think would love the detail, often can’t tell which features solve the problem they came to solve.

This is where the benefits half of the cliché earns its keep.

A feature list with one line of context for each — what problem this solves, who it’s for, why it matters — gives every reader a way in. The page doesn’t get longer, it just gets more readable.

How to audit a service or product page for message-decision fit

Most audits fail because they are looking for “better writing.” But your sales team doesn’t need better writing; they need shorter sales cycles.

Before you open your CMS or edit a single line of copy, you have to accept a cold truth: If a deal stalls after a great demo, your website likely failed to arm your champion for the internal battle that followed.

In other words, get ready to audit not for for clarity; you are auditing for leverage.

You aren’t just auditing for how the copy reads; you are auditing for how it works as a tool for your buyers. Pick one service or product page to start. Don’t audit your highest-traffic page first; start with the one closest to your pipeline, because that’s where decision-fit failures cost the most.

Then, work through the page in four passes:

Pass 1: Who is actually landing here?

You cannot write for everyone at once without becoming generic “junk food” copy.

Pull your traffic data and segment by source to see who is arriving:

• The Champion: Usually the dominant role doing open-web research to see if you belong on the shortlist.
• The Economic Buyer: Often arrives via a direct link sent by the champion to “check the work.”
• The End User: Arrives in waves, typically looking for proof that your tool won’t make their daily life worse.

Once you know who’s landing, the next question becomes answerable.

Pass 2: What is their real “Buying Job”?

Map the reader to the job they are performing. A champion isn’t just “exploring solutions”—they are making a high-stakes social decision

• Try this stress test: Ask, “Does this page give the reader enough ammunition to pitch this to their boss without looking like an idiot?” If they have to “invent” the argument themselves because your copy is too abstract, the page has failed.

That’s a different decision than “is this company good.” The page needs to help them make the decision they actually have, not the one your sales team wishes they had.

Pass 3: Is the copy working or just talking?

Read the page out loud. For every section, put yourself in the shoes of a skeptical CFO or an overworked engineer.

• Evict the “Throat-Clearing”: Identify hero sections and headlines that say nothing. If a benefit like “Unlock Growth” could be pasted onto a competitor’s site, it has zero value for a buyer building a business case.
• Audit the Evidence Clusters: Are your case studies only sorted by industry? A technical buyer often cares less about your industry and more about your specific mechanism for solving their problem.
• The Specificity Rule: Check if you’ve replaced “truth” with “adjectives.” Specificity is a form of risk reduction for an economic buyer.

Be honest about which sections are earning their keep and which are filler.

Pass 4: What is the missing piece?

The gap between what the reader needs to decide and what you’ve given them is your to-do list.

• Add “Missing Evidence”: This might mean finally publishing that pricing framework or implementation timeline so the economic buyer can plan for resource conflicts.

• Kill the “All or Nothing” CTA: If your only button is “Book a Demo,” you’re asking for a marriage proposal on the first date.

You could also offer a “Smaller Decision” that matches their current job:

• “Forward this overview to my team” (Consensus Creation).
• “Add this to my shortlist” (Solution Exploration).
• “View the pricing framework” (Validation).

The point isn’t to add more words; it’s to ensure every word performs decision-shaped work. Resonance gets them to nod; Decision-Fit gets them to act.

Are your pages message-decision fit?

A page has message-decision fitness when a reader can answer four questions about it without you in the room.

1. Who lands here?
2. What decision are they trying to make?
3. What proof or framing do they need to make it?
4. What’s the next decision after this one, and does the page hand them off cleanly?

If your sales team keeps getting deals that go quiet after the demo, the copy isn’t failing at resonance. It’s failing at message-decision fit. You likely have a committee reading, they’re just not deciding.

Fix the page for the decision, and you stop being just another vendor. You become the safest, most defensible choice in the stack. Resonance gets them to like you; message-decision fit ensures they aren’t afraid to hire you.

The product was BluBlocker — sunglasses that filtered out blue light decades before screens made it a buzzword. Sugarman sold over 20 million pairs.

This is a golden example of why copy is king and design is mostly overpriced, overhyped window dressing. You don’t need a great image to sell something. You don’t need a six-figure brand book or a designer who insists on three more rounds of feedback (which you need to pay for).

All you really need are a few sentences so well-constructed that the reader can’t stop reading.

That’s the entire premise of Joseph Sugarman’s career, and the reason copywriters still pull his books off the shelf forty years later.

Who was Joe Sugarman?

Joseph Sugarman was an American direct response copywriter and entrepreneur who built JS&A Group in the 1970s — one of the first mail-order companies to specialize in tech and gadget products. He wasn’t a Madison Avenue ad man writing 30-second TV spots. He was selling pocket calculators, smoke detectors, and digital watches in long-form newspaper and magazine ads, back when a full page of body copy was a normal way to make a sale. He grew up in Chicago, served in the Air Force, and got into mail-order almost accidentally after stumbling onto the early calculator market.

By the time he wrote The Adweek Copywriting Handbook in 1998, he’d spent decades testing every theory he had on paying customers, not focus groups. His writing rules came from money on the table, not academia.

Joseph Sugarman’s copywriting rules

Sugarman’s books, particularly The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, are full of axioms he developed by running ads, tracking response rates, and watching what made paying customers actually pay. A handful do most of the work, and they hold up just as well today as they did when he was writing for newsprint:

1. The first sentence has one job: get the reader to the second sentence. Not to sell, not to dazzle, not to summarize the product. Get people to keep reading, that’s a copywriter’s entire job.

2. Plant seeds of curiosity early. Drop small open loops in the opening paragraphs — phrases that make the reader need to know what you mean before they’ll close the tab. Here’s an example: “There’s one mistake on every homepage that’s killing your conversion rate, and it’s probably in the first sentence.”

3. Write the way your customer actually thinks. Forget the way the company describes itself on its About page. Use the words and rhythm your reader uses when they’re describing the problem to a friend. Ogilvy said this exact same thing, by the way.

4. Edit ruthlessly. Sugarman’s first drafts were always too long. He believed the real work happened in the cutting, not the writing. If a sentence isn’t pulling the reader forward, it’s pushing them away.

5. Sell with logic, justify with emotion. Or flip it depending on the product, but both need to be there. A purely emotional ad feels like manipulation, and a purely logical ad doesn’t move anyone to act.

It’s rules like these that built Sugarman’s career, and it’s still the foundation under almost every landing page, sales email, and ad you’d write today.

What is direct response copywriting?

Direct response is copy is exactly as it sounds. It’s copywriting that’s “designed” to make the reader take a specific action right now — buy, click, sign up, call, request a quote, fill out a form.

The whole point is to get a measurable response from a single piece of work, which is the opposite of brand advertising, where you’re trying to build a vague positive feeling about a company over months and years.

The trade-off is that direct response is brutally measurable.

A direct response ad either makes more money than it cost to run or it doesn’t. There’s no soft brand-awareness cushion to hide behind, no abstract “exposure” metric to soften the result. You either got the order or you didn’t, and the copy is the variable that decided which one happened.

Joseph Sugarman’s BluBlocker ad is the textbook example.

The 1986 Wall Street Journal placement opened with him describing his personal experience of putting on the sunglasses for the first time and being startled by how clearly he could see — no fashion appeal, no celebrity, no glossy photography. Just his story, told in dense body copy that pulled the reader sentence by sentence down to the order form at the bottom. The reader followed because each line set up the next, and by the time they got to the price, they’d already been sold three pages earlier without realizing it.

Twenty million pairs later, the formula was vindicated.

How direct response works in the modern internet (and AI) era

I think we can all agree that direct mail is a dying craft.

The bulk of Sugarman’s career happened on paper — newspaper inserts, magazine ads, mail-order catalogs — and most of that infrastructure has either disappeared or shrunk into a niche that only a few industries still touch.

Although, a few years ago I worked on a postcard campaign for a US beauty lash company that was using direct mail to reach franchise prospects in their assigned regions. Their goal was to get more investors to open new studios. This was during my Upwork days, so I have no idea how that campaign played out.

Anyway, here’s how direct response copywriting applies to the channels we have today.

The underlying craft never went anywhere

The principles Joseph Sugarman built his career on transfer almost perfectly to nearly every modern format a copywriter touches:

• Landing pages
• Sales emails and email sequences
• Paid social ads on LinkedIn, Meta, and X
• YouTube video scripts and VSLs
• Even the prompts you’d write to get an AI tool to produce something useful

While the medium changed, the mechanics of attention has not.

People still scan, still get bored, still bounce.

This is why the first sentence you write still has one job.

Most modern B2B copy is direct response (even when nobody calls it that)

Most B2B teams today think they’re doing “content marketing” or “demand generation” or “brand building.” Strip the labels off and look at what the copy is actually being asked to do, and almost all of it turns out to be direct response in disguise.

• Building a landing page → the direct response is a demo booking
• Writing an email sequence → the direct response is a lead moving from interested to ready
• Running a paid ad on LinkedIn → the direct response is a click
• Gating a whitepaper → the direct response is a form fill
• Setting up a webinar registration page → the direct response is a signup
• Writing a SaaS pricing page → the direct response is a “Start free trial” click

These all live or die by the same metric Joseph Sugarman lived under for three decades: did someone do the thing the page asked them to do?

If yes, the copy worked.

If no, it didn’t.

There’s no third option, and no amount of brand-aware hand-waving or Jaguar-like rebranding fills the gap.

This matters because most B2B writers approach these formats like they’re writing a magazine article — building up context, explaining the company’s perspective, leading the reader on a thoughtful journey. Joseph Sugarman would have looked at that and asked two questions:

• where’s the offer, and
• what’s pulling the reader toward it?

The answer for most B2B pages is “buried at the bottom, under three paragraphs of throat-clearing.” Which is why the conversion rate on most B2B landing pages sits in the 1-2% range when it could be doing much more.

Direct response copywriting fixes this not by being pushier, but by being honest about what the page is for. The reader is there to make a decision. The copy’s job is to help them make it. Every sentence either moves them closer to the action or further from it.

But hey, maybe your AI can do that for you. Right?

Where AI fits in

The AI angle makes Joseph Sugarman’s rules more relevant, not less, and it’s worth being specific about why.

Anyone can spin up a draft in thirty seconds now. ChatGPT, Claude, Jasper, Copy.ai — they’ll all give you a competent-looking landing page in less time than it takes to make coffee. The output is grammatically clean, structurally reasonable, and almost always wrong in ways that someone untrained in copywriting won’t notice.

Here’s what AI consistently gets wrong:

• It opens with positioning statements instead of slippery first sentences
• It explains the product before it’s earned the reader’s attention
• It uses the company’s voice instead of the customer’s voice
• It piles on features without building emotional pull
• It writes a perfectly logical case while forgetting that people don’t buy from logic alone

What separates copy that works from copy that doesn’t is whether the person editing the draft understands the underlying principles. The slippery slide. The seeds of curiosity. The editing discipline. The match between what the customer feels and what the page says back to them.

AI can produce a thousand sentences instantly. It can’t tell you which one belongs first. It can’t read the draft back and notice that the second paragraph kills the curiosity built in the first. It can’t catch when the offer is buried, or when the call-to-action assumes a level of trust the copy hasn’t earned.

That’s still a human judgment call. And the people making that call best are the ones who’ve internalized the rules Sugarman wrote down forty years ago.

This is the part most “AI is replacing copywriters” arguments miss. The bottleneck was never producing draft copy — copywriters have always been able to produce draft copy. The bottleneck is producing copy that converts, and that bottleneck is editorial judgment, not generation speed.

A copywriter who understands direct response, with AI as a drafting tool, will outproduce both a junior copywriter writing from scratch and a marketing manager prompting AI without the underlying craft. The middle ground — somebody who knows what good direct response looks like and uses AI to get to a working draft faster — is where most of the real productivity gains in copywriting actually live right now.

At least, that’s what I believe.

I discovered Marshall McLuhan at a used bookstore when I was a teenager. His book, The Medium is the Massage, was a skinny little thing with an obscure cover and a typo in the title. I remember thumbing through the pages, mesmerized by the randomness and obscurity of all the visuals on each page.

I bought the book for $6 CAD and devoured the entire thing later that evening when I got home. This was the first-ever marketing book I ever read. It also happens to be the book that made me pay attention to how writing works on people. Or, as McLuhan puts it: how writing works us over.

That distinction — between what words say and where the words are published work us over — has become more clear to me as I got older. Yet McLuhan seemed to know exactly where media and marketing were headed when he published his ideas back in 1967.

Who Was Marshall McLuhan?

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian English professor at the University of Toronto. For most of his career, he wrote dense academic books that almost nobody read. His first book on media, The Mechanical Bride, came out in 1951 and barely registered. The Gutenberg Galaxy followed in 1962 and won him a Governor General’s Award, but stayed mostly inside academic circles.

Then in 1964, he published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. That was his real breakout book. It introduced the line he is most famous for, “the medium is the message,” and within two years he had gone from obscure professor to international intellectual celebrity.

Companies like IBM, General Electric, and Bell Telephone were flying McLuhan in from Toronto to lecture their executives. According to a 1965 profile in New York magazine by Tom Wolfe, one American corporation paid him $5,000 for a single closed-circuit television lecture, which is roughly $50,000 in today’s money.

The reason they paid him those numbers is worth understanding, because it explains why McLuhan still matters to anyone writing copy for a business:

• He told IBM, to its face, that it had spent decades thinking it was in the office equipment business when it was really in the information processing business.
• He told General Electric the same thing. They thought they sold light bulbs and lighting systems, when really they were in the business of moving information.

Reframes like that, delivered with the authority of a Cambridge-educated literary scholar, were the kind of thing that made executives pay speaker fees normally reserved for sitting senators.

By 1977, Woody Allen knew McLuhan’s name carried enough cultural weight to use him in a cameo in Annie Hall — McLuhan was actually a last-minute replacement after both Fellini and Buñuel turned the part down.

In the scene, a pompous Columbia professor pontificates in a movie theatre line about McLuhan’s work, until Allen’s character drags the real McLuhan out from behind a poster to deliver the line that became one of the most quoted moments in cinema: “You know nothing of my work.”

What Exactly Did Marshall McLuhan Write?

The Medium is the Massage came out in 1967. It is unlike any book about media before or since. And the title itself is famous for the wrong reason.

“Massage” was a typo. When the proofs came back from the printer, McLuhan’s publisher saw the misspelling and expected him to fix it. McLuhan looked at the page and told them to leave it. He saw right away that the accident was better than the original word.

“Massage” also captures the way media works on us physically. It kneads us. It softens our resistance. It folds in two other meanings at the same time. “Mass age,” the era of mass media. And “mess age,” the disorder it creates. A printer’s mistake became one of the most elegant puns in marketing history.

The book itself works the same way. It is not an argument you read in a straight line but more of a collage of photographs, torn typography, and white space used like punctuation.

McLuhan’s ideas are scattered across pages like the book is performing its own thesis. If you pick it up expecting a normal academic text, you will be confused. But that was the point.

Here is what he was actually saying.

We obsess over the content of any message: the words in the ad, the story in the film, the headline on the page. We ignore the medium that carries it, even though the medium is doing far more work than the message itself, for example:

• Television does not just broadcast shows, it restructures how we pay attention.
• Print does not just deliver words, it created the idea of the private, individual self.

Marshall McLuhan called this process narcosis.

This means we become so used to a media environment that we stop noticing what it is doing to us. The fish, he said, is the last to discover water.

Stripped to its working definition for any copywriter, the idea is simple.

The platform you publish on is already saying something before the reader sees a single word, such as:

• A cold email does not just deliver a message, it interrupts the reader’s day and asks them to trust a stranger.
• A LinkedIn post does not just share an idea, it borrows credibility from the people who liked and commented on it before you scrolled past.
• A landing page does not just describe an offer, it announces that someone is trying to sell you something the moment it loads.

This is what Marshall McLuhan was getting at. It’s not that copywriting changes in any of these places. The medium does. Each medium comes pre-loaded with its own expectation, its own register, its own emotional weight.

The medium has already done its work before your subject line even loads, before your first sentence is read, before the visitor scrolls. It shapes what the reader expects, how much they trust you, and the emotional register they bring to the words you actually wrote.

Why Does Marshall McLuhan Still Matter Today?

Every copywriter working online is operating inside McLuhan’s idea, whether they know it or not. The shape of the medium becomes invisible through repetition, and the content inside it becomes invisible right along with it.

This is why the copy that actually works tends to break the rules of the medium it lives in.

• The email that reads like a note from a friend instead of a broadcast.
• The landing page that opens with a story instead of a headline.
• The B2B article that takes a real position instead of a safe one.

These work because they do something the medium is not expected to do. That gap is what creates the only thing advertising has ever needed: attention.

Which brings me to AI, the newest medium shaking up our world.

AI-written copy is fast becoming a medium of its own, with its own register, its own predictable rhythms, and its own pre-loaded expectation. The AI cold email, the AI LinkedIn post, the AI landing page have all started to sound like the same thing, regardless of which platform they live on.

The medium is announcing itself before the reader gets to the first sentence, and what it is announcing is that the message was not at all written for them (i.e., it’s written by the business, for the sake of the business profiting).

That is McLuhan’s narcosis happening in real time. Anyone leaning fully on AI to do their writing for them is about to find out the hard way that the reader can feel the medium underneath the words.

Now, Marshall McLuhan never wrote an ad in his life. But he understood, better than almost anyone, why the same words in different places get completely different results. The copywriter who ignores the medium is only doing half the job.

I still have my copy of McLuhan’s book. Even though the spine has given up and the pages are falling out, I reread it whenever I feel my writing is not working because it always reminds me of the same thing:

The reader is not just reading my words. They are also reading — and being influenced by — the place I put them.

So is copywriting worth it in 2026, or is this a budget line you can eliminate completely?

I want to walk through this the way I would if you booked a call with me, including the parts that argue against hiring me.

AI Copywriting Disclaimer: This post was drafted with AI assistance and revised, line-by-line, by a human (that’s me). It’s part of my 30-Day AI Writing Challenge — a public experiment testing whether AI-assisted, human-edited content can revive a stagnant B2B site that stopped generating leads.

What is happening in the market?

According to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 23% of agencies cut junior copywriter headcount in 2025, and another 31% are planning more cuts in 2026.

In the same period, those agencies grew their senior content strategist roles by 18% year-over-year. The spend is not disappearing; it is moving up the value chain, and marketing leaders are no longer asking whether they still need writers — they are asking whether they need writers who can do more than write.

That shift is being driven by how quickly AI has become the default tool for content work. Industry research from Siege Media and Wynter puts AI adoption among content marketers at 97% in 2026, up from 65% in 2023, and a separate survey by Reboot Online found that 65% of marketers believe AI has had a bigger impact on content creation and copywriting than on any other marketing task, by a 20-point margin.

Put it all together and you get a market that is not killing copywriting so much as sorting it into cheap, generic, fill-the-page work copy. While the strategic work — the kind that affects what a buyer thinks and ultimately decides — is being concentrated into fewer hands with responsibilities going beyond just the delivery of words.

Whether copywriting is worth it in 2026 depends entirely on which side of that line your business need falls on. Which leads to the obvious objection.

What AI is genuinely good at now

Let’s give the machines their due. In 2026, a business owner with a clear brief and decent prompting skills can produce:

• Useable product descriptions
• Internal documentation and FAQs
• First-draft blog posts on well-trodden topics
• Social captions and email subject lines
• Outlines, briefs, and research summaries

If your need sits inside that list, hiring a copywriter at four figures for the work is probably overkill, and I would rather you use the tools, edit the output, and spend that money on something where it actually compounds.

The argument for hiring me is not that AI cannot do the easy stuff; it is that the easy stuff is no longer where the value lives.

Where AI fails B2B businesses

There are four places AI consistently breaks down, and any one of them is enough to sink a page.

1. AI does not know your buyer

AI knows a generic version of your buyer assembled from the public internet. That is not the same thing as:

• The CFO who has to defend the line item to the board
• The operations lead who has been burned by three similar tools in the last two years
• The marketing manager who needs the buy-in of two skeptical peers before the deal closes
• The founder who is making this decision personally because nobody else on the team has the context

The model has no access to the specific anxieties, internal politics, or unspoken rules that decide whether your deal actually closes. Real buyers have all of those. AI buyers do not.

2. AI does not know your offer

AI can describe what you sell, but only as well as you describe it in the prompt. What it cannot do is explain why your specific approach is the right one for a specific buyer.

That requires understanding the trade-offs you have made — the features you deliberately did not build, the customers you turned away, the price point you held even when the market pushed back.

None of that is in the public record, and none of it shows up in an AI draft unless you put it there yourself, in which case you are doing the strategic work and AI is just the typist.

3. AI does not have a position

This is the biggest failure mode, and it is the one most DIY copy never recovers from. AI defaults to the average of what already exists in your category.

That means if your three closest competitors are all using the same vocabulary — “intuitive platform,” “seamless integration,” “trusted by industry leaders” — AI will help you use the same vocabulary, faster and more efficiently than ever. You will sound exactly like them, on a tighter publishing schedule.

That is the opposite of what positioning is supposed to do.

4. AI writes to a topic, not to a buying decision

This is the subtle one, and it is the one that quietly tanks conversion rates.

• A topic is “what we do.”
• A buying decision is “why a specific buyer should choose us, right now, over the next three options on their list.”

AI is excellent at the first job. It is structurally incapable of the second, because the second one requires understanding where the reader is in their decision and what would move them one step closer to yes.

A blog post that explains your category is a topic page. A landing page that walks a skeptical buyer from “I do not know who you are” to “send me a proposal” is a buying-decision page. The work is fundamentally different, and only one of them moves money.

What you actually get when you hire a copywriter in 2026

If you hired me for a website project or a set of landing pages, here is what shows up in the final deliverable, broken down into the five things you are actually paying for.

Sales conversations that match the website

Most B2B sites and sales pitches contradict each other. The homepage promises one thing, the sales call sells another, the proposal frames it a third way, and the buyer ends the process more confused than when they started. Strategy-led copy fixes the misalignment at the source.

You walk away with:

• A one-paragraph positioning statement your sales team can quote verbatim on a discovery call
• Page-level value props that match the language you use when you pitch live
• An objection-handling map that pairs the most common buyer pushbacks with the page that addresses each one
• A messaging document your team can hand to a new hire on day one

By the end of the project, your homepage and your sales deck are telling the same story. That is harder than it sounds, and it is worth more than most founders realize until they see it working.

Pages that serve a single job

Every page on a site does one thing for the visitor, and the copy is written to do that thing only.

• The homepage qualifies — it tells the wrong-fit visitor to leave and the right-fit visitor to keep reading
• The services page builds confidence — it shows you have done this before and you know what you are doing
• The case study reduces perceived risk — it lets the buyer see themselves in a customer who looked like them and got the result they want
• The pricing page handles objections — it answers the price question before the buyer has to ask it out loud

When those jobs are clear, the pages get shorter and sharper, and your conversion rate moves in the right direction.

Your buyer’s actual language on the page

This is the part AI cannot fake, and it is the part that decides whether the copy actually converts.

The final pages are built from the words your real customers used in interviews:

• the phrases they typed into Google,
• the objections they raised on sales calls,
• the way they described their problem to their boss when they were trying to get the budget approved.

AI-generated copy uses the averaged-out B2B language for your category. Whereas strategy-led copy uses your specific buyer’s specific language.

The difference shows up in your conversion data within ninety days, and it shows up in your sales calls immediately — because suddenly your prospects are quoting your homepage back to you, in their own words.

A second opinion from an outsider’s POV

When you pay an outside copywriter, you are also buying someone with no political stake in your org chart, no emotional attachment to the old homepage, and no reason to be polite about copy that is not working.

That perspective is hard to get from inside the company, even when you have smart people on the team. Internal feedback is shaped by who said what in the last all-hands, who built the old page, and who is afraid of losing the argument with the founder.

An outside copywriter does not care about any of that. The cheapest version of this is the Landing Page Roast, and on a full project, the second-opinion work is built into every page review.

More of your time back

This is the one most founders forget to put on the list, and it is the one that pays for itself fastest.

You did not start your company because you wanted to spend Saturday afternoons rewriting the homepage. You started it because you are good at the actual work — closing deals, shipping product, running the operation, leading the team.

Every hour you spend wrestling with a blank page is an hour you are not spending on the work that only you can do.

Hand the words to me, and you get back:

• The hours you were going to spend writing
• The hours you were going to spend rewriting after the first draft did not land
• The hours your team was going to spend giving you feedback on copy that was never their job
• The mental overhead of having “fix the website” sitting on your to-do list for the next six months

You have better things to do. Leave the words to me.

When hiring a copywriter is not worth it

I am not going to pretend the answer is always yes, because it is not. There are situations where hiring me would be a waste of your money, and I would rather tell you that now than take the project and have you regret it later.

The real test is whether the work you need actually requires strategic thinking, or whether it just needs decent words on a page. If it is the second one, AI plus a careful editor will get you most of the way there for a fraction of what I charge.

Skip hiring a copywriter if:

• You do not yet have a clear offer or an actual customer to talk to. Copy cannot fix a positioning problem you have not solved.
• You need volume content like weekly blog posts on broad topics, and you do not have a real distribution plan to put behind them.
• You are pre-revenue and need to test ten things this quarter. Move fast, write it yourself, and hire a copywriter once you know what is working.
• The page is genuinely informational and not tied to a buying decision. A help center article, an internal wiki, or a basic product spec sheet does not need a strategist.

If any of those describe your situation, save the money. I would rather you come back in twelve months when the copy actually has a job to do than spend $1,500 now on a project that was never going to move the needle.

A question worth asking before you hire anyone

Before you hire any copywriter, including me, run the math on one diagnostic question:

If you doubled the conversion rate on a single page, what would that be worth to the business over the next twelve months?

Most businesses have never actually run this calculation, so let me show you how it works with a real example.

Say you run a B2B SaaS company.

Your pricing page gets 1,000 visitors a month from a mix of organic search and paid traffic. Of those visitors, 20 start a free trial — a 2% conversion rate. Of those 20 trials, 4 convert to paying customers at an average annual contract value of $6,000. That page is generating $24,000 in new revenue per month, or $288,000 a year.

Now, what happens if a copywriter rewrites that page and conversions move from 2% to 3% — a 50% lift, which is conservative for a page that has never been optimized for a specific buyer?

You go from 20 trials a month to 30. From 4 customers to 6. Your annual revenue from that single page jumps from $288,000 to $432,000. That is $144,000 in new revenue, from one page, in one year.

Against a one-time investment of $1,500 to $5,000, the math makes sense.

Now flip the example. Say your page gets 50 visitors a month, your offer is a $200 product, and your conversion rate is already 3%. Doubling that conversion gets you an extra three sales a month, or $7,200 a year. Spending $3,000 to chase that lift is not unreasonable, but it is not statistically significant either, and you would probably get a faster return improving your ad targeting or your offer instead of your copy.

So before you book a call with any copywriter, do this exercise on the page you are thinking about. Walk through the actual numbers — your traffic, your conversion rate, your average customer value — and figure out what a meaningful lift would be worth to you over twelve months.

So, is copywriting worth it in 2026?

Copywriting in 2026 is worth it when the words on the page are tied to revenue, positioning, and customer psychology, and it is not worth it when you just need someone to fill a page with text.

AI has commoditized the generic end of the work, which is a real and permanent shift, but it has also made strategy-led writing more valuable rather than less, because the gap between average copy and copy that actually moves money has widened in a way that buyers can feel even if they cannot articulate it.

I have written before about why copywriting is not dead, and the short version of that argument applies here too: AI raised the floor and the ceiling at the same time.

The question is no longer whether you need a copywriter; it is what kind of copy actually moves the needle for your business, and who is the right person to produce it.

If you want to talk through whether your situation falls on the AI side of that line or the copywriter side, that is what my paid strategy call is for, and I will tell you honestly which one I think you need — even when the answer is not me.