Journal · By Steve and Nolan
Your Customers Describe You Better Than You Do.
We read how 151 small businesses describe themselves and what their customers wrote about them. Customers name a person four times as often. Here's what to steal back.
We’re Steve and Nolan, two people in West Michigan who run a small business too.
Journal · By Steve and Nolan
Your Customers Describe You Better Than You Do.
We read how 151 small businesses describe themselves and what their customers wrote about them. Customers name a person four times as often. Here's what to steal back.
We read the public pages of 151 small businesses, and for 125 of them, the reviews their customers left too. At 37% of those 125, a customer named a person. Only 9% of the same businesses named a person about themselves. Your best line is probably already written, in a review, by someone who paid you.
Our work starts with reading what a small business has put out in public. The website. The bio. The Google listing. Then the reviews. We have done that a few hundred times this fall, and after a while a pattern got hard to ignore, so we stopped and counted it.
Here is the count. It covers 151 small businesses with something to say about themselves in their own words, and 125 of those also had customer reviews we could read. Bakeries, groomers, landscapers, salons, coffee shops, roofers, bookkeepers.
For about seven in ten, the first line we found was a label, not a sentence. No verb. Lines shaped like “Premier landscaping experts,” “Quality cuts, fair prices,” or “Family owned and operated.” Three out of ten never describe themselves in a full sentence anywhere we could find.
The most common stock claim we counted is time. One in four leans on “since,” “established,” or a number of years. The words that show up in what businesses write, and almost never in what customers write, are “serving,” “owned,” “proudly” and “locally”. In the reviews we compared, not one customer wrote “proudly.” Not one wrote “locally.”
And four in ten name nothing specific at all. No town. No one thing they make. No person.
Customers write about a person, and what that person did.
Of the 125 businesses where we could read both sides, 37% had a reviewer use somebody’s first name. The owner, the groomer, the guy who ran the crew. The businesses themselves did that 9% of the time. Same businesses. Their customers named a person four times as often as they did.
At 36%, a customer described one specific moment. A fix that happened before the next storm. Getting squeezed in the same day. A cake for a particular birthday. The businesses told a moment like that 14% of the time.
The words customers reach for are plain ones: “crew,” “friendly,” “knowledgeable,” “always”. “Always” is our favorite. It means somebody came back enough times to notice a habit. No business in the set called itself “knowledgeable.” At 15% of them, a customer did.
If your page reads like the first list, you’re in good company. Most pages do, ours included.
When you sit down to write about your own business, you are writing for a stranger, and writing for a stranger makes anyone stiff. You reach for the words that sound like a business. Those words come from every other business page you have ever read, which is why they all match.
Your customers have no such problem. They are not trying to sound like a business. They are telling a neighbor what happened. So they say the name of the person, the thing that person did, and the day it mattered.
That is also exactly what a stranger wants to know before they call you.
We would rather tell you the limits than have you find them.
We could only count the pages we could reach, so the tenure and stock-phrase numbers are probably low. The label number may run a little high, because the script sometimes grabbed a menu heading or a service name, and those read as labels too. When we collect reviews, we look for the specific ones, which pushes the customer numbers up. And a script did the sorting, with a hand check on a sample: about four out of five lines it pulled were sorted right. Treat each number as give or take a few points.
The direction is not close, though. Even if our pick of reviews doubled the customer number, customers would still name a person twice as often as the businesses do.
You do not have to become a writer to do this. The writing is done. Somebody who paid you already did it for free.
If you want to see how your page reads to someone who has never met you, the Carbon Copy Check does that. Paste your website, your profile or your link in bio, and it shows you where your page sounds like everybody else’s. It’s free. It asks for your email so your read is waiting when you come back: stolanacres.com/check
From public pages only: each business’s own website, bio and listing, and the public reviews customers left. We counted per business, so one business counts once no matter how many times it used a word. We name no business here and never will.
Ask the customer first, and use their words exactly. Even without quoting anyone, you can borrow the shape: a name, a thing that happened, a day it mattered.
Think of the last text a happy customer sent you, or what a regular says when they introduce you to a friend. Same source, smaller pile.
Then go open your reviews.
Back to the Journal ↗ See what a stranger sees. Take the Carbon Copy Check →Paste your website, your profile or your link in bio. We read what strangers read and show you what they missed. Free.
Read one. Then see yourself the way a stranger does.
Paste your link. We show you what a stranger sees when they look you up. Free.
Or just come hang out: the Stolan Acres Studio is free. Walk in