Show, Don’t Tell
Stop listing who you serve. Let the work do it.
There is a page on almost every small business website that does the same, slightly desperate job. It is usually called Who We Work With, and it is a list. Sectors, sometimes. Company sizes. A row of logos, if there are logos to be had.
The list is doing something quite specific: it is trying to reassure. It is saying, look, other people like you have trusted us, so you may safely do the same. And it almost never works, because a list is an assertion and assertions are cheap.
The problem with telling
When you tell someone who you are for, you are asking them to do two things at once. First, to locate themselves on your list. Second, to believe you.
Both are effort. And the moment someone does not see themselves on the list — the moment the tattoo studio owner scans a row of corporate logos and finds nothing — they conclude, quite reasonably, that this is not for them. You have excluded them by accident, using a list you wrote in a hurry.
There is also the deeper problem, which is that a list flattens exactly the thing you most need to convey. It tells someone the category. It cannot tell them the feeling.
What showing looks like
Showing means the specificity moves out of the copy and into the evidence.
It means editorial photography rather than stock headshots — the tattooed bookkeeper photographed with the tattoos visible, the practitioner photographed in their actual room rather than a studio, the messy desk on a real working morning rather than a staged one. Pictures of the truth, framed beautifully.
It means client stories written as stories, worth reading whether or not you are buying anything. Not case studies with a challenge, a solution and a percentage. Actual writing, about actual people, with the awkward bits left in.
And it means that cumulatively, without you ever having to write a list, someone can look at the body of work and know precisely whether they belong there. Because they will have seen someone like them, treated with care, described with attention. That is a far stronger claim than any sentence you could write about yourself.
The three-second test
Look at what you published this week. Could a stranger have posted the same thing?
If the answer is yes — if it would look identical coming from any of the fifty other businesses doing what you do — then it is telling, not showing, and it is doing no work at all.
Everything you put out should be recognisably yours within about three seconds. Not because of a logo in the corner. Because of what it is, and how it looks, and what it chooses to notice.
This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.
