Is this a copywriting problem or a positioning problem?

Sometimes I’m asked to evaluate a company’s positioning by having a look at the company’s website. I understand why someone would ask me to do this. If both the copywriting and positioning are solid, I would be able to tell immediately without even scrolling down on the home page.

But when someone asks me to look at the website and tell me if there’s a positioning problem, it’s usually because they already suspect there is one. But weak, confusing copy on the website could be because:

• Your positioning is weak and no one really understands it, including the person who wrote the web copy

• The positioning is super clear to the founders / leadership, but not to the person writing the copy

• The copywriter sucks (for most startups, this is better articulated as ‘the person who wrote the web copy sucks at writing web copy’)

The end symptom of each of these problems appears pretty much identical to someone visiting the website, whether it is me or a tech journalist or an investor or a prospect. But the illness is different and the cure is different.

Poor positioning can be the underlying cause of a lot of problems, from marketing problems to PR problems (the kind of PR problems in which you are ignored) to churn problems. But that does not mean it is always the underlying cause. Maybe your positioning is great but your funnel sucks. Or your PR team sucks. Or….

Before I finish this blog post, I want to go back to the second scenario: The company leadership is super clear on the positioning, but the rest of the team is not. This is kind of a positioning problem, but not the kind that you would want to hire someone like me to help solve. It’s really a communication problem and a sign that the leadership needs to get the company positioning out of their heads and into a document that can be shared and referenced.