The Simplest Rule for Speaking to Buyers, Not Browsers
A small mistake from my photography site reminded me why speaking to the right person is simple, but not easy
A buyer doesn’t need your whole page to be wrong before they leave.
You can start with the right person. You can understand their problem and have useful things to say about it.
Then, slowly, the page turns away from them and to a different reader.
A paragraph explaining something only an industry insider would care about.
A section trying to prove how clever you are instead of helping the buyer decide.
A technical detail which makes customers feel less included.
None of it looks disastrous. But once there are enough moments where your target stops feeling like it was written for them? They’re gone.
The fact is, whether it’s an offer, a landing page or even just a blog post, all writing needs one clear reader in mind—and to stay laser-focused on them.
“Know your buyer” is obvious advice.
“Stay with your buyer” is less obvious—and, as it turns out, much harder.
Smile for the camera!
I recently started a business in portrait photography. I set the website up, launched the business and began working on my content strategy.
My first blog post for the new website was on how to smile in photos.
I noted the key details:
The reader? Anyone who wants better photos of themselves. Very commercially aligned with a portrait photography business.
The problem? They don’t know how to smile in photos in a way they like.
The solution? Practical advice they could use before or during a photo shoot.
I was going to throw everything at this one. Not just what I knew about SEO/content marketing, but everything I knew from years of taking portraits.
And to my surprise, it flowed like crazy. Turns out that 10 years of taking pics means I know much more about portrait photography than I do about interior decor. I got the first draft out pretty quickly—and it was not bad at all.
But on a re-read a few days later, I noticed problems.
Here’s a passage from the first version of this article:
Laughter creates one of the best smiles in everyone. And one of the best ways to get a laugh is to tell a joke.
It doesn’t have to be a clever, or even a funny joke. Sometimes, the funny thing is just how unfunny the joke is. But even a groaner almost always gets a laugh from the subject.
Oops. See what happened there? Suddenly, I’d stopped talking to people who wanted to learn “how to smile in photos”.
I’d become a photographer speaking to other photographers.
If I were writing a blog post called, “How to get your subject to smile in photos”, this passage would have been great.
But that wasn’t the brief, and there were small examples of this throughout the draft:
places where I was speaking to the wrong target.
places where I was trying to “be authoritative” or “sound impressive” instead of giving practical advice.
places where I couldn’t resist slipping in a witty comment/anecdote—even if it had nothing to do with smiling in photos.
The reality? My first draft was still entertaining.
But once I’d put myself in the mindset of someone who’d just searched for “how to smile in photos”, I realised too much of the writing hadn’t addressed the issue at all. This person probably wouldn’t be settling in with a cup of tea, excited to read my extended thoughts on portrait direction.
With that much fluff, why would they stick around?
I’ve since updated the article to honour the promise of the headline better.
But here’s the danger I’m speaking about. Had I not remembered to check my work from this point of view, I’d have been left with a page that felt entertaining to me, but was quietly useless to the reader I was hoping to find.
The wrong audience can sneak in before you publish
Here’s another example.
I’ve been back to writing on Twitter lately.
I’ve mostly been documenting my learning, building in public and generally sharing any digital marketing wisdom I have with the world.
But, for the longest time, I was very squeamish about posting anything to do with SEO. After all, if I said something wrong and a more experienced SEO publicly contradicted me, I might have had to change industries entirely.
Ok, fine. I’m exaggerating. But it does point to the question of why I was thinking of writing for experienced SEOs to begin with. I doubt there’s much I could say which they wouldn’t find obvious.
But the people I was trying to help? Business owners, consultants, clinic owners, photographers? They’d probably have found what I was saying quite useful.
The “audience drift” had kiboshed my writing before I’d even started.
It’s bad enough pushing away a target buyer because I didn’t focus enough on them. It’s another to never reach them in the first place because they seemingly never entered my mind.
The test isn’t only, “Is this good?”
The better test is, “Who would feel more understood after reading this?”
If the answer is your peers, your competitors, an internal team or an imaginary expert waiting to judge you…be careful.
Those people might appreciate the detail, but they’re not the people trying to decide whether or not to buy from you.
Speaking to the right buyer is simple…
But staying with them takes a huge amount of discipline.
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