There’s a sequence that repeats in many rebranding or repositioning projects. The current message isn’t working. Conversions are slowing, leads are coming in less qualified, the sales team is complaining that the sales page doesn’t support the conversation. The natural reaction is to call a better copywriter. Let’s rewrite the copy. Tighter, more direct, more impactful.
It works, sometimes. For a few weeks. Then results drift back to where they were.
The better copywriter had done their job well. The message was effectively tighter. More direct. More impactful. And yet the problem came back. Not because anyone made a mistake, but because the problem, from the start, wasn’t in the message.
Messages don’t fail because they’re badly written. They fail because the reader doesn’t have the context to interpret them.
Context is the set of things the reader needs to already have clear in their head for your message to work. What problem they’re trying to solve. What they’re choosing between. What they’re willing to invest. What risks they’re trying to avoid. Without these answers, the message floats. Even when it’s well written, even when it’s tight, even when it’s direct. It works at the aesthetic level, not at the decision level.
You see this clearly in the following scenario, which I’ve watched in three or four variations over the last few years. A B2B services company builds a new site, rewrites all the copy with a premium agency, launches a coordinated LinkedIn campaign. The first two months traffic goes up. So do leads. The sales team starts getting call requests. Three months later, the requests dry up. Six months later, they’re back to pre-rebrand numbers. The site is still beautiful, the copy is still tight, the campaigns are still running. What changed?
What almost always happened is this. The people most exposed to the message, the ones the copy intercepted first, were already looking for a solution. They already had the context. They didn’t need your company to build the problem in their head. They arrived, found something speaking to their problem, clicked. When that pool runs out, what’s left is people who don’t yet have the context. For them tight copy isn’t enough. They need help recognising the problem before being offered the solution.
This completely changes where you should intervene. If the problem is copy, rewrite the copy. If the problem is context, rewriting the copy isn’t enough. You need to build the context upstream, before the reader even arrives on the sales page. You build it with prior content, with the sequence of exposures, with how you frame the problem out there in the market.
The copy on the sales page is the synthesis of a decision-making process that, ideally, started long before. When it works, it works because it traces a thought the reader had already half-formed. It confirms. Frames. Lets them choose. It isn’t convincing from scratch. It’s arriving at the destination.
When the copy has to do all the work alone, it’s too late. However well written, it ends up trying to build the reader’s decision context in thirty seconds of reading. It almost never works.
There’s a practical test for telling whether the problem is copy or context. Have your current message read by three people who know nothing about your company and three people who’ve been following you for a year. If the first three say I didn’t get who this is for, the problem is context. If the second three say not very effective, the problem is copy. Almost always, the first diagnosis is the real one. People mistake it for the second because rewriting copy is easier than rebuilding context.
Rebuilding context takes months of coordinated work. Rewriting copy takes weeks. That’s why people end up rewriting copy. It’s faster. It just doesn’t move much.
When a message isn’t working, the first question isn’t how do we rewrite it. It’s who is reading it, and in what context?. The answer to that question tells you what needs fixing, and almost never is it the message.