SBA Consultation Insight
When the Website Describes Services Instead of Solving Problems
A shared workspace business had excellent design, professional photography, and comprehensive service descriptions. Occupancy remained low. The messaging spoke about the business instead of the customer's actual need.
By Doug Mansfield | President, Mansfield Marketing
Home > SBA Consultations > When the Website Describes Services Instead of Solving Problems
Impressive Design, Missing Message
I sat with a business owner recently who had done almost everything right with her website. Professional photography of actual facilities. Clean layout. Well-organized navigation. Detailed descriptions of every service offering. Even a blog with regular posts.
Occupancy was 3 out of 44 private offices. One of 14 warehouse units.
The website looked expensive. It communicated competence. But it was not converting visitors into phone calls.
The Service Description Trap
When I scrolled through the homepage, I found icons and descriptions for every workspace type offered. Co-working. Private offices. Virtual offices. Meeting rooms. Each service had its own section with features listed.
The presentation was logical. Someone had thought carefully about organizing the information. The descriptions were accurate.
But every section talked about what the business offered. None of it addressed why someone would actually pay for it.
What People Actually Buy
I asked the owner: when people sign up for private office space, what problem are they actually trying to solve?
Image. They want to look credible.
That answer came immediately. No hesitation. She knew exactly what motivated her clients. A small business competing against larger competitors needs to appear established. Working from home signals something different than having a professional address.
This insight was absent from the website.
The homepage described workspace solutions. It did not say: while your competitors work from their spare bedroom, you can look like a company worth doing business with. It did not acknowledge that credibility was the actual product being sold.
A local area code phone number appears at the top of the website. That number communicates something the carefully written service descriptions cannot. It says: we are local, we are real, you can reach a human. That phone number does more work than paragraphs of copy about amenities.
The Blog Problem
The blog contained regular posts. All of them discussed the business itself. Why shared workspace matters. Benefits of co-working. Productivity tips for remote workers.
This is what most business blogs look like. And it is the wrong strategy.
Reading a business blog that only discusses the business feels like attending a meeting with someone who only talks about themselves. At some point, the reader disengages. The content is perceived as sales copy, not useful information. Nobody shares self-promotional content with their network.
The Good Neighbor Strategy
I suggested a different approach. Three out of four blog posts should have nothing to do with the business at all.
The workspace is located in a specific community. Local restaurants. Other small businesses. Schools running fundraisers. Charities the owner supports. Tenants inside the workspace who could use exposure for their own ventures.
This content serves multiple purposes. It positions the business as a community member rather than just a vendor. It provides genuinely interesting material that people might actually share. It gives other local businesses a reason to cross-promote.
When the workspace publishes a post celebrating a local restaurant, that restaurant shares the post with their own audience. The workspace gets exposure to people who had no reason to visit a commercial real estate website.
One promotional post out of four. The other three build community presence and generate organic reach.
Social Media as Amplification
The owner maintained Facebook and LinkedIn accounts alongside the website. Both received sporadic updates with original content posted directly to each platform.
This approach dilutes effort. Every piece of content published directly to social media represents an investment in someone else's platform rather than your own website.
The blog should be the only place new content gets created. Social media posts become links back to blog content. Facebook and LinkedIn serve to funnel people to the website where conversion happens. They are distribution channels, not content destinations.
This also solves the newsletter problem. Instead of creating yet another content obligation, the monthly newsletter simply summarizes what appeared on the blog. The work happens once and gets distributed through multiple channels.
The Speed Problem Nobody Mentions
WordPress powers the website. The design looked professional. But Google's speed test returned concerning numbers. Mobile score in the teens. Desktop barely above fifty.
These numbers matter for search visibility. Google rewards fast-loading sites and penalizes slow ones. Mobile speed matters especially for local service businesses because people searching for nearby options are often on phones.
The owner knew about the speed issue. The web developer could fix it. WordPress speed optimization is a common technical challenge with known solutions.
But until that call, the business impact of those numbers had not been clearly communicated. A mobile score of 16 is not a minor issue to address eventually. It actively undermines the search visibility the business needs to fill empty offices.
LinkedIn for Targeted Outreach
The business exists to serve small businesses and self-employed professionals. LinkedIn provides tools specifically designed to find these people.
Sales Navigator allows filtering by company size, geography, and industry. Self-employed individuals can be specifically targeted. The platform identifies people matching defined criteria and surfaces them for outreach.
The typical LinkedIn sales approach feels awkward. Connecting with someone and immediately pitching them creates resistance. But when the filtering works correctly, inbound connection requests increase. Responding to someone who reached out first feels different than cold outreach.
Building connection numbers creates momentum. Somewhere around ten to fifteen thousand connections, daily inbound requests become reliable. Each request represents an opportunity for a non-awkward conversation starter.
Pricing Visibility
The website displayed detailed pricing tables. The owner had attended a workshop where I mentioned the topic of whether to publish prices.
My general position: avoid absolute statements on websites. Dollar amounts, percentages, and specific numbers allow visitors to reach conclusions without talking to you. The goal is inspiring contact, not enabling independent decisions.
But this situation was nuanced. The pricing tables were exceptionally well-designed. The presentation communicated value clearly. And the owner believed visibility helped because prospects assumed costs would be higher than reality.
The answer is testing. WordPress allows showing different versions of pages. Run the pricing visible for a month. Run it hidden behind a form for a month. Compare which generates more conversations.
If hiding pricing increases inquiries, the form also captures contact information for follow-up. The visitor provides name and email to see the numbers. Now there is a lead even if they do not call immediately.
The Actual Fix
The website needed one fundamental change: messaging that addresses the customer's problem rather than describing the business's services.
Someone visiting that website already knows shared workspace exists. They do not need education about co-working concepts. They need to hear their own motivation reflected back at them.
You want to compete with companies that have real offices. You want clients to take you seriously. You want a professional address that is not your apartment. You want to look established without the overhead of a long-term commercial lease.
These statements speak to what the buyer actually wants. The service descriptions explain what gets delivered. But the problem-focused messaging explains why anyone would care.
