79. Your Website Is a Movie Trailer (And Most Are Terrible)

Now, I don't need to tell you this, but we know that the times have changed, right? A professional, niche-specific website, kind of the bare minimum right now.

It used to be enough to stand out to have one of those, and those were [chuckles] in some ways the glory days.

These days, like, the bar has been raised, right? The name of the game right now is being memorable.

And just 'cause you can list every single training you've taken or the fact that you're trauma-informed or strengths-based, it doesn't make you memorable right now.

It's just adding to that sea of sameness that clients are wading through.

The thing that is going to differentiate you right now is you.

But many clinicians don't know how to get you, them, onto the page.

Now, this episode and the episode title even was inspired by a conversation I had with Monica, who's our confident copy coach.

CC Live students you know and love Monica just like I do.

But she offered the metaphor that your website is like a movie trailer for what it's like to sit across from you.

Okay? Your website is the movie trailer of doing therapy with you, and nobody's buying a movie ticket off of the synopsis, right? They're not buying a movie ticket because, oh, the plot sounds interesting.

They buy it off of a feeling that that trailer gives them.

I remember Kyle, my husband, went to go see Project Hail Mary, which if you haven't seen it, it's fantastic, but he went before I had seen it and he came back and told me all about the movie trailer for The Odyssey and how it was absolutely gripping and he couldn't wait to go see it.

Now, I hated reading The Odyssey in high school.

I don't know about you, but that was not my idea of fun literature.

But he was right.

You watch that trailer and you're like, "Okay.

I, I guess I'm into this.

I'm into this mythology and that kind of thing." Just a really good example of the fact that we make decisions off of feeling, that 95% of our decision-making is led by emotion, even when they're decisions about our businesses.

So if we use this idea of your website being the movie trailer for working with you, guess what? If the trailer is stiff, and disconnected, and boring, or sounding the same as every other trailer I've seen, your client is going to assume that the room with you is the same.

Okay? So you know what you bring into the room.

You know that it's not stiff and disconnected, and that you actually are quite dynamic and interesting and do great work when you're in the right room with the right person.

But we need to get that onto the page.

That's what this episode is really about.

Now, the way that we're thinking about this is the idea of showing versus telling.