Open most SME homepages and you'll find the same structure: a headline about the business, a paragraph about its mission, a photo of the founder, and a story about how it all began. It reads well in the boardroom and falls flat on the page, because the person reading it is not there to watch your business be the hero. Visitors skim because they are hunting for one answer, does this solve my problem, and most SME marketing makes them hunt for it. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith spent years building brand stories for global names inside DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi before building and selling nine of his own companies, and the biggest single shift he makes with SME clients is this: stop being the hero of your own marketing.

The enemy here is a natural instinct: when you've built something, you want to talk about it. So the website leads with we, the pitch leads with our story, and the brochure leads with awards and years in business. None of that is wrong to include. It's wrong to lead with, because the customer isn't browsing your website to learn about you. They're browsing to find out whether you understand them.

Nielsen Norman Group's research, based on more than 45,000 page views, found that visitors have time to read at most 28 percent of the words on an average web page during a typical visit, and 20 percent is the more realistic figure. People are not reading your story. They are scanning for themselves in it, and if they can't find themselves in the first screen, they leave.

Author and marketing consultant Donald Miller built the StoryBrand SB7 framework on a simple correction to brand-as-hero marketing: the customer is the hero of every story, and the business plays the guide who helps them win. Every piece of effective marketing copy can be rebuilt around seven beats, in your own words, never copied from the book itself.

“Kevin D'Ambros-Smith was the first coach that helped us and he was so great. He understood the business straightaway, was able to identify some of the areas where we could grow it, and some of the things to park. I don't think the ROW branding would be nearly as strong without his input. He was just brilliant.”

— Sarah McGuinness, Founder and CEO, Revolutionaries of Wellbeing (ROW)

Most owners know, on some level, that nobody wants their origin story on page one. They write it anyway because it feels earned, and because handing the hero role to the customer feels like giving up credit for the years of work that built the business. It isn't giving up credit. It's the fastest way to get the business noticed, because attention follows recognition, and people only recognise themselves in a story, never a stranger's resume.

This is where an outside eye is worth more than another round of internal edits. Someone who has sat in rooms building global brand positioning can see, in minutes, which parts of a business's own story the customer will skim past, and which single sentence actually answers can you solve my problem, often a sentence the owner has never thought to lead with.

If your website is still telling your story instead of theirs, that's the first conversation we have.