Where Does Your Personality Belong on Your Website? [Alumni Check-In Session #6](Episode 77)
Your website shouldn't feel like a completely different version of you than the one clients meet in the therapy room. In this alumni check-in episode, Anna answers a thoughtful question from a Confident Copy graduate: How do you let your personality shine through your marketing while still keeping your website focused on your ideal client?
Using the metaphor of a pair of light pink pants that felt "too bold" to wear, Anna explores why so many therapists default to "beige" marketing that feels safe but ultimately blends in. She shares practical ways to infuse your personality into your copy without making it all about you—so the right clients recognize themselves, recognize you, and feel confident reaching out.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ Why your personality belongs in your marketing—even when your website is client-centered.
2️⃣ How "beige" marketing keeps you from standing out to the clients you're hoping to attract.
3️⃣ A simple exercise to help your authentic voice come through naturally in your website copy.
4️⃣ Why the goal isn't to appeal to everyone, but to help the right clients immediately recognize that you're the therapist for them.
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Hey everyone. Welcome back to Marketing Therapy, episode 77. Did you know that Marketing Therapy turned one year old this month? Yeah, we didn't really acknowledge that birthday, but happy one year to Marketing Therapy. 77 whole episodes. This is something, and I will not get sidetracked from our topic today, but this podcast is something I would have never imagined doing, and being on the other side of it is one of the most rewarding things I've ever chosen to do in my business. I enjoy it so much. I love getting to hear from you guys and talk about these episodes. I love getting to share what it is that we're noticing and learning, and it's just been really wonderful.
So thanks for tuning in, whether this is your first or your 77th episode. Now, this is an alumni check-in. If you're not familiar, our alumni check-ins are an opportunity for our Confident Copy graduates to ask follow-up questions as they go out into the world, as they put their copy into action, as they start marketing themselves.
What else is there to wonder about, right? So in the same way that you might have a client graduate from therapy and then come back for a check-in session three, six, nine months later, this is that opportunity for our Confident Copy graduates. So this is exactly what I would say to them if we were sitting down in a one-on-one call, and you just get to listen in.
Now, the cool part about these check-in episodes is that our students are not asking questions that are exclusive to them. They're not even exclusive to Confident Copy. They are relevant to just about every therapist right now, or at least some of them, right? So this one is really, really good and was asked of a student
who has asked to remain anonymous, which is perfectly fine, but she had a really fantastic question that is especially important in this market we're in, where specificity, personality, humanness is so critical. So she said, "When we are writing our website for clients to see themselves in it," she means, "how do we balance that with adding in our personality?
Where and how do we add that in, our personality, outside of the About page, which is still geared towards them?" So what I love about what this student is asking is that she is keeping her ideal client front and center when it comes to her marketing.
She is not getting pulled into that trap of making her website about her and her approach and what makes her different, but instead is really championing her client, and I love knowing and seeing that that is front of mind for her. Now, she mentioned as a little more context for this, that my email I sent out about the pink pants I bought, and I'll share that story with you in a moment if you haven't heard it Really resonated with her, but she found that she is struggling with translating her own personality in her writing, and she feels like she lands better in person and can't get it to come across in her copy.
Have you ever felt that way? I am so much more fun and interesting in the room than I am in my words, right? So I want to address that. I wanna talk about this pink pants concept. I wanna talk about personality. We're gonna cover a lot of ground here. Now, if you're not on our email list, you should be.
But if you didn't get an email that I sent earlier this summer, I talked about this pair of pink pants that I purchased right before getting pregnant last year. They are light pink. They are barrel leg, which is uber trendy. It was very much an impulse buy, but I was excited about them, okay? So I buy them, but then they just sat in my closet. They felt a little bit too bold to wear. You know when you buy something new and you can't figure out how to make an outfit with it? That's how I was feeling.
But I chose to wear them to dinner with some friends, and my friend opened up the door, and literally the minute she saw me, she said, "Oh, my gosh, those are so you." And it was like, bam, that's all I needed. That was the confidence boost that I needed to wear these pink pants confidently, right? Well, then I get pregnant.
I can't wear them anymore. I'm doing a third trimester purge of my closet right before my son came, and I saw them again. I hadn't seen them in a while because I'd been busy wearing maternity pants. But it occurred to me as I found them in that purge, that a lot of therapists are doing the opposite of the whole pink pants thing in their marketing.
So that's what this alumni was referencing. Because when you're brand new to private practice, being beige feels a heck of a lot safer than putting on your light pink barrel pants in your marketing, right? You don't wanna turn anyone away. This idea of claiming a niche and carving out this unique space for yourself is intimidating, and so a lot of clinicians go the beige route.
But then eventually something shifts in your practice, and you decide, "You know what? I am going to charge more," or, "My niche is clearer," or, "I do wanna be more intentional about the clients that I'm bringing in." And then the website stays beige. You start putting on pink pants as a clinician. You start knowing who you're for, who you're not for, but your marketing doesn't catch up.
And the fact is that that mismatch is subtle but incredibly costly right now, especially when premium-fee clients are making really, really quick decisions, and any gap that they see is inviting doubt rather than confidence. And what people need right now to pay premium fees is confidence. So that's what this alumni was referencing, is, "How do I put on my pink pants in my marketing," right? "How do I translate that personality into my writing so that clients really feel like I'm different? And how do they see that personality come through when I'm trying so much to champion them and not myself in my marketing?"
Okay? So that's what's happening today. Here's the through line. Not everyone is gonna love your pink pants, and that is the whole freaking point. You are not the right therapist for everyone. If your marketing is not doing a good job of letting people know that, your marketing is missing something. So please hear that.
Not everyone's gonna like your pink pants. That's okay. The right client will. And what a beautiful thing. Okay? So before I get into this whole idea of personality, I do wanna touch on what this alumni asked about when it came to struggling to translate her personality into her writing, that she was better in person and can't get it to come across in your copy.
One of my best tips for this, and I share this with our Confident Copy students, is if you're really feeling stuck in creating copy that feels like you, start by talking rather than writing. There's something about the, I think, distance from our head to our fingertips versus our head to our mouth, right?
That things get garbled, and all of a sudden they get clinical and professional and, you know, not right. Just talk. In the age of AI and things like that, there are so many places where you can speak into a microphone and transcribe what it is that you wrote and then use that. So rather than perhaps sitting down and answering, "What makes me different than other therapists?"
Talk about it. Talk into a microphone. Talk to a friend and record it. But truly actually say the things rather than attempting to write them, and that can often unlock a lot of personality, because that's where we're gonna get the little euphemisms that only you say or, you know, those little phrases that your clients come back and they're like, "I heard you in the back of my mind this week."
That's where those things are gonna shine, if you're finding that when I sit down to write, it doesn't come through. So that's my recommendation there. Go ahead and talk. Talk about the work that you do. Talk about your clients, and then use what you said for your writing.
All right, now let's talk about this idea of personality. So what I want to really reframe here is your personality is not the same as talking about yourself. The, the places where you can inject personality into your marketing are not only the places where you're talking about you, and I think that's an important reframe for this alumni, and likely for others that are listening right now.
Personality is not a section of your website. It's not a place where you talk about you. Personality is literally sprinkled into every single thing that you say and choose to write and choose to convey on your website, in your social media, anywhere in your marketing. Okay? It's not confined to the little section of your About page where you talk about what you like to do on the weekends.
Okay? It's so much bigger than that. Personality is showing up in how you talk about your clients. Okay? It's showing up in how you talk about why it is that they're here and what it is that's going through their mind. It also comes through in the way that you talk about how you're gonna help them.
So in your approach and what it's like to be in the room with you, all of these places are opportunities for personality. Now, the reason for that is because in this market in particular, personality is the same in many ways as specificity, and we know that specificity is the name of the game. The more precise, the more alive your client descriptions are and your copy is, the more you is coming through.
Okay? So if your ideal client, the person that you just absolutely love to work with, is that super high-functioning woman who just became a mom for the first time and all of a sudden doesn't recognize herself and is laying awake at two AM nursing her baby and wondering, "What happened to me?"
Okay? If that is your client, then talking about that, how she's laying awake at two AM nursing her baby, should-ing herself, thinking that she's behind or has done something wrong, all of those things are showing personality. Right? Because it's the way that you're talking about it. The specificity is your voice there.
The shift is to stop asking, "Where do I talk about me?" And start asking, "How do I talk about them in my way? How do I talk about my approach in my way?" Because all of it can be injected with your personality and with your voice. Okay? Now, where does personality actually live in your website? If it's not gonna be just on that little section of your About page, then where does it belong?
Well, like I said, it kinda goes everywhere. It's gonna be in how you talk about your clients, the struggle that brings them here, the inner experience, right, that they're having that maybe they haven't talked about out loud. It's gonna be in how you talk about your approach and your philosophy, right? This is so much more than just name-dropping your modalities.
But, like, what is it like to be in the room with you? What is the process you're taking your clients through? What is it like to be in a session? What are you gonna do that other therapists don't? That's another place for personality. Now, we recently did some website copy in our done-for-you copy suite for a psychodynamic clinician, super skilled, a lot of fun to talk to, knew her ideal client inside and out, and also knew herself and her approach inside and out. And one of the headlines we wrote for her was, "You're not looking for another self-help exercise.
Neither am I." Because that was the thing about her clients. They had done all the things, right? They were not interested in a CBT worksheet. They'd listened to the podcast, they'd done the journaling. Like, they were ready for something much deeper.
And so that headline was so her, and she's also, like, this super direct kind of no BS clinician. So that was a way to bring in personality. Again, she was talking about her clients essentially, not about her, and yet we were getting a sense of that clinician there. So that's an example of where personality could perhaps be brought in.
But you have a certain presence, right? You have a cadence to the way that you talk. You have a way of thinking about and conceptualizing things. You have metaphors that you bring in to the way that you talk to your clients. All of those things belong in your copy.
One of my favorite sections of the pre-writing that our done-for-you clients do is a section about their voice, and they are asked to include at least, ideally more, but at least 10 to 15 phrases, concepts, metaphors that they often use in session. So that could be something as simple as, "I hear you," and as complex as, like, the metaphor they use to describe EMDR, okay?
It can be anything. But that is an absolute goldmine for us to draw upon when creating copy that's gonna sound like them because we know that that actually sounds like them. So what are the things that you say? What are the turns of phrase, the concepts, the metaphors that you use, and how could that be sprinkled in?
Right? And remember, the goal is to not be for everyone. The goal is to put on your pink pants. And so you really have to, as you go through this process, be holding in your mind the person that you are the best fit for. Be really, really specific about who that person is. If you don't know that, you gotta start there, and our last episode was on identifying your ideal clients, so maybe go listen to that. But we have to know who you're sitting across from in that room as you write this copy, okay? And then how can you speak to them so specifically, so uniquely, that once they get into the room with you, it just feels like a consistent through line?
How can they meet the version of you they're gonna get in the room now? That's the power of your language and the power of your words right now, the power of being specific. So if we bring this back to the idea of pink pants, not everyone's gonna like 'em. That's the whole point. Not everyone is gonna like how you talk about your approach.
Not everyone is going to identify with the client reality that you are displaying. That's the whole point. The right client is going to recognize themselves. They are going to recognize you. They are going to resonate with what it is that you are describing, the type of experience you're talking about.
They're gonna see themselves. They're gonna like your pink pants. And that recognition, the one that I got from my friend, "Oh, those pants are so you," they're gonna have that recognition, "This is so me." And that is the goal of copy, right? The goal is that they see themselves, so it is still client-focused, which is exactly what this alumni was centering first and foremost, but doing it with that personality, That little bit of you that another clinician wouldn't say, right? How do you say things? How do you think about things? How do you position things that others don't? When that comes through, they recognize themselves and they also recognize you.
They get into the room with you and it feels like exactly who they met on the website. That's the incredible opportunity available to you in copy, and it's why in this market, the words that you are using continue to be the number one driving factor behind whether or not someone decides to reach out to you as their therapist.
They pull so much weight if you use them right. Okay, this is way more in-depth, way more nuanced than just going to ChatGPT and asking it to write you a homepage. This is about thinking about spending time with who this ideal client is, what sets you apart, and what your personality is. What are those ways that you can be injecting what makes you you into your marketing so that people latch onto that?
Because in the sea of sameness that your clients are wading through, you can stand out. Your pink pants can stand out. All right? Okay, I hope this was helpful for you. Thank you to the alumni who chose to share this with us.
If you're sitting here and you're a Confident Copy alumni, please head on over to the submission form and ask the question you're wondering about. You might see your question featured in these monthly sessions that we're doing. If you're interested in Confident Copy, you're in luck. I am not supposed to tell you this, but our Confident Copy waitlist is open.
We actually won't be talking about this publicly until next month. But if you know that you want to have a live experience, if you want to go through our proven Confident Copy process and do it with support, with feedback, with live coaching, Confident Copy Live is going to be reopening in August and the waitlist is open.
So we're not actually talking about the waitlist publicly until next month. But it is ready for you if you know, "Hey, starting in August, I really wanna jump in. I wanna get clear on what makes me me. I wanna know how to bring my personality into my copy and do it in the right ways."
Confident Copy Live is a great place to do that. So you can head over to walkerstrategyco.com/cc-waitlist. CC, the letter CC, dash waitlist if you wanna jump on there. If you're wondering about that done-for-you that I mentioned that client for whom we wrote that incredible headline that's also an option.
So if you know that you're not interested in writing the copy yourself, but instead wanna hand it over to some experts, we would love to partner with you in that way. You can get all the details there, walkerstrategyco.com/services. Whatever you do next, even if it's nothing related to Confident Copy or our services, be thinking about how you can be bringing your personality into your marketing.
How can you be putting on your pink pants, and how could that potentially be resonating with the exact types of people you wanna be doing your life's work with? I'll see you in our next episode.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
Episode 76: https://walkerstrategyco.com/show-notes/76
Confident Copy Live waitlist: https://walkerstrategyco.com/cc-waitlist
Done-for-you copywriting services: https://walkerstrategyco.com/services
The Walker Strategy Co website: https://walkerstrategyco.com
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About Marketing Therapy
Marketing Therapy is the podcast where therapists learn how to market their private practices without burnout, self-doubt, or sleazy tactics. Hosted by Anna Walker—marketing coach, strategist, and founder of Walker Strategy Co—each episode brings you clear, grounded advice to help you attract the right-fit, full-fee clients and grow a practice you feel proud of.
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