Why Your Marketing Needs To Be Messy
The other day I was on a beach walk with a friend, one of those long, soul-level conversations where you skip the “how have you been?” and dive straight into the depths. We started talking about how much pressure we’ve both felt to make everything clearer in our marketing.
Clearer messaging. Clearer offers. Clearer content.
And then we laughed, because lately even AI has become the tool we turn to for clarity. We copy and paste our musings:
“Make this clearer,” we say. “Make it more concise. More strategic.”
But imagine this: you’re in the middle of a deep conversation with someone you love, and halfway through your thought you pause and say, “Hang on, let me run this through ChatGPT to make sure it makes sense.”
The connection would disappear instantly.
Sure, your words might be clearer, but they’d lose their magic. The messy musings that naturally arrive in flow, back and forth, connection, would vanish in replacement of rehearsed, static and precise conversing.
That’s what’s happening in so much of today’s marketing. It’s polished, strategic, perfectly structured… and yet, utterly lifeless.
The danger of “clear”
A client of mine recently caught herself mid-sentence, saying,
“Wait, that doesn’t make sense, does it? My business coach said I need to make it clearer.”
But the thing is, what she had just said did make sense. It was raw and flowing and human. I could feel her work in her words. When she tried to “fix” it, she stripped all the resonance away.
It’s a pattern I see all the time.
We’re told that clarity converts.
We’re told to be strategic, concise, structured.
But no one talks about what gets lost in the process: us.
When I read her website, it was technically clear, but it sounded like everyone else in her industry. Words like somatic, nervous system, integration - all fine words, but they felt stiff compared to the way she naturally flowed on those topics. They didn’t sound like a real conversation. They didn’t make me feel anything.
That’s the danger of chasing clarity. You end up with marketing that’s easy to understand but impossible to feel.
Humans don’t buy from clarity
Humans buy from connection.
We buy from resonance.
There have been countless times where I’ve fully understood an offer, what it is, how it helps, why I “should” want it - and still felt nothing. No pull. No spark. No yes.
And then, other times, I’ve barely read the sales page. I’ve skimmed a few lines, seen a photo, felt the energy and my whole body has whispered, this is for you.
That’s what happened recently when I applied for a retreat. I honestly couldn’t tell you where it was being held or what the itinerary was. But I could tell you exactly how it felt. I could see myself there.
That’s what real marketing does. It bypasses logic and lands straight in the body.
The messy truth
Some of the best marketing I’ve ever read has been messy.
I remember one client who rewrote her retreat sales page after I told her to ditch the polished copy and just talk, as if she were chatting to a group of mums over a cup of tea.
What she came back with was raw, hilarious, and full of life. It wasn’t perfect, but it was her. And it was magnetic.
We are so afraid of being messy that we forget: messy is human.
And humans are who we’re marketing to.
Bringing the human back
A client recently told me, “I love reading content where people are raw and honest, but when I sit down to write, I don’t let myself do that.”
That right there is the disconnect.
We crave humanness, but we’ve been trained to edit it out.
What if your stories, your imperfections, your rambles were actually the very things that made your marketing powerful?
What if clarity wasn’t about perfect sentences, but about emotional truth?
Because that’s what moves people. That’s what makes them say, “I see myself in this.”
Putting you back into your marketing
As I finished recording my Podcast episode this week, I glanced down at my notebook, the one propping up my mic, and on the page in front of me, I’d written:
“Putting you back into your marketing.”
That’s what this is all about.
Bringing the human back. The essence. The messy brilliance that makes your work so powerful in the first place.
Because when your marketing feels like you… people don’t just understand it.
They feel it. They see themselves within it. And that’s where the magic happens.
