Website copy – especially home page copy – is the hardest of all copy to write and get approved.
Whether you’re in telecoms, enterprise software, or IoT, your website is your storefront. You have about 10–20 seconds before a visitor decides whether to stay or leave. The pressure to communicate everything your company does, for whom, and why it matters, in those first few seconds, is genuinely overmastering.
This leads to a few classic problem situations. Do any of these sound familiar?
- The homepage tries to cover too much ground. It introduces the problem, the solution and the differentiators in one go.
- There is no tagline strategy. It wants to be catchy, differentiate the product, and provide the key USPs within 10 words. Needless to say, it does none of these things.
- The copy is vague. The copy needs to be benefits-driven, but it also needs to list all the key features. So it compromises by being neither, using terms like ‘Benefit from’, ‘Save time and money with’.
I think we can all agree that this is website copy that sucks.
The question is what to do about it.
First: recognise that copy doesn’t work in isolation
Good copy doesn’t emerge from a brief and a deadline. It comes from a clear foundation that keeps the target audience front and centre at every decision point.
Here are the steps that actually matter.
Step 1: Define the audience clearly.
It’s tempting to define your website audience as broadly as possible because “anyone can land on the site.” That’s true. It’s also the fastest route to copy that resonates with nobody.
For telco and tech B2B companies in particular, this step requires more precision than most. A carrier selling wholesale voice termination has a completely different buyer to one selling private 5G to enterprise manufacturers. The homepage copy that tries to speak to both will speak to neither.
Pick a primary persona. Write everything from their perspective. You can serve secondary audiences with dedicated solution or sector pages but the homepage needs a point of view.
Step 2: Agree on who validates the copy, and who doesn’t
This step is genuinely political, and nobody talks about it enough.
In large telecoms organisations especially, website copy goes through rounds of approval involving product teams, legal, compliance, and sometimes regional leads, each of whom adds a sentence and removes a point of view. What goes live is a document by committee.
Marketing and sales need to take the lead on messaging. They know the customer best. Technical validators should check accuracy, not rewrite tone. Agree this upfront, or you’ll spend three months producing copy that says nothing.
Step 3: Set clear goals for each section
For a tech B2B company without an e-commerce model, “what is this website supposed to do?” is a genuinely hard question. The answer needs to be specific, and it needs to be different for each section.
Homepage goals might be: lead visitors deeper into the site, communicate a clear positioning statement, pass the shortlist test (i.e., a buyer who’s already heard of you comes to verify you’re credible). These are different goals from the solution pages, which might need to do more technical persuasion work, or the resource centre, which should be generating leads.
Define the goal of each section before a word is written. It’s the only way to evaluate copy objectively rather than subjectively.
Step 4: Choose your format (this gets interesting)
A “website” is no longer just pages. For complex B2B propositions — like a carrier replatforming their digital presence or a CSP launching a new enterprise product line — the question isn’t just “what does the copy say?” It’s “what kind of digital experience should this be?”
Some formats worth considering:
Scrollytelling. Animation and narrative unfold as the user scrolls, turning what would be a static product explanation into something closer to a guided story. For telcos explaining network architecture, edge computing, or multi-cloud connectivity, this format does a job that bullet points can’t. The visual and the copy work together in sequence, revealing complexity progressively rather than dumping it all above the fold. See for example this interactive whitepaper we wrote and designed on the fiber revolution for BSS provider ZIRA.
Microsites. A dedicated microsite for a specific product launch, campaign, or solution vertical lets you build a focused narrative without the constraints of the main brand site. We’ve seen telco clients use microsites effectively for major product launches where the main site structure would have buried the proposition. For example, here’s TechUK’s digital landline switchover microsite, a dedicated resource for users and their carers that’s easier to navigate than the larger TechUK site.
Interactive product explorers. Rather than a static product page, an interactive experience lets visitors self-select their use case and see the relevant content. Particularly powerful for telcos with large, fragmented product portfolios where no single page can serve all buyer types.
The focused landing page. Sometimes the answer is simpler. One message, one audience, one CTA, no navigation. For paid campaigns or ABM programmes, this is often the highest-converting format precisely because it removes choice. We’ve used tools like Folloze with some of our clients to create intelligent landing pages for ABM campaigns for examples.
When we worked with BICS on their website revamp, the format question was as important as the copy question. Getting the structure right — what lives where, what the user experiences in what order — is what allowed the copy to land. You can see how that played out in the case study.
Step 5: Build for the full funnel, think beyond the homepage
A website is more than a homepage. You also need content for technical buyers, for people further down the purchase journey, and for existing customers trying to get more from the product.
Content clusters work well for telcos with multiple verticals or product lines — a hub page for, say, IoT connectivity that links through to spoke pages on LPWAN, eSIM, and roaming partnerships gives you SEO depth and a navigable structure for visitors who know what they’re looking for.
Resource centres are underused by telco brands. If you have genuine expertise in your sector, a well-built resource centre builds the kind of authority that shortens sales cycles. We’ve written more on how to make content work across the buyer journey.
Step 6: Don’t forget about design
Fundamentals haven’t changed: the copywriter, the designer, and the developer need to work together from the start, not in sequence. Copy handed to a developer after the fact gets squeezed into a template it was never written for.
What’s new is that AI has changed the dynamics of this process. AI tools can draft copy quickly, iterate on tone, and generate variations. But they can’t define strategy, and they can’t make judgment calls about what a specific buyer at a specific stage needs to feel. The risk is that teams will use AI to skip steps 1 through 5 and go straight to generating words and wonder why the site still doesn’t convert.
The foundation work is still the work. AI just makes the execution faster once you’ve done it properly.
Step 7: Now write
When you’re finally ready to put words on the page:
- Cut the jargon, but know your audience. Copy should be clear and accessible. That doesn’t mean dumbed down. Write so that an intelligent person who’s new to the category can follow it, while a technical buyer finds nothing to object to.
- Pass the beer test. How would you explain this product to a smart friend after a couple of drinks? Simple sentences. One idea at a time. That’s the register you want.
- Stay true to your positioning. All great brands have one thing in common: consistency. Whether your tone is authoritative, conversational, or challenger-brand edgy, every page on the site should sound like the same company.
- Kill the filler. “In order to.” “Leverage.” “End-to-end solutions.” “Cutting-edge.” If a phrase adds no meaning, remove it. This is especially chronic in telco copy, where vague technology language fills space where a real value proposition should be.
- Keep it action-oriented. Even informational copy should point somewhere. Every section should have a logical next step, and the copy should make taking that step feel obvious.
- Design for how people actually read. Which is to say: they don’t. They skim. Short paragraphs, strong subheadings, and visual breaks do as much work as the sentences themselves. For guidance on digital experience design that converts, we go into more detail here.
Good website copy is never really finished. Markets shift, propositions evolve, and what was differentiated two years ago is now table stakes. The telco sector in particular is moving fast, from connectivity to cloud, from infrastructure to platform and websites need to keep pace with that repositioning.
If your site no longer reflects where your business is heading, that’s worth fixing sooner rather than later. Get in touch at hello@isolinecomms.com, or find out more about how we approach website copy.
