One of the challenges of marketing and producing creative for a professional services business is that there is usually far too much you could talk about.

Different services, sectors, offices, areas of expertise, people, specialisms, years of experience and a whole range of other things can all feel important. None of it is necessarily wrong, which makes deciding what matters most to someone encountering the business for the first time particularly difficult.

This becomes harder as a firm grows. Everyone inside the business understands how it works because they are surrounded by it every day. They know the different teams, services and areas of expertise and understand how everything fits together.

Someone arriving on the website for the first time doesn’t have that context.

They may simply want to know whether you understand their particular problem and whether they can trust you to solve it. If they have to work through company history, multiple service lines and pages of information before finding the answer, there is a risk that you’ve already lost their attention.

That doesn’t mean making a complex business sound simplistic. It means being more deliberate about what needs to be communicated first and what can wait until later.

We come across this quite often when working with professional services firms. The instinct can be to add more information, particularly when there is so much expertise and experience worth communicating.

Quite often, the more useful exercise is the opposite.

Start with everything that is already there and work out what someone outside the business actually needs to understand first. What problem are they trying to solve? What do they need to know about you? What will give them enough confidence to take the next step?

The rest can follow.

It sounds simple, but deciding what to leave out can be one of the harder parts of communicating a complex business clearly.