Recently I was telling someone I know about a new client I was working with. They understood who I meant and what the business did, but then I showed them some of the videos we had just filmed.
The way they spoke about her afterwards completely changed. They still had not met her, but they had heard her speak, watched her explain what she knew and seen enough of her personality that suddenly she felt familiar.
That was success.
There is a name for the one-sided familiarity we develop with people we repeatedly encounter through media: a parasocial relationship. We tend to associate it with celebrities and creators, but the same effect can be incredibly valuable for businesses.
For a long time, referral gave us a head start on trust. Someone would tell you, call her, she really knows her stuff or they did our place and were fantastic. You had never met the business, but someone you trusted had, so you borrowed a little of their confidence before making contact.
Referral is still extraordinarily powerful, but content can now help people build some of that familiarity for themselves.
Good writing can show someone how you think, what you know and how you explain something complicated. Photography makes the people, work and environment recognisable. Video can bring many of those things together at once, allowing someone to hear how you communicate while also seeing the way you work, interact with people and move through the real environment of the business.
Even footage where nobody is speaking can tell us a lot. The care someone takes with their work, the way a team interacts or what the experience of being in the space might actually feel like can all provide information that is difficult to communicate through a list of claims.
The content itself does not always need to be groundbreaking. Ten people in the same profession might know the same thing. Sometimes it matters that you are the person saying it.
Because the customer is not only learning the information. They are also forming an impression of you.
That matters when the buying moment arrives.
I needed an emergency plumber recently and recognised one of the businesses in the search results because I had met the owners briefly before. They may not remember me, but I remembered them. They had seemed like trustworthy people, and at a moment when I needed to let someone into my home after hours and trust that I was not going to be taken advantage of, that small previous interaction made the decision easier.
Content can create an online version of that same effect. You do not necessarily need someone to know you deeply. You need them to have enough of an impression attached to your name that, when they need what you do, choosing you feels less like choosing a complete stranger.
But this is where strategy matters, because more familiarity is not automatically better.
I have followed people online for more than a decade. I have watched their weddings, house moves and major life moments and can feel remarkably familiar with them while still having absolutely no intention of ever sending them a message. That works perfectly well when the commercial exchange is attention, advertising revenue or influencing a product purchase.
A service business usually needs the relationship to move further. Eventually the person watching needs to feel comfortable enough to make contact.
At the same time, some professional services do not benefit from creating a best-friend level of intimacy. A client might want enough access to understand how a lawyer thinks and communicates without knowing the details of her family life before she has even learnt the client's name.
The goal is not maximum familiarity. It is the right level of familiarity for the exchange you are asking someone to make.
And whatever version of the business people come to know needs to be true.
We recently came across a website that made the people behind the business seem considerably more aloof than the customers describing them in reviews. The reviews talked about warmth, trust and how down to earth they were. Somewhere in the effort to make the business look polished, some of its most valuable qualities had been lost.
There is still art direction. There is still editing. Presenting people well is part of our job. But presenting someone well and presenting them as somebody else are very different things.
One of the best compliments we can hear when someone eventually meets one of our clients is:
You are exactly how I thought you would be.
Because the objective is not simply to be visible or even familiar. It is to deliberately reduce the right amount of distance between the business and the person it hopes to work with.
Enough that when the need arises, you no longer feel like a stranger.
