Do people’s eyes glaze over when you explain what you do? You could be the best at what you do, but if people can’t understand your message in seconds, they’ll move on.
In Week 4 of the Dream Business Blueprint series, Lori explains why clear messaging is the foundation of every successful marketing strategy. Using stories from her own business and real client examples, she shows why trying to sound clever often creates confusion, why clients respond to symptoms instead of industry jargon, and how a simple, clear message builds trust faster than polished marketing language ever will.
If you’ve ever wondered why your marketing isn’t attracting the right clients, the answer may not be your offer. It may be the way you’re talking about it.
What You’ll Learn
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Why clear messaging attracts more clients than clever marketing.
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The difference between speaking in diagnosis language and the symptom language your clients actually use.
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How to use Lori’s simple messaging framework to help prospects immediately understand what you do and why it matters.
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Episode 345 – Dream Business Blueprint, Week 4: Messaging
Chapters
0:00 – The 11-Second Test
2:09 – Welcome to the Midlife Business Academy
2:28 – Continuing the Dream Business Blueprint Series
3:09 – Your Point of View Is the Foundation, Not the Message
4:02 – “Not Your Mama’s Website”: Lori’s Own Messaging Mistake
6:33 – The Networking Event: Two Sides of the Same Lesson
10:10 – Why Clear Messaging Matters
11:46 – The Physical Sign Someone Is Leaning In
16:08 – Why Confusion Kills Trust
19:04 – Diagnosis Language vs. Symptom Language
24:20 – Why Emotion Sells: Nike, De Beers, and Dove
28:01 – The Hallway Test
29:56 – This Week’s Worksheet: The Message Assessment
32:15 – Next Week: Visibility, and How to Book a Session
The 11-Second Test
Do people’s eyes glaze over when you tell them what you do? You could be the absolute best at what you do, but if it takes someone 11 seconds to decode your message, you’ve lost them. They’re gone.
Most business owners write copy meant to sound clever, elevated, or sophisticated, instead of speaking directly to the exact symptom their client is living with right now. Today, we’re ditching that marketing doublespeak and building a message that actually makes your ideal client lean in. Let’s dive in.
Welcome to the Midlife Business Academy
I’m Lori Lyons, and welcome to the Midlife Business Academy. If you’ve ever felt like your business is running your life instead of supporting it, you’re in the right place.
Around here, I believe a dream business isn’t measured by its size. It’s measured by the freedom and the life it makes possible.
Continuing the Dream Business Blueprint Series
So we’re in week four of the Dream Business Blueprint series. And if you’re just joining us, go back and start with episode 342, because each week builds on the one before it – although you can listen to them separately if you’d like. But to get the best results, they follow each other.
So far, we’ve designed the life you want. We’ve picked a business model that fits that life. We’ve gotten clear on your point of view – what you actually believe and what you want to be known for. And now we’re getting to the part where all of that actually lands.
Your Point of View Is the Foundation, Not the Message
Your point of view is the philosophy your business stands on. You’ll probably never say it word for word to a client. It’s not meant to be recited. It’s meant to be the foundation everything else is built on.
From my point of view – I actually happen to say a variation of it every week, but that’s not necessary – my point of view is it’s never too late to build a life of your dreams. I tweak that a little to say the business of your dreams, but that’s my point of view.
So here’s the question that matters now: does your message actually support your point of view? Because if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter how solid that foundation is – nobody will see it. And that’s messaging.
“Not Your Mama’s Website”: My Own Messaging Mistake
And I learned this the very hard way. Years ago, when it was time to rebuild my website design agency’s website – and keep in mind, this was in the era of marketing doublespeak. “That on-brand journey to elevate your unforgettable digital presence” – I think that was actually one of my taglines at one point. That kind of language was thankfully about to die and be replaced by something better. I just hadn’t gotten the memo yet.
So I wrote the copy for my new site, and I was very proud of it. It was branding, it was copy, it was design, all wrapped up in language I thought sounded really smart and sexy and juicy. My tagline – and I say this with love for who I was back then – was “Not Your Mama’s Website.”
I thought that was funny and clever, and I proudly showed it to my business coach. I expected him to be blown away at how clever and wordsmithy I was. He read it. Then he looked up and said, “Lori, this is a great website. It’s clean. It’s well branded. The photos are beautiful. You look great.” Well, thank you very much. “It’s striking. But Lori, I have no idea what you do.”
Say what? Thank you – I have no idea what you do. I had just written a website that was sexy and juicy and said absolutely nothing, because I was so busy trying to sound clever that I forgot to be clear. And clever doesn’t get you clients. Clear does.
This is the problem you have. This is how I solve it. That’s it. That’s the whole job.
I’ve said many times: right message, right client, right time, right platform. But none of that matters if the message itself doesn’t work. Nothing else on that list can save it. You can have the right client and the right time, but if it’s not the right message, they go.
The Networking Event: Two Sides of the Same Lesson
And it’s not just me. I saw this happening from a different perspective a couple of years ago. I went to my first live event after COVID – and quite honestly, I didn’t love the person running it, but my very good friend was going. We could hang out at the beach in Florida together in November, and after two years of Zoom squares, I was desperate for an actual room with real people in it. And quite frankly, she was one of the first coming back in person after COVID, and I wanted to support that.
So we went around the room and introduced ourselves – it was a small group, I have to be honest. And there was another woman who said she was in marketing. So I went up to her at a break and asked her what she did. She helped heart-centered, self-starting women who are high-powered and soul-centered – and blah, blah, blah – elevate their business and showcase their talents.
Okay, but what do you do? She gave me a variation of the same thing. Soul, hearts, elevate, empower – the whole thing.
And finally I said, “You know, I’m not trying to be difficult, but I really want to know what you do, because I don’t understand it.” And you know what she said? She designed websites. Really? Because that was me a couple of years earlier, with that exact kind of language. It really became clear that the words we speak really need to be clear – no pun intended.
She should have said that in the first place: “I design websites.” I could have gotten it. I would have asked her some more questions. We could have had a really fun conversation, maybe even collaborated on something. We could have been referral partners for each other, because not every client that comes to us is a perfect fit for our style of business. But she lost me in that first 60 seconds – not because her work wasn’t good, but because I couldn’t figure out who she was, and I wasn’t going to introduce her to clients I knew if I couldn’t understand what she did, and neither could they. That wouldn’t be fair to my clients, and I wouldn’t do that to them.
So think about that: if a fellow marketer couldn’t get a straight answer out of her, what chance does a stranger have on her website?
Why Clear Messaging Matters
Okay, so let’s talk about why clear messaging matters. Because here’s the thing about your point of view: it’s not something you’re trying to get somebody to understand. That’s yours. It’s the philosophy your business is built on, like I said earlier. It’s the hill you’re willing to take a stand on. Nobody needs to necessarily hear it recited back to them, and most of them never will.
But what they do need is a message that’s actually built on that point of view – one that holds up under your point of view without you ever having to say it word for word or out loud.
We’re doing that right now with a client. We’ve walked through developing her point of view, and now it gives us, as the people handling her marketing, a reference point. We can always ask: does this piece of social media reflect and refine her point of view? Does this piece on her website do the same thing? Does her signature talk do the same thing? Because we’re developing all of those assets with her, and that gave us something solid to build on.
You know exactly what you believe. You know exactly why your work matters, who it’s for, and what makes you different. But none of that does a single thing for your business until it gets translated into words that someone else can actually follow and understand. And that translation is what we call messaging. It’s where most good businesses go quiet, without ever telling the owner why.
The Physical Sign Someone Is Leaning In
So I say this a lot: the goal is to get people to lean in – and you’ll notice I leaned in when I said that. People don’t lean in because you’re impressive. They lean in because they recognize themselves, or you’re interesting to them, or you’re not boring.
And by leaning in, I mean that literally. It’s not just a figure of speech. Watch a room. The next time you’re in a networking room, or anywhere people are talking and somebody could be half listening – when something actually lands in a conversation you’re observing, you’ll see them physically shift toward each other. Their body language changes. Their feet stop shuffling. Their phones go down. People really, physically, literally lean in, and it’s not politeness. It’s the body’s way of reacting before the brain catches up, saying, “wait, they’re talking about me.”
And you can read the opposite just as clearly, because restlessness is the tell. Somebody glancing over your shoulder toward the rest of the room – is there somebody out there I actually know what they’re talking about? Their feet stay pointed toward the exit, even though their face is looking at you. Their body isn’t. They’re checking a phone that didn’t buzz. And it’s not someone being rude – most of the time we don’t even realize we’re doing it. It’s just body language telling that person that what they’re saying isn’t landing.
So if you remember the woman from the live event – I wasn’t scanning the room looking for someone more interesting. I really wanted to lean into her. I really wanted to know what she did, and I was looking for a reason to. But every time I asked her what she did, I got handed another round of the sexy, juicy, heart-centered speak, and I could feel myself physically drifting away. I was trying to give her a chance, but my body was like, “nope, I’m done.” And it wasn’t because I didn’t like her. It’s because I had nothing to lean toward. There was no problem, no symptom, no solution to grab onto. It was just word soup floating around up there.
And that’s what a confusing message does, no matter where it shows up – whether it’s in a room, on a call, or on a website page. Restlessness is restlessness. The body doesn’t care what medium it’s reacting to.
So when you’re building your message, that’s the test – not “does this make me sound smart,” not “does this make me sound branded,” but this: if you said this out loud to a stranger, would they lean toward you, or would their eyes start looking toward the door?
Both of these stories taught me the same thing, just from opposite sides of the conversation. One of the biggest lessons I learned as a website designer, and one I still carry with me every day as a business coach, is that nobody owes you the effort of figuring out what you mean. Not a website visitor, not a stranger at a networking event, not a potential client scrolling past your social media post. If your message takes work to understand, most people simply won’t do the work. We’re just not built that way anymore. Our attention spans are too short. We’ll just move on to something that doesn’t require us to decode it. And that’s true no matter what medium you’re using. The medium changes. The lesson doesn’t.
Why Confusion Kills Trust
So why does confusion kill trust? Because this shows up everywhere, not just online. Most messaging is written to impress, not to inform. It’s written for the business owner who wants to sound sophisticated, elevated, on-brand – instead of being written for the confused stranger on the other side, who only has a few seconds to decide if you’re relevant to them.
One of my favorite examples is going around networking events and talking to chiropractors. I love my chiropractor – I wouldn’t be able to sit at a desk as many hours as I do without one. But if you look at most chiropractor marketing, especially at networking events, when they stand up and describe what they do, they talk about subluxations, spinal alignment, nervous system function, structural connection. All of it is technically accurate. All of it is the language of the diagnosis.
Now imagine you’re lying on the floor and your back is killing you. What if you heard a chiropractor say, “I make your back stop hurting”? No subluxation, no jargon. Just one sentence – the one every person who’s ever thrown out their back and been afraid to move off the floor actually wants to hear.
It’s not less credible because it’s simple. It’s more trustworthy, because it proves they understand what their patient is actually lying there thinking. “My back hurts.” Not, “I wonder if my subluxation is resolved.” It’s, “Please make this stop.”
That’s the trap fancy language sets. The more sophisticated it sounds, the more it feels like good marketing – right up until the person who’s supposed to reach out can’t tell what you’re offering. And they won’t do the work to figure it out. They just leave.
And chiropractors aren’t alone. Have you talked to a lawyer lately? Half of them still talk like they’re billing you by the syllable.
Diagnosis Language vs. Symptom Language
So before we go further, I want to clear something up, because I don’t want you walking away from last week’s episode thinking your point of view is something you’re supposed to say to people. I alluded to this earlier – it’s not. It’s primarily internal. It’s the philosophy your business lives by, the thing that shapes your brand and eventually your message. But you’ll probably never say it out loud. It’s not a sentence you put on the website. Think of it like a house: it’s the frame underneath the house, not the front door.
Your message is what people actually see and hear. And it’s built on something a lot less philosophical than a point of view. It’s built on a problem and a solution. What problem do your clients have, and how do you solve it? That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Because here’s the nuance that trips almost everyone up, and the difference between a message that falls flat and one that makes someone stop scrolling: I had a client a few years ago – a coach who helped people work through imposter syndrome. Those were his words. He does amazing work, gets really good results, but he wasn’t getting enough clients for the value of the work he does.
And every piece of his marketing said exactly that: “I work with clients to overcome imposter syndrome. Is imposter syndrome holding you back?” So here’s the question I asked him: how many of your clients come to you and actually say, “I have imposter syndrome”? He thought about it and said, almost none.
So who’s booking calls with you? What do they say when they reach out? And that’s when it got interesting. He said, well, they tell me they procrastinate. They say they can’t get motivated to do the things they should be doing. They say they’re perfectionists – it has to be perfect before they’ll even start. They say they have this constant self-doubt every day that they can’t get rid of.
None of them were walking around with the words “imposter syndrome” in their mouths. That’s the diagnosis – the clinical label he learned in his training. But his clients weren’t living in the diagnosis. They were living in the symptoms.
So I’m going to say that again, because it’s so valuable when you’re deciding whether you’re talking diagnosis or talking symptoms: clients don’t live in the diagnosis. They live in the symptoms – the procrastination, the perfectionism, the self-doubt. And that’s where your marketing needs to live – not in the label you learned for the diagnosis, but in the language your clients are already using to describe their pain, whatever that happens to be.
He pushed back a little at first. He said imposter syndrome is technically accurate and sounds a little more sophisticated, and he was worried he wouldn’t be able to charge enough for something as ordinary-sounding as self-doubt and procrastination. He thought he could charge more with “imposter syndrome.” But here’s the thing: if you aren’t getting clients because you’re calling it imposter syndrome, and most people say, “I don’t have imposter syndrome” – even though it’s been a little more in the news lately, and people are more prone to recognize it – sophistication doesn’t sell. Recognition sells. If you recognize that you’re a perfectionist, that’s what draws you in. The second he started talking about procrastination, self-doubt, and the “it has to be perfect” spiral, people started saying, “wait, that’s me – he gets me.”
That’s why this matters so much. Nobody wakes up thinking in the language of the diagnosis. They wake up thinking in the language of how it feels. Your ideal client doesn’t think, “I have a scalability problem in my operations.” They think, “I’m working 60 hours a week and I still can’t get ahead.” They don’t think, “I lack a differentiated brand positioning statement.” They think, “I don’t know why my competitors keep getting the clients I should be getting.”
The diagnosis is what you know because you’re the expert. The symptom is what they know because they’re living it. Your job in your messaging isn’t to prove you know the diagnosis. It’s to prove you understand the symptoms well enough that they trust you with the diagnosis.
So when you’re building your message, don’t start with your expertise. Start with a notepad and write down every single way your client describes their own pain, in their own words – not the polished, soul-centered, heart-centered, elevated version, but the messy, real, “what wakes them up in the morning” version. Because that list is worth more than any framework, mine included.
Why Emotion Sells: Nike, De Beers, and Dove
People don’t make buying decisions off of something accurate – they make them off of feelings. So here’s what’s really happening when you switch from diagnosis language to symptom language: it doesn’t just become clearer, it becomes emotional. “Procrastination, self-doubt” didn’t just describe imposter syndrome – it made someone feel caught, in a good way. Like, “okay, you finally get me.”
Think about some of the big brands out there. Nike: “Just do it.” That’s not about shoes. It’s not describing cushioning technology or arch support. What it’s saying is: stop overthinking, stop waiting until you feel ready, go do it. It doesn’t inform you of anything, but it energizes you. That’s the feeling it’s selling – the shoes just happen to come along for the ride.
De Beers built an entire industry around four simple words: “A diamond is forever.” That’s not a product description – it’s an emotional promise. It’s promising permanence, love, commitment, something that doesn’t fade. Very few people buy an engagement ring thinking about clarity – though some do – but mostly it’s that feeling that the weight of it is forever.
Dove ran their Real Beauty campaign. They didn’t talk about ingredients or moisturizing formulas. It made people – especially women, who were having a hard time being seen at the time – feel seen. It didn’t focus on body shape or what someone looked like. It talked about the outside standard they’d been measuring themselves against the whole time, and said that was the problem, not them. For a lot of women, that became an exhale. It wasn’t a product pitch – it was a feeling: “somebody sees me.”
None of these brands led with what they do. They led with how you feel once the problem is solved. The product was almost secondary to the pitch.
The Hallway Test
So here’s the problem: simple sounds unimpressive. And that’s exactly why a lot of people avoid it. It feels like it’s not good enough, like it doesn’t capture how nuanced and layered your work really is. But simple isn’t the enemy of smart. Simple is what actually lets smart land.
The best messages in the world pass what I call the hallway test: if you said it to someone in the hallway, would they get it in one sentence? “This is the problem you have. This is how I solve it.” That’s not dumbing it down. That’s the hard work of clarity – the hard work of clarity so your audience doesn’t have to do it themselves.
So let’s quickly go through the structure. Step one: name the problem the way your client would name it, using their symptoms, not your diagnosis. Step two: show them you understand it deeply enough that they feel seen, not sold to – you’re talking to their emotions. This is where a lot of businesses rush through and jump straight to the pitch before the person even feels understood. Step three: state your solution in one plain sentence, no jargon required to decode it. If your ten-year-old couldn’t repeat it to a stranger, it’s not simple enough.
Put those three together and you’ve got a message – not a tagline, not a slogan, not a “Not Your Mama’s Website” kind of message. “This is the problem you have. Here’s proof I understand exactly what it feels like. And here’s how I solve it.” “Not Your Mama’s Website” certainly had personality, but it had zero problem, zero symptoms, and zero solution. My coach couldn’t tell me what I did because I skipped straight to trying to sound interesting and clever.
This Week’s Worksheet: The Message Assessment
So let’s go to the blueprint, because the best marketing strategy in the world can’t overcome a message that people don’t understand. That’s your takeaway from today.
So pull up your message assessment from episode four – it’s in the workbook. If you don’t have it, the link is in the show notes. The question it’s built around is simple: can people quickly understand what you do and why it matters?
Inside, I want you to rate yourself one to ten on five statements: my message is clear; people understand the value I provide; I communicate it well; and I can confidently explain what I do. If you’re not sure, hand somebody your message. Talk to somebody about what you do, ask them questions, and see how they’d rate you. That takes some guts, but you learn a lot when you do it.
Add those up for a score out of 50 – where do you fall? And then there’s a reflection question I want you to actually sit down and answer, not just think about: where do you think people are becoming confused about your business? Be honest, because that answer is usually more obvious than you think once you stop defending what you wrote.
Once I realized “Not Your Mama’s Website” wasn’t this fascinating thing that was going to draw me tons of clients, I started reading it the way a stranger would, and realized – okay, this is kind of fun, I don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I could use it in other ways, but I need to actually explain what I do. On that message, I probably would have scored a five out of 50. What’s your score?
Remember: people rarely ask for more information. If they don’t understand what you do, they simply move on. There’s no argument, no objection to overcome. They just leave.
Next Week: Visibility, and How to Book a Session
So next week we’re moving into visibility, because you can have a great message that people finally understand, and it won’t matter if nobody hears it. Visibility isn’t vanity – it’s opportunity. And getting known doesn’t mean you have to become an influencer.
And if you worked through the message assessment and your blueprint score came in below 35, that’s not a bad grade – it’s information. It usually means your message is living in your head, or worse, in language that sounds good to you but doesn’t necessarily translate to the people you’re trying to reach. That’s exactly the kind of thing we work on together when you’re coaching with me.
Go to talkwithlori.com and book a Dream Business Design Session, and let’s see if we’re the right fit to get that message out of your head and doing its job. And as a side note, I love digging into messaging – so let me work through yours with you.
Until next week, it’s never too late to build a business of your dreams. Don’t forget that – that’s my point of view. We’ll see you next week.