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What you’ll learn in this episode:
If your marketing feels like it requires too much explaining, convincing, or creating, the issue may not be your effort, it may be your messaging. In this episode, I break down why messaging isn’t about persuasion, volume, or being louder. It’s about recognition. When your words clearly signal who you help and at what buying moment, everything gets easier: sales conversations shorten, client quality improves, and you spend less time over-explaining. The result – more profit.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why messaging should act as a filter, not a megaphone
- How to use your one-sentence offer as a leverage tool
- Why specificity repels the wrong people and attracts the right ones
- How industry-specific signaling builds faster trust
- A simple way to refine your messaging so it reduces effort instead of creating more work
This Episode Is Part of a Series:
In this high-leverage growth series, I’m guiding you through the most powerful ways to simplify your business and increase revenue with more ease. If you missed Lever #1 (The Buyer Moment), Lever #2 (Your Offer as a Profit Lever), Lever #3 (Existing Proximity), or Lever #4 (Strategic Partnerships), go back and listen. These episodes are designed to stack and build on each other.
Mentioned in this episode:
Your High-Leverage Messaging For Growth Worksheet
Work/Connect with me:
Jessica Miller (00:01.454)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the It’s Your Offer podcast. I’m Jess Miller. I’m so excited to be here with all of you. Welcome back to all of our listeners who have been with us for this Profit Lever series. And for many of you who have joined because of this series, I wanted to welcome you to the show. This is one of my favorite series that we have been doing at the beginning of this year. And I’m so excited to talk to you about our next Profit Lever today. I’ve got a lot of great things in store for you. I can’t wait to tell you one of the most fun things today about the
topic we have to talk about, which is how it’s going to make your life easier. But if you haven’t listened to the other episodes in the series, no worries. They’re there for you. Go back and check them out and stick with us through this episode, especially to the end, where I have something to give to you that’s going to take everything you’re learning through the series and allow you to execute on it right now so that you can start uncovering the money that is sitting in your business this minute. This does not have to be hard. You don’t need to be a special snowflake. This is available to everyone.
And it really is my mission to make sure that I can help you through this podcast and through the work that I do uncover these profit levers in your existing business so that you can really mine the money, the gold that is sitting there right now. So today we’re going to talk about something that most people think is about marketing. But I’m here to tell you it’s actually about leverage. And that thing is messaging.
and not messaging in the way that most people think about it, where it’s just, you know, about like, what do we say? What do we go out there? What do we talk about? It’s not about louder. It’s not about being more persuasive. It’s not even about being more clever, because a lot of us think messaging is about clever marketing and persuasive marketing. And it does do that. But today in this podcast, we’re talking about messaging as a profit lever with something that is much more precise. If you’ve been following this series,
we have been stacking these high-leverage shifts on top of each other. So we started with talking about the buyer, your ideal client, as identifying a moment in time that your buyer is in. I call it the buying moment where they are looking for you and they are ready to buy. We talked about clarifying your offer as a profit lever. Your offer is the epicenter of your business. I would shout it from the rooftop. When it’s clear and it is on point, it’s one of the most powerful pieces of leverage that you have in your existing business.
Jessica Miller (02:21.666)
We talked about leveraging existing proximity, meaning that the people that are closest to you in your audience, in your client pool, are the warmest, most probable people to buy more from you. Buy again, buy period. And then we talked about aligning with strategic partners and this concept of partnership as leverage, as a lever in your business. And how it’s not just about locking arms with random people, it’s about being strategic on who that person is.
and making sure that that person is actually close to and working with your ideal client and your buyer at the buying moment. So today we’re translating all of those levers into execution when we talk about messaging. Because messaging is not about persuasion, it is about recognition. We are talking about it today from the perspective that messaging is a signal. It is a signal to your right
buyer in the moment they are looking for you and ready to buy. Most people think that messaging should follow some sort of an idea like convincing people to do something, impressing them with what you’re saying about it, explaining things, justifying things. But high leverage messaging does something different. It filters people. It signals to them. It says,
This is for you or this is not for you. Messaging should reduce the work you have to do in your business to convert clients, not create more of it. When you think of messaging as a signal, it’s like a homing device. People are bombarded with information every single day. When you speak to your buyer in the buying moment with clarity and intentionality, it cuts through all the noise
and it takes all the effort that you need to do and it cuts it down by 10 times. Okay? So we want to think of messaging from the perspective of leverage. And that’s what we, you’re going to hear me use these two words so many times. If this was a drinking game, we would all be drunk because you’re going to hear me say the words leverage and optimize. Like those two things are so crucial. And when we think through that lens with messaging,
Jessica Miller (04:44.652)
we think of messaging as a filter, not a megaphone. It is not about saying more and being louder. It is about filtering out the stuff that doesn’t matter and speaking directly to your person about the things that they care about in the moment they are looking to pay somebody for help. And we want that person to be you. So here’s the difference. When we think about megaphone messaging, when we think about like loudness and breadth of messaging, we think about something that is broad.
It’s often like inspirational and somewhat vague. It’s general. It kind of applies to everyone. It’s this kind of like sounds good, feels good thing, but it’s not really clear and it is not on point. Some examples of that is you hear someone talking about their business and they’re saying like, I help women feel confident, right? Very general, like what exactly does that mean? I help entrepreneurs grow. Great, like how do you do that? What entrepreneurs? We help you look and feel your best.
Awesome, but I don’t exactly know what that means. These types of messages require more explaining. They require often a longer sales cycle because you have to talk to people and touch them a million times before they get it, move them along this trajectory because you’re talking about something they don’t quite understand and often to the moments and the buyer in the wrong place. And they raise more objections because it’s not honed into this person. Leveraged messaging signaling to people through messaging
looks more like specificity, something very specific. It’s anchored in speaking to someone in the buying moment, meaning they’re already ready to buy and they are looking for you and what you do. It is anchored in your offer because your offer is on point, it is made specifically for someone and you are talking about their problem in that moment and the thing that’s going to solve it, which should be your offer. And it is anchored in proximity, meaning
think for a second what the difference is if you are talking to somebody who already gets it, knows you and is in your world and is looking to buy versus you’re talking to somebody out there who is like three standard deviations away from you and they don’t know you and they’re not in that place where they’re convinced, right? It’s a completely different thing. So if we think about like what does this messaging look like, maybe for a brick-and-mortar like a med spa or somebody like that, if we think about, you know, like the beauty industry,
Jessica Miller (07:08.396)
You could say something like, for women who are tired of wasting money on one-off skincare treatments and want a long-term plan. Very specific. I know who you are, know what’s going on in the moment, know what your problem is, know what the solution is. Maybe somebody like a coach would be saying something like, for established business owners who are busy but still experiencing inconsistent revenue months. There is no convincing in those sentences. It’s just recognition.
If you’re that person, you hear it and you think they get me and you notice yourself in it. It is very clear. So when we take this messaging and we apply it to our business and we think about the execution of this and where again can we lean in for higher ROI? As I mentioned earlier, your offer is one of the epicenters of your business. You have that on point, you know who you’re solving problems for, and now you know what to say to them.
it really becomes clear that everything else around that offer is going to get simpler. So if we think about the offer through the lens of leveraging messaging around that, we want to think back to what we talked about in lever number two when we talked about the offer. And again, if you haven’t listened to it, go back and check it out. But we talked about this idea of your one-liner. And the reason why your one-liner around your offer is so powerful is because when you use that line as a lever
connected to your offer, it is a signal to the person who is looking for it. And remember, it is ultra powerful because the person that you’re targeting is in the buying moment where they are ready to buy and they’re just looking for the person to do that with the offer that can help them. So the structure we talked about for that one-liner was I help people who already, whatever that is, fill in the blank, solve, fill in the blank, so that they can fill in the blank.
This sentence is extremely tight. And when you narrow it in and you get it tighter, the content around this becomes easier because you know exactly who you’re talking to about what, how you solve their problem, what result they’re going to create. So any messaging or content or things that it touches becomes powerful. And the people that hear it are getting it. Sales conversations become shorter because it is lock and key. The person that you are intending this for sees themselves in it and they’re like
Jessica Miller (09:30.582)
Like my gosh, that’s me. Referral partners understand you faster. They understand who you’re helping. They can put the pieces together about how that fits into their own sales journey and their own clients. Your ads perform better because it’s clearer and people click on the ad. Speaking becomes clearer because all these things are now tied together. Because you’re not reinventing your positioning every time, you’re actually getting more clear and dialed in
and using this messaging as a signal to a specific person with a specific problem at a specific time. That clarity is so powerful. And when you are clear over and over and over, it compounds and the person gets pulled in. It is magnetic and they move through that sales cycle much, much faster.
Jessica Miller (11:50.784)
Another retail example is we create curated shopping experiences. Sounds lovely. What the heck does that mean? Right? So again, a signal would be for boutique retailers who want to increase their average order volume without discounting. Now I know exactly what you’re doing, who you’re targeting, if you are running that kind of program. So when you hear your industry called out, something inside of you shifts.
People will say, I feel seen. I feel like you get me. That is what’s happening. It is resonance. And that is what signaling is. That is what signaling is. So we want to really dial into that. And specificity, although many people are afraid of it, we know they’re afraid of narrowing. They’re afraid like niching is a dirty word. People feel like they’re cutting their arm off their body. You know what I mean? They’re leaving something out. But specificity is freedom.
Right? It is the thing that either repels or attracts your person. And I always tell people good marketing and good messaging allows people to opt in and out. And the beauty of this is you want people to opt in and out in your marketing. You don’t want to, God forbid, get them into your business with a preconceived idea of what they’re going to get and then they’re like that’s not me. That is bad. You want to let them decide
by being clear and very direct and on point in your messaging. And you take that one step forward from just clarity to actually signaling and the people that are looking for you right in that moment will come in. So people are afraid of narrowing but as I said narrowing is freedom and it’s freedom because it reduces friction, it improves client quality, you get better people when you are clear, right? The people that come in are the people that you
are trying to talk to. It speeds decision making, right? People see it, they see themselves, like I’ve been waiting for you where have you been? Yes I’m going to do this. And it increases referrals because again people are looking for each other. And there’s nothing like locking arms with other people but if they can’t figure out what you’re doing or if you’re the right person for them it’s a problem. So broad messaging as the opposite attracts curiosity and creates conversations
Jessica Miller (14:14.008)
But what it doesn’t always do is create conversions.
And when you’re thinking about sales and levers and profitability and cash in your business, all roads lead to the conversion. That’s what it’s about. So you don’t need more conversations as a result of your marketing. You need the right conversations. You need the conversations that are closer to converting. And that is why the right words really reduce the workload that you do when you do it right. So when your message signals clearly
You don’t need to over explain. You don’t need to over deliver to compensate for the lack of clarity or people misunderstanding. You don’t attract misaligned clients. You get more of your right clients in the door, on calls, all the things, walking through your front door. And you don’t need as much content. Right? Your marketing becomes calmer. It becomes on point. And here’s the thing, it’s energetic and people feel it when they come into contact with your brand. We’ve all seen this, right?
And calm and on point is profitable. It is profitable. It allows you to do less things better including saying fewer things more precisely and that’s what we want to do. And it’s funny if anyone has ever gone through a sales call this is true in sales too like often we’re over explaining we’re saying too much. We just need to say the right things and then shut up.
And let the messaging as the signal or the guide do its work and that’s what it’s really about. Okay so let’s put this all together for all of you. As I mentioned in the show notes there is a worksheet that is going to walk you through exactly what I’m about to talk to you about. If you’re not in a place where you could get it you’re out on a walk whatever don’t worry about it.
Go download it later on or you’re in a place where you can’t get to it you could just write it down on the back of a piece of paper on your airplane napkin while you’re on the plane and you can always go back and get it. But here’s what I want you to think about. Again related to messaging as a signal and in this case we are tying it to one of your most powerful levers your offer. If someone were to read your one sentence offer
Jessica Miller (16:34.326)
right that one liner would they instantly know it’s for them? Would they instantly know it’s for them? Are you talking to the person who knows they need you in the moment they are ready to buy? Is it clear in that one offer? If not no judgment this is part of the process. If not what words need tightening?
Where can you make it more clear? What industries or type of situation can you name in that one liner that makes it for them makes it written for them? What buying moment could you call out right the problem they are experiencing right then in that moment that they’re looking for buying.
Okay this is your lever. This is your messaging as a signal lever okay and this is where you want to lean into doing this. You want to fine tune this one sentence and then you want to go out there and test it with the market which means you’re going to put it out there in one of your communication streams.
LinkedIn post in an email on a CTA that you’re doing on a guest episode you’re going to pick one place and you’re going to start sharing this message related to your offer as a signal and watch you blow your own damn mind.
Okay this is your messaging lever and it is going to totally rock your world. The clarity is where it’s at. It’s a signal it’s not a megaphone.
It is a powerful lever sitting right in front of you in your business with your existing offers and the things you already worked so hard to create and now you are going to pull it and you are going to create cash and conversions and it’s going to be awesome.
So as I mentioned this is part of the overall high leverage growth series we’re talking about. We’re talking about profit levers in your business. To recap that first profit lever was about identifying the buyer moment as your ideal client.
Jessica Miller (19:01.4)
The second lever was about clarifying your offer your offer as one of your most powerful levers. The third one was we talked about activating existing proximity meaning the people closest to you with the highest amount of trust are the hottest and those are the people that are the most powerful levers to pull when you’re thinking about conversion. We expanded this idea through this idea of strategic partnerships and partnering up intentionally strategically with people who are working with your client in that buying moment as well
so you can lock arms with them. And then today we translated all of that into messaging as a signal. Together these levers stack. They are the keys to creating growth in your business in a simple powerful fun way. You will not find an easier path to growth than within these things we’re talking about in this series. If you miss any of them
Go back and listen they’re all there for you. And if you’ve been doing the worksheets keep going. These levers build clarity builds and everything is compounded. If you’re realizing that your business does not need more activity it actually needs refinement. It needs the power of these levers. That is exactly the work we do inside my Profit Accelerator and in private consulting. This isn’t about adding more it’s about tightening what already exists in your business.
If that feels aligned you can book a private strategy call using the link in the show notes. We’ll look at where your highest leverage opportunities actually are and whether working together makes sense. Until next week everyone cheering you on pull those levers have a wonderful wonderful week.
