Offers
Why your offer is not confusing, it is just aimed at the wrong moment
Short answerWhen people say your offer is confusing, the explanation is often fine. It’s just speaking to a different point on their timeline than the one they’re living. Everyone is on a timeline toward the result they want, and every day on it is a different buyer. An offer built for someone deep into the problem sounds like nonsense to someone just starting. Pick one moment on that timeline and build for it.
“People keep telling me they don’t really get it.”
If you’ve heard some version of that about your own offer, you know the instinct that follows. Simplify the headline. Add an explainer video. Cut the jargon. Sometimes that’s exactly the fix.
But a lot of the time the offer is perfectly clear. It’s just clear to somebody who isn’t reading it.
Everybody lives on a timeline
Here’s the idea I build every offer around. Everybody lives on a timeline. You do, I do, everyone does.
Say somebody wants to lose a little weight over the next ten days. Day one, they start eating less. A few days in, the first pounds come off and they’re excited. Around day five, halfway through, the doubts and the weariness kick in. Day seven, it feels hard and they have to talk themselves back into it. Day nine, they’re almost there.
Every single one of those days is a different version of that person. The one on day one, fresh and excited and taking the first steps, is a completely different human from the one on day seven who’s losing momentum and wondering if this is going to work.
And most of us, when we build offers or write ads, just talk to people anywhere on that timeline, vaguely. We throw a dart. “Hey, if you want to lose weight…” That speaks to everyone and connects with nobody.
Timelines scale, too. A weight-loss timeline might be ten days. A business transformation might be three or four years. The people who buy my own front-end offer about Facebook ads are usually somewhere around year two of a path like that, and that’s who I wrote it for.
Same person, completely different message
I’ve lived a version of this myself. Over a year and a half or so, I went from 200 pounds down to somewhere between 160 and 170. I bounced back a bit after a vacation with a lot going on, and got back to about 165.
If I were at the very beginning of that, the message that would grab me is how to lose the first five pounds. Where I am now, the message that grabs me is how to take those final few pounds off.
Same guy. Same goal. Same problem, technically. But hand me the “first five pounds” offer today and it’ll feel like it’s for somebody else, and hand the “final few pounds” offer to the version of me from a year and a half ago and I wouldn’t have understood why it mattered.
That’s what “confusing” usually is. It isn’t that the words are unclear. It’s that the reader hasn’t lived the part of the path that makes them make sense.
What the wrong moment looks like in an account
A friend of mine with a fairly big offer came to me because his CPMs had spiked to over $500 and his cost per acquisition on a $27 front end had gone to $180. He asked me, “Andrew, what the actual heck is going on here?”
The first thing I looked at was frequency, because I figured the market was worn out. I wouldn’t have been shocked to see eight to ten. It was 2.21. People weren’t sick of the ads.
So we dug into the audience. It was kind of a biz-op offer, and the audience had been burned and abused and didn’t really trust anything right now. And, believe it or not, they were very research driven. They had to research and understand every little part before they’d even begin moving.
The question I asked him was whether there was a mismatch between what the front-end offer was trying to do and where this audience was at that moment. Where we landed was that this audience wasn’t capable of hearing what the ads were saying, even though the offer would have worked for them.
Nothing was wrong with the ad account. The offer was aimed at a version of the buyer who wasn’t the one showing up. More concepts and more audience segments usually aren’t enough in that situation. The offer has to move too, because the offer sits deeper than the ads.
How to aim at the right moment
When I architect an offer, the first thing I want to know is who I’m speaking to, where on the timeline they are, what’s stopping them or holding them back, and how I can move them forward to the result they want. In that order.
Draw the actual timeline for your buyer, from the day they first feel the problem to the day they’ve got the result. Mark how they feel at each stage: excited, weary, skeptical, picking up momentum, about to quit. You’re looking for the point where the most movable, most numerous version of your buyer is standing.
My default is to catch people while they’re actively in the problem, early to mid, and haven’t committed to a solution yet. That group is bigger, less skeptical and less jaded, and more interested in learning what’s really going on than in defending a fix they’ve already picked.
The exception is a very sophisticated market. There, the movable buyer is often the jaded veteran who has tried everything. You can sell to them, but you’ll need something they’ve genuinely never heard, which is where naming a true mechanism earns its keep.
Then name the first obstacle. A front-end offer doesn’t have to deliver the whole transformation. Its job is to get them past the first wall in front of them. A small offer that promises the entire four-year trip isn’t believable. “Get past this one thing” is.
When it really is just confusing
I should be fair. Sometimes the offer really is unclear, and no amount of timeline work will fix that.
One of the reasons people don’t buy is simply that the offer isn’t clear. My test is whether you can say what it is, who it’s for and what they get in one to three sentences. If you can’t, the offer isn’t dialed in yet, and that’s the first job.
If you can say it plainly, you’ve shown it to a few real prospects, and they still look at you sideways, that’s when I’d stop rewriting the explanation and start asking whether you’re talking to the right day on their timeline.
Anyways. Clear to the wrong person still reads as confusing. Fix who you’re talking to before you fix how you’re saying it.
What to do this week
Write out your buyer’s timeline from the first day they feel the problem to the day they have the result, and mark how they feel at each stage. Then put your sales page headline next to it and circle the day it’s actually written for. If the people clicking your ads are standing somewhere else on that line, rewrite the offer’s promise for the day they’re really on.
What is timeline marketing?
It’s building an offer and its messaging for one specific point on the buyer’s timeline instead of the whole path at once. Every stage between feeling the problem and getting the result is a different version of the person, with different beliefs and emotions. Pick the stage you’re selling to and speak to that version of them.
How do I know where my customers are in their buying process?
Listen to how they describe their situation in sales calls, reviews, comments and replies. People early on tend to talk about the problem and what might be causing it. People further along tend to talk about what they’ve already tried and why it didn’t work. Their own words usually place them on the timeline more accurately than any survey.
Should I target problem-aware or solution-aware buyers?
My default is problem-aware people who haven’t committed to a solution yet. That group is bigger and less skeptical, and they’re open to hearing what’s really going on. In a very sophisticated market, the better target can be the burned veteran, but that takes a genuinely new mechanism.
P.S. A quick gut check: read your offer out loud and ask what the person hearing it must already have experienced for it to make sense. If that experience is a year along the path, your offer is built for someone further along than the person clicking your ad today.
