Your Clients Already Wrote Your Best Line
Jo is a health coach. Actually, scratch that. Jo is three health coaches.
She supports women through three very different stages of life, and she’s genuinely good at all of them. Her clients say so, at length. Some of her testimonials run longer than this article.
But her website told three different stories depending on where you clicked. Her headline worked beautifully for two of her client groups and quietly shut the door on the third. Her best testimonials were tucked away near the bottom of the page, where only the most determined visitors ever found them. And her video views had fallen off a cliff, without her being entirely sure why.
When she came to me, the question she asked was: “Which one should I pick?”
It’s the question almost every multi-specialist asks. And it’s usually the wrong one.
Why “just niche down” isn’t always the answer
The standard advice is simple. Pick one. Drop the rest. Sometimes that’s right.
But Jo’s three client groups weren’t three random businesses bolted together. Dropping two of them would have meant turning away women she loves working with and gets brilliant results for.
Her problem wasn’t too many offers. It was that nothing connected them. Without a thread, a visitor sees three businesses and fully trusts none of them. That’s the vague tax again, just wearing a different outfit.
The breakthrough was hiding in her clients’ words
So instead of looking at what Jo does, we looked at what her clients said before they found her.
And there it was. Across all three groups, the same dismissive line came up again and again, repeated by people who really should have known better. Different stage of life, same frustration. Same feeling of being brushed off.
That was the thread. Not a service. A shared experience.
In one session, we built:
An umbrella idea that holds all three client groups without blurring them into mush.
A lead offer. The one she loves most and books most now fronts her marketing, with the other two clearly signposted rather than hidden.
A draft one-liner built on that shared frustration, with variations she can swap in depending on who she’s talking to.
An opening question for networking and talks, designed to make people lean in and ask, “How do you do that?”
Your vocabulary is your DNA. Jo’s clients had been handing her their best marketing line for years. She just hadn’t been reading it as copy.
What else changed
Proof moved up. Her testimonials went from footnote to front line: a short, outcome-led snippet right under the headline, and more scattered through each service page. Especially where the client journey is emotional, and readers need a reason to keep hoping (and scrolling). The long ones get trimmed to the result, without changing the meaning.
Topics led by the problem, not the method. Nobody searches for your modality. They search for the thing keeping them awake at 3am. Sometimes literally.
The traffic mystery, solved. Her video views didn’t drop because the videos got worse. They dropped because the posts that used to send people there stopped. The fix wasn’t more filming. It was using LinkedIn to point people back to the evergreen videos she already has.
SEO without losing the voice. Keep the memorable framing, but make sure the plain words people actually search for sit in the headline and subheadline. Beautiful copy that nobody finds is just a diary.
Five things to try if you do more than one thing
Stop asking which one to pick. Ask what connects them. The answer is rarely in your services. It’s usually in your clients.
Read your testimonials like copy, not compliments. Print them out. Highlight any phrase that turns up more than once. That’s your language, handed to you for free.
Lead with one, signpost the rest. A lead offer isn’t your only offer. It’s the front door. The other rooms are still there.
Move your proof up. If your best evidence lives at the bottom of the page, most people will never meet it.
Lead with the problem, not the process. Your method is how you do it. Their problem is why they’ll care.
What happened to Jo
Jo didn’t drop two-thirds of her business. She didn’t start from scratch.
She left with one umbrella idea, one lead offer, a one-liner she could say out loud, and a plan she could act on that week: rewrite the homepage around the umbrella, sort her testimonials into three piles, trim them, lift them, and start pointing LinkedIn back at her videos.
Same Jo. Same three client groups. One sentence that finally holds them all together.
That’s the bit most multi-specialists miss. You don’t need fewer services. You need a clearer reason why they belong together.
If your business has outgrown the way you describe it, that’s exactly what The Competitive Advantage is built for: my six-week programme for scaling founders ready to turn clarity, consistency, credibility, connection and conversion into the reason people choose them. But whether you join us or not, start with the five steps above. Your clients have probably already written your best line. You just have to listen.
