If You Can’t Explain It Simply, Your Customer Won’t Buy It
Most customers don’t decide not to buy because your product or service isn’t good enough.
They decide not to buy because they don’t quite understand it.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a “this makes no sense at all” way.
More in a subtle, unsettling way that sounds like: “I think I get it… but I’m not completely sure.”
And in digital marketing, that hesitation is usually the end of the conversation.
How complexity sneaks in (without anyone noticing)
Very few businesses wake up one morning and decide to be unclear.
What usually happens is much slower and far more reasonable. The business grows. Services expand. New offerings are added. Language evolves internally because everyone around the table already understands the context.
Over time, the website starts reflecting that internal shorthand.
What once felt clear becomes layered. Explanations get longer. Messages try to cover more ground. Before long, the business is speaking fluently to itself, but asking customers to do a lot of the decoding.
Internally, everything still makes perfect sense. Externally, it starts to feel like hard work.
Why “clear” doesn’t mean “simplistic”
There’s often a quiet fear underneath this conversation.
That if you simplify what you do, you’ll undersell it.
That nuance will be lost.
That expertise will be diluted.
In practice, the opposite tends to be true.
Clear explanation isn’t a sign of shallow thinking. It’s a sign of mastery.
People who truly understand their subject can explain it plainly. People who don’t often rely on complexity to do the heavy lifting for them.
Customers are surprisingly good at spotting the difference.
Where digital makes the problem worse
Digital marketing doesn’t give you much time.
Your website isn’t read line by line. It’s scanned. Compared. Judged quickly. Often on a small screen, between other tasks, with very little patience for ambiguity.
In that environment, complexity doesn’t feel impressive. It feels demanding.
If someone has to slow down to work out what you do, whether it applies to them, or why it matters, the momentum is gone. And once momentum goes, so does confidence.
This isn’t because customers are lazy or incapable. It’s because they don’t need to work that hard to make a choice.
The internal understanding gap
One of the most common patterns we see is a gap between internal clarity and external clarity.
Inside the business, everyone knows exactly how things fit together. They understand the process, the thinking, the differentiators, the detail.
The customer, meanwhile, is still trying to answer a much simpler question: “Is this for me?”
And often a second one follows quickly after: “Could I explain this to someone else if I needed to?”
If the answer is no, doubt creeps in. Not because the offer is wrong, but because confidence hasn’t had the chance to form.
People rarely buy things they can’t comfortably repeat back.
Over time, this kind of misunderstanding has a quiet cost.
Enquiries take longer to convert. Sales conversations start further back than they should. Marketing gets blamed for underperformance that’s actually rooted in explanation, not execution.
And because the issue isn’t always obvious, businesses often respond by adding more – more content, more pages, more messaging, which only deepens the problem they were trying to solve.
Simplicity is about focus, not slogans
This isn’t about reducing everything to soundbites.
It’s about choosing what matters most and leading with that.
About putting outcomes before process.
About using customer language rather than internal shorthand.
About deciding what you want someone to understand first and letting everything else support that, rather than compete with it.
In many cases, the biggest improvement doesn’t come from rewriting the whole site. It comes from getting one explanation right. One page. One core message. One clear way of describing what you actually do.
That kind of focus tends to outperform far more effortful overhauls.
A question worth sitting with
Before adding more copy, more services, or more explanation, it’s worth pausing and asking:
If a potential customer read this, could they explain it back to someone else, clearly and confidently?
If not, the issue usually isn’t lack of marketing activity.
It’s lack of clarity.
And clarity is a decision, not a volume problem.
What this means for buying behaviour
Customers don’t need to understand everything you do.
They need to understand enough to feel confident moving forward. To know why you’re relevant to them. To feel comfortable taking the next step.
Once that foundation is in place, detail becomes reassuring rather than overwhelming.
Without it, even very good businesses struggle to convert attention into action.
The Last Word
People don’t buy complexity.
They buy understanding.
If what you do makes sense quickly, confidence follows.
If it takes effort to decode, hesitation sets in.
Being able to explain your work simply isn’t about reducing its value.
It’s about making that value accessible.
And in digital marketing, accessibility is often the difference between interest and action.
