Command and Comms: Turning Confusing Marketing Into a Clear Message People Act On

On the fireground, you learn very quickly that noise is not the same as communication.

A few summers ago we’d been working the edge of a fast moving bushfire on a hot, windy afternoon. I was the Officer on the truck watching a flank that looked settled enough on the surface. The smoke column was almost gone, crews were blacking out and you could feel people starting to relax just a bit. Then a gully lit up out of nowhere, the fire found unburnt grass and everything changed.

The radio went from casual updates to a wall of sound in about ten seconds. Crew Leaders called each other instead of calling the Sector Commander. Half finished sentences overlapped with fire observations and panicked reports. There was a lot of talking, yet not much that you could translate into facts or action. If you have ever sat in a leadership meeting where everyone shares opinions and nobody makes a decision, you already know that sound. It’s the sound of “out of control”.

In the middle of that, the Incident Controller cut in. “All crews, all crews. Fall back to the the main road. Confirm when clear.”

That was it. Simple. One task. One location. One next step.

There was no chatting, no explanation, no confusion. The message landed, the Crew Leaders gave the word, the drivers turned the wheel, pumps were wound down and in a couple of minutes every truck was sitting safely on the road watching the fire run hard through the spot where they had just been. Nothing heroic. Just one clear command that changed the outcome and ensured everyone’s safety.

In my marketing work I see this same pattern every week.

Websites and campaigns that are full of “communication” in the broad sense. Lots of words, plenty of sales phrases, brand stories, mission statements and a sprinkling of buzzwords. Yet even when the right person lands on the page and reads a bit, they walk away without doing anything. Why? Because at no point did the message cut through the clutter, get their attention and tell them clearly what to do next.

On the fireground, we would treat that as a safety problem. On your website, you should treat it as a revenue problem. Your marketing is either that calm voice on the radio or it’s the cacophony of noise that people just tune out.

What Marketing “Radio Chaos” Really Sounds Like

When we train new members in radio comms in the Rural Fire Service, we lean on a few simple habits that keep everyone safe. Use plain language. Say who you are. Say who you're calling. Say where you are. Say what is happening. Say what you need.

Keep it short enough that crews can remember it without asking you to “repeat last send”. If you miss those steps, you force other people to guess and guessing under pressure is something you don’t need.

Marketing often fails for exactly the same reasons as bad radio calls. It sounds fine inside the room where it was written, yet it  doesn't give a real person, with a real problem, anything clear to grab onto. To make this practical, I want to walk you through a few very common examples so treat them like radio comms. Imagine you were talking on your CB.

The first is the old favourite:

“We help businesses grow.”

If someone keyed the mic and said, “We’re helping with the fire,” you would be straight back at them asking who, where and how. The sentence tells you nothing you can use. On your homepage, “We help businesses grow” does the same thing. It is positive, yet completely non-specific.

A stronger version looks more like a good radio update.

“We help accounting firms on the Gold Coast turn website visits into booked meetings.”

Now we have a specific type of business, a rough location and a concrete outcome. The right person can see that and make a decision. “That sounds like us and that sounds like something we want.”

Another common line is:

“Innovative solutions for today’s challenges.”

On the fireground, that would sound like, “We’re implementing innovative tactics to address current fire behaviour.” You would have no idea whether they were winning or losing, whether they were even talking about your fire or if they had just lost their mind.

Your buyer doesn’t get out of bed searching for “innovative solutions.” They search for things like “get more leads,” “reduce refunds,” or “fix my shopping cart.” So a better version of that line would be something like: “We fix leaking sales funnels so more of your paid traffic turns into real revenue.”

Another favourite line I see is:

“Partnering with you on your journey.”

On a fireground that sentence would get you some interesting looks. Crews  don't need emotional companionship over the radio. They need direction. Your buyer can value partnership but at the time that they land on your homepage they need clarity about what will actually change in their world if they work with you.

So you might turn that into:

“We run your SEO and analytics so you stop guessing and know what works to bring in paying clients.”

Now working as your partner is implied in the “we run” and “you know,” yet the focus sits on a clear result for them.

You see this same pattern play out in the more corporate content  as well.

“Delivering excellence across multiple verticals.” “Driving digital transformation at scale.” “Empowering your people to thrive.” “Leveraging cutting-edge technology to accelerate success.”

None of these would pass as useful radio calls. There’s no useful "communication" in the word they’ve written. They don’t tell anyone where to move, what to do or what to watch out for. Think about your content. Are your prospective clients in the same position when they come to your website or social media?

Rewritten, those same ideas can become:

“We build and manage Shopify stores for lifestyle brands doing 7–30 orders a day who want to scale profitably.”

“We replace spreadsheet chaos with a simple CRM and automation so leads stop falling through the cracks.”

“We train your managers in one practical coaching framework that cuts performance problems and staff churn.”

“We set up AI tools that write first drafts of your blogs and emails so your team spends time editing, not staring at blank pages.”

These lines still sell value. They just do it with the kind of precision you hear in a good radio message.

If you want a quick diagnostic, open your site and ask one question.

“Could this content sit on any of my competitors’ websites without changing a word?”

If the answer is yes, you're sending out radio garble.

How We Structure Clear Orders On The Fireground

On the fireground, we  don't rely on talent or brains for clear communication. We rely on structure.

The pattern varies slightly between services, yet most of us follow some version of the same simple outline when we speak on the radio. We call the station or role we want. We identify ourselves. We state our location. We describe what is happening. We state what we need or what we are going to do.

It sounds like this:

“Incident Control, Mudgeeraba 41. We’re at the top fence line behind number 32 Strawberry Rd. Fire has spotted into the bush one property over. We need two more crews up here to help urgently.”

There is no mystery in that structure. It just works. Everyone listening can place that crew on the map, picture the conditions and either act or stand by. The Incident Controller can make a decision without another five questions.

Your marketing will benefit from exactly the same discipline. You  don't need to write like a radio operator but you do need to answer the same questions quickly.

1. - Who is this for?

2. - Where or in what situation are they?

3. - What changes for them? How soon, or under what conditions.

4. - What should they do next?

If you leave those out, you hand over the mental work to your reader and in my experience they rarely volunteer for that job.

You can translate our radio procedure straight into a simple messaging template.

“We help [WHO] in [WHERE / CONTEXT] get [RESULT] [IN TIMEFRAME / SITUATION]. Start by [NEXT STEP].”

You’ll rarely put that full sentence on your homepage in that exact form. When you write it though, you force yourself to be specific before you try to “sound clever”.

So, let’s make this real and plug it into a few different types of business.

For a local service business:

“We help homeowners in south Auckland fix burst pipes and hot water failures within two hours. Call now to get a plumber on the road.”

For a B2B consultant:

“We help mid-sized manufacturing firms in Singapore cut production bottlenecks and missed orders within 90 days. Book a diagnostic session with your leadership team.”

For an ecommerce brand:

“We ship rugged workwear to tradies across the USA with 48 hour delivery on common sizes so you don't lose time on site.”

In each case, the line gives the reader the same things a good radio call gives our crews.  There’s enough detail to know whether they should pay attention because you’re talking directly to them.

If you spend ten minutes drafting three or four versions of that sentence for your main offer, you’ll almost always see that your current homepage headline is weaker than it should be. Once you have that core messaging, you can wrap your design, story and brand voice around it. Without it, anything you add is decoration on top of noise.

Clarity leads to your wanted action!

Why You Need a Brand Clarity Blueprint Not Just “Better Copy”

On a large incident, we  don't rely on one charismatic officer to keep the whole thing together by the sheer force of their personality. We rely on a system. The Australasian Inter-Service Incident Management System (AIIMS) might not sound exciting but it gives everyone common terminology, command structure and agreed chains of communication. Any trained AIIMS trained firefighter can step into a role and crews still get the same quality of information.

In business, most organisations run the opposite way. Messaging lives in people’s heads. A clever line appears in an ad, another line on the website, a third in sales powerpoints and a fourth in that LinkedIn post someone smashed out at midnight. Nobody pulls all those fragments of marketing into one plan. New staff write in their own style, agencies “put their spin” on things and over a few years your brand voice turns into a broken down patchwork of random content.

That is why we build what I call a Brand Clarity Blueprint before we touch SEO or paid traffic or automation. It is our equivalent of the comms playbook.

At a practical level, our blueprint gives you four things.

The first is a message map. This is not a glossy brand story. It is a simple overview of your main promise, the three or four supporting points that matter most and real proof for each.

If your main promise is that you help home buyers secure the right loan with less stress and fewer surprises then your supporting points might be things like how clearly you explain their borrowing position, how well you package and present their application to lenders and how closely you stay beside them from pre-approval through to settlement. Under each of those, you then add in some hard numbers and short client stories that show you actually do this in the real world, not just in your marketing.

The second is a proof bank. On the fireground, if I ask Incident Control if I can close a road, I expect to give them good reasons. Flame height, spotting distance, wind change, smoke over the bitumen. You can’t just shut down a road without saying why it’s important. That evidence is what gets a quick yes.

In your marketing, your proof bank fills the same purpose. It stores the measurable wins you’ve created, the positive testimonials your clients have said about you, the before and after snapshots of key metrics or the job photos. Then when you or your team write, you  don't fish around for content ideas. You grab something concrete from the bank.

The third is a CTA ladder. On a fire, not every instruction is to “evacuate” or “go to a sector.” Many calls are smaller steps that build momentum. Move to this road. Check behind the shed. Hold at the track.

In your marketing, you need the same range of commitment levels. A cold visitor might not be ready to “book a full strategy project,” but they might happily “Get the Brand Clarity Checklist” or “Send us your URL for a free quick Loom review.” When we map a ladder, we pick one low, one medium and one high commitment action that make sense for your buyers. Then we assign each page and campaign to one of those instead of asking everyone to leap straight from stranger to long term client. You need to build trust.

Business, like firefighting, is built on trust. On a fire we must trust each other with our lives. In business, people are trusting you with their livelihood or something else precious to them.

The fourth is a tone guide. Fireground radio guides  don't only tell you what to words say. They tell you how to say it. USe a steady pace, no slang, no private jokes and speak in  short, focused sentences. That tone is not a branding choice. It is a practical tool that helps people understand you more clearly in noisy conditions.

Your tone guide plays the same role for your brand. It might say, for example, that you write in the first person, that you use Australian spelling, that you avoid jargon unless you explain it, that you speak to one reader at a time (you, your )and that you pair every claim with proof.

When you combine those four pieces, you end up with a plan that does something most businesses never manage. It lets anyone on your team sound like the same calm Officer on the radio, even if you're not the one holding the mic that day.

From there, tools like AI become far more useful. You can feed your message map, proof bank and tone rules into a writing assistant then ask it to draft or repurpose content and you stand a good chance of getting something that sounds like you. Without that, you get what most people get from AI, which is generic, cold copy with no edge and no clear messaging.

The 30 Minute “Radio Read” Exercise

One of the simplest diagnostic tools you can run on your marketing costs you nothing and will only hurt your pride.

Print your homepage or copy/paste it into a plain text document and read it OUT LOUD as if you were talking on the radio during a busy fire. Imagine that the person on the other end (your buyer) has smoke in their eyes, they’re fatigued and have a very limited attention span. They can’t see your clever layout and images. They can’t admire your colour choices. All they have is your words, your tone and the message you read out.

As you read, take notice of where you falter.

Notice where a sentence runs so long that you have to take an extra breath. Notice where you hit a phrase you would never say to a real client in a real conversation. Notice where you finish a paragraph and cannot answer a simple question: “Who is this for and what do I want them to do now?”

Take a pen and mark those spots. They’re the garbled message parts. This isn’t to make you feel bad about your writing. The marks are there to show you where the message failed to communicate effectively.

When you’ve finished reading, block out thirty minutes for a quick review and clarity session with yourself or your team. Spend the first ten minutes tightening the top of the page using the Who / Where / Result / Next Step structure. Write three versions and pick the one that is most specific to the clients you’re trying to convert.

Use the next ten minutes to plug at least one real piece of proof into the page from your proof bank. Swap out a fluffy phrase for a concrete result, a client quote or a simple before and after.

Use the last ten minutes to check that the main call to action on your page matches where the reader is likely to be in their decision. If they have just met you, maybe asking for a $30,000 project is a little premature. Offer the low rung on your CTA ladder instead.

You  don't need to fix everything in one go. The aim of this exercise is to teach your ear what clear, action oriented communication feels like when you hear your own content “speak”.

Bringing It Back to You

When I'm on a fire truck, I  don't think about “brand voice.” I think about whether the crews and the community will hear what they need to hear in time to act safely.

When I’m working with you on your website and your SEO and your Brand Clarity Blueprint, I’m thinking about the same thing from a different angle. You have people landing on your pages who are already under pressure. They need your product, Their business is not growing the way they want. Their leads are slowing. Their staff are stressed. They have bosses or boards or families asking hard questions. Or a multitude of other hassles.

They  don't need more noise. They need one clear, confident voice that sounds like it knows how to solve their problem and has a plan.

You don't get that by posting more content or by buying more traffic. You get it by treating your marketing as communication that is life changing. You decide exactly who you're speaking to, what result you help them create, how that appears to the real world and then you give them one simple “next step” backed with proof.

That is what we do for you with the Brand Clarity Blueprint at Proficlix. We sit down for an hour, ask you the kind of questions you probably have not been asked about your own business for a long time, pull your story out of you and your offers into a simple, effective message and then line up your SEO and your content and your content engine behind that.

From the outside, it just sounds like clear, focused, helpful communication. From the inside, it feels like moving from random radio chatter to taking command.

And once you’ve run a few campaigns with that level of clarity, you’ll start to hear vague lines and generic promises the way I hear messy fireground radio calls. Something in you will flinch a little. You will pause and think, “That might sound fine in this room but it would never stand out in the smoke.”

That’s the point where your marketing starts to behave less like decorated words and more like a sales machine.

So if you take one thing from this, I hope it will be this.

Your words aren't decoration. They’re specific instructions. Every line either helps the right person take the next step or it gets in their way. If your current page is not sending people somewhere useful, treat it the way we treat anything that puts crews at risk on the fireground: flag it, communicate it and then fix it. Replace vague phrases with clear, practical direction that someone under pressure can follow without thinking twice.