I was browsing online the other day when an advertisement for a video game CD caught my attention. It said how it was a piece of cake for me to order it online. All I had to do was fill up a form that would just take “a few seconds” of my time and it would be delivered to me. My son loves playing video games and I thought, well why not. So I clicked the link that would take me to the form.
To my distaste I found that the form was longer than the shopping list my wife gives me every month (which is quite long, trust me) and I had to scroll down forever to spot its end. It was certainly not a piece of cake to fill it.
To top it off when I finally completed filling the form and hit the submit link, all I got was an error message. The link associated with the form was broken. The advertiser was either ignorant about this or he had ignored it. Neither can be excused.
Are you being more careful about your ads?
A lot of businesses these days are not careful about the ads and the broken links. They keep posting ads just for the heck of it. If a competitor posts a good ad, they would want to copy them. It is a good thing to keep a track of what your competitor is up to but copying a competitor blindly is not a good thing.
This is because, what works for your competitor may not always work for you!
Do you keep your promises?
The purpose of an advertisement is ideally to inform your audience about your product and make them act – in this case make a purchase or an enquiry. In such a case, you must make sure that your sales promises are kept. If you want them to act, you have to provide them the right direction to act.
If you claim that your e-mail enquiry form is a piece of cake to fill up, it has to be a piece of cake, period.
If it ends up having a broken link, you instantly lose credibility and goodwill. And yes, business.
Make sure that you do not post ads just because they look attractive. If it does not do what it promises, you will have several people attracted to it – only to get fooled by it. Just like me and the video game CD.
Have you come across ads with problems such as broken links? Share with us what you learnt from them.
