How effective is your message?

Think your plan through

This morn­ing I heard an adver­tise­ment on WDAE 620 am in Tampa.  It is a major sports talk sta­tion here in cen­tral Florida, and gen­er­ates a lot of rev­enue for Clear Chan­nel.   The sound spot I heard was for a local restau­rant chain.  In the ad, one of the hosts of  the radio show explained how to get to a web site to make reser­va­tions for your hol­i­day event.   It went some­thing like this:

“Go to the web site. Click on the menu and it will take you to the reser­va­tion page.   Click on group events and then fill out the form and we will get back to you in a cou­ple of days!”

This set of instruc­tions struck as being way too com­plex for a radio host to be giv­ing in a drive time radio show.   The restau­rant should have invested a few bucks for a radio but­ton that they could place on their main page.  The cus­tomers could click on the big but­ton with the hol­i­day col­ors and click right through to the appro­pri­ate page.   And the radio host could have said: 

“Just go to our web site and click on the big hol­i­day themed radio but­ton for reservations!”

Keep Your Mes­sages Simple

Apply­ing a lit­tle thought to this process in advance would have:

1. given the mes­sage in the ad a cleaner delivery.
2. made the mes­sage in the ad com­pre­hen­si­ble, since lis­ten­ers would only have to remem­ber the web address, not a com­plex series of instruc­tions that they can’t write down while driving.
3. deliv­ered bet­ter over­all results and max­i­mized the ROI.

These same lessons apply to recruit­ing and career web sites.  I’m just sayin…

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Tagged as: Advertising, Clear Channel, Clear Channel Communications, Florida, Message, Radio, Sport, Sports radio, Talk radio, Tampa Florida, United States, WDAE, Website