How effective is your message?

by Michael VanDervort on November 9, 2009

WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 6:  Congratulatory messa...
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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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Tweets that mention How effective is your message? -- Topsy.com
November 9, 2009 at 8:54 pm

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

MikeVanDervort 1 MikeVanDervort November 9, 2009 at 6:50 pm

[New Post at The Human Race Horses] How effec­tive is your mes­sage? http://www.thehumanracehorses.com/2009/1...
via Twitoaster

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2 Michael VanDervort November 9, 2009 at 8:50 pm

[New Post at The Human Race Horses] How effec­tive is your mes­sage? http://toast.tw/1006jk

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3 Michael VanDervort November 9, 2009 at 8:53 pm

How effec­tive is your mes­sage? — http://bit.ly/NIZ77

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4 anita santiago November 9, 2009 at 8:54 pm

RT @MikeVanDervort: [New Post at The Human Race Horses] How effec­tive is your mes­sage? http://toast.tw/1006jk #blog #hrbloggers

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5 Michael VanDervort November 10, 2009 at 6:33 am

How effec­tive is your mes­sage? http://bit.ly/NIZ77

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6 Erik Van den Branden November 10, 2009 at 11:49 am

How effec­tive is your mes­sage? Keep it sim­ple. http://bit.ly/NIZ77 (RT @MikeVanDervort)

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