How effective is your message?

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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:

given the message in the ad a cleaner delivery.
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.
delivered better overall results and maximized the ROI.

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