How Clear is Your Message?
Yesterday I was sifting through ninemsn’s News site, when I was confronted by what you see in the screen grabs on the left (click the thumbnails to see what I mean). This all out advertising blitz consisted of no less that eleven advertising placements, two of which expanded even more when rolled over with the mouse. I’ve had to crop the second screen grab because of its size!
Certainly the clash of brands you see will not make advertisers too happy, as they would have all had a reasonable expectation that their ads were going to cut through. While the side panels do relate to the Codral ads, you wouldn’t know it at a glance, and this becomes even more confusing once the wine ad almost pushes Codral branding off the page all together. I really wanted to call this post “When Advertising Attacks”, but I want to use these examples to illustrate a different point.
Through all of the side panels, multiple expanding ad units, half banner and house ads, one thing here is obvious – no one’s message is clear. By the time I have finished trying to make sense of all it, I no longer want to read the article. This got me thinking about clarity of your 
message, or brand, when online and how getting it wrong can drive potential customers away.
As an online business owner, being clear about who you are and what your message is forms an incredibly important part of building your brand and reputation.
This is a process that should begin the minute you choose your domain name. You should make sure that it accurately reflects your business. Try to get your business name in there, or an accepted abbreviation of it. Avoid an acronym (unless you are someone like IBM), as it does nothing for SEO, and make it easy enough for Joe Average to remember. Extensions to your domain name are just as important. If you want your product to be consumed on a global level, do everything in your power to get a .com address that matches your business. If you are only focusing locally, then a domain with your country extension is fine.
The look and feel of your site should be one that you are happy to live with for a while too. My first iteration of Online Business Adviser was fine to start with but after a while it started to look stale so a redesign was needed. You should make sure that your design is one that you feel comfortable with and reflects your business. Once you have it nailed, extensions of the site should be consistent with this look and feel. As an example, Twitter pages should be customised with a background that is reflective of the main site. If you maintain social media profiles on site such as MySpace and Facebook, these should be tweaked as much as possible to suit your business. Colours, logos, and language should all be the same as your main site.
Moving on from the aesthetics, it is also vital that your purpose is clear as a business. What is it that your business does, what is its mission? What products and services do you offer? How do people contact you? You need to make sure that wherever you maintain an online presence, from directories to social network profiles, all this kind of information is clear and consistent.
Mixed messaging can drive potential customers away. Ambiguity about what you offer and exactly what people should expect from you will simply lead a consumer to someone who they know they can trust. The examples above may be extreme, but illustrate the point perfectly. The mix of ads on the page simply do not work together, run over the top of each other and any equity those advertisers may have on the page is squandered by the others.
The web is a big place, and getting exponentially bigger each day. Getting lost in the clutter can be easy, so it is vital that you maintain consistency of messaging in everything you do to stand out.
Tags: Best Practice, ninemsn, Online Marketing, Online Reputation
Posted on August 1st, 2009 at 12:14 am
A concern for me about the above examples is how the sanctity of the content that attracted the reader in the first place is so cynically ignored.
The reason the person is at that webpage is because they were attracted by the story, not by the ads
Ninemsn runs a significant risk of damaging its own brand, as well as that of its advertisers, is it blindly chases ad dollars at the expense of its broader proposition.
Like the new site Ben, very tidy.