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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> to fill it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This is because, what works for your competitor may not always work for you!<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If it ends up having a broken link, you instantly lose credibility and goodwill. And yes, business.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Have you come across ads with problems such as broken links? Share with us what you learnt from them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAre you being more careful about your ads? <\/strong><\/h2>\n
Do you keep your promises?<\/strong><\/h2>\n