Craptastic Marketing: Don’t Make This Dumb Mistake!

Today’s craptastic marketing move: creating mistrust through dumb mistakes.

First, my confession: I am a link clicker.  

Show me a link and my clicking obsession catches fire.  This used to be a real problem for me in the early days of the internet when I caught more viruses than an 19th century prostitute.  Through years of pain (and good virus protection) I’ve cleaned up my act quite a bit.

So how does this connect to dumb marketing mistakes?

Picture this: you’ve spent time and money to build this online presence with your shiny new website. “I’m a for real business person, yay me!” 

• All good so far.  Then it happens.
• A possible customer shows up and clicks on a video link and nothing.
• They click on a free report download after filling out a contact form and nothing. 

They are on your business page on Facebook and they click on your link to your website and nothing.  

Broken links.  What the hell!

You have literally seconds to make a great first impression and already you’ve proven yourself to be unreliable.  

Website FAIL.

Look, we all miss stuff like this.  I certainly have, especially with the massive amount of content we create.  Even though we double check, sometimes something slips through.

Luckily, our readers usually let us know…occasionally with hate mail calling us incompetent because of these “innocent” mistakes.  Yikes.

That first impression is the do or die moment.

It’s easy to avoid this mistake if you just take a moment to click on your links.  

A well known marketing guy in our industry (who shall remain nameless) had 2 out of 3 of his Facebook links go no where.  Seriously, physician heal thyself!

Anytime there is menu or link associated with your business, it is a promise of something more.   They click and they should get what’s described.  If they don’t, it’s a strike against you.

Setting expectations and then actually delivering is critical in your marketing.  Especially in this early stage of the courtship between you and the possible client.

We all know that weddings can be a high wire act.  Big money mixed with big emotions means drama is only one broken link away.
So why not avoid this dumb mistake once and for all?

HOMEWORK: Create a checklist to use before you publish a new page online.

Links working.  Check.

Keywords. Check.

Permission to use pic.  Check.

Etc.

Pilots go through a checklist every time before take off for a good reason.  Save yourself from crashing and burning by creating your own.

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