Focusing Your Message
I had an interesting experience recently. I was working with a company who, amongst other problems, had a pretty miserable web presence. They had a lot of images, some flash, and a really inconsistent message.
We were working through some ideas about what their web presence should look like, but their ideas were almost all visual. They weren’t thinking about the message at all. After a few rounds of talking about it, thinking about it, we eventually settled on starting with writing an AboutUs page about their company.
Once they started focusing on writing a single page document describing everything they wanted someone to know about the company. This worked fantastically. After a day or two, they were able to come up with a really great, really focused message that really presented the company in a great light.
We updated AboutUs, then we rolled the new update into a series of pages in a Wordpress blog and pretty soon they had a great web presence with a highly focused marketing message.
Why weren’t they able to focus the message when thinking about the website.
- They were thinking in terms of what they had, AboutUs was completely new to them, so they had to start with a blank sheet of paper.
- Using a Wiki format, they stopped thinking visually and started thinking about what they wanted to say.
The sections of the website aren’t very long. I imagine some would criticize this, but I will take a focused, succinct message any day. Plus, it’s all above the fold!
For the record, the categories we used were:
- Company
- History
- Products (with several sub-categories)
- Culture
- News
- Contact
Imagine if you completely re-thought your marketing message and wrote a document that described those six categories. How much are you saying today that is boring people or driving them away?
What if you didn’t just do this for the external message you company presents, but what if you did this for your department or yourself?