When you deliver an advertising message to a group of prospects, you have a short period of time to convince that prospect to take action — pick up the phone, log onto a web site, or walk into a store. If they take the action and don’t get what you promised them, you’ve lost the opportunity to build a business relationship.

Today, I caught a hole in a client’s sales funnel — a disconnect in the call-to-action.

This new client is starting an advertising campaign on several radio stations, including mine on Monday. I wasn’t involved in creating the campaign; a competitor is doing that. The commercial we received on Friday afternoon drives prospects to a web site, with the ultimate goal of getting those prospects to attend an Open House.

Unfortunately, the information about the Open House wasn’t on the home page when I looked at it this morning. It was on another page on the site, but anyone coming to the site would have no way of knowing that. The danger, of course, was that even if the radio commercial “worked” — by getting people to log onto the site — it wouldn’t WORK unless looking at the site caused people to come to the Open House.

Prospects would have entered the sales funnel, and fallen out before buying.

The good news is that somebody did a little advance legwork, caught the disconnect, and notified the client. The client immediately made arrangements to fix the website, and all will be ready when the radio starts on Monday.

I’ll end with a little sales pitch: this is just one of the subjects covered in my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them, which you can still get at no charge by clicking here.

So, click here, already.

________________________________________________________________________

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.