At a recent Interactive Marketing Summit conference held in St. Louis, I attended a session on SEO.  Of the many topics discussed, one of the basics is the Page Title of any web page.  The presenters stressed the importance of having unique Page Titles for each page on the site and that the title contain key words - not the company name - although the company name could be included at the end of the Page Title.  This is important because search engine robots read and index, at least in part, web pages starting with the Page Title and they look for key words or relevant terms.  Company names are not generally searched by people.  So, if the Page Title begins with the company name, it will not index well.  Again, this is basic but, it triggered a thought.

If you pick up any paper or directory (Yellow Pages) you’ll find that most ads will have the company name in a prominent position at the top of the ad.  In fact, many ads devote 20% to 30% of the space of the ad to the company name.  This is a mistake, just like having the company name dominate the Page Title of a web page.  People searching for anything generally will search based on specific context, such as “interactive marketing” or, “Plumbers” (just for fun, look up “Plumbers” in the Yellow Pages - you’ll see   mean about company name dominating).

The lesson here is whether you’re promoting your business online or offline, or both, begin the ad (or web page) with something relevant to the reader. And, the more relevance to the emotions of the reader, the more likely you’ll grab their attention.  After all, if you don’t grab their attention at the beginning, you’ll likely never get them to read the rest of the ad. This could waste a lot of money.  This concept applies to most all marketing material -not just ads.

Then, once you get their attention, then…well… maybe that’s a subject of another article.

The recent political debates and on-going campaign speeches have similar themes; and each party has taken similar positions.  Yet, both parties stress how different they each are.  Obviously, there are some clear differences, yet, many are subtle - at least as far as what can be understood from the media.  Perhaps that’s why the polls are fairly even (depending on your source).  But, one thing I notice is that all the rhetoric boils down to “sound bites”.

This causes me to think about communications, in general, and about message retention levels.  I’m sure everyone reading this understands that only a fraction of what we read, watch or listen to is retained (and the older I get, the lower the fraction!).  In business, marketing and advertising messages face the same challenge as the candidates face getting their message across.

The latest research claims that we are exposed to between 3000 and 3500 marketing or advertising messages a day!  Currently, many of these messages can be attributed to the current political environment - we can’t get away from them.  Campaigns are spending tens of millions trying to get their message across.  This is an excessive demand for our attention.  Just as with marketing and advertising, we’ll likely respond only to those messages that reach an emotional cord within us.

What can we learn from this?  At a minimum, unless we have a lot of money for advertising our message repeatedly, which is unaffordable for the majority of businesses, it is extremely difficult to get your message to stick.  We can also learn that our communications must resonate with our audience emotionally and be different than our competitors.  This isn’t easy to do.  I believe it’s why most advertising under performs.  Not enough time is devoted to truly developing compelling content for marketing.  Many that advertise are looking for immediate results and do not systematically test their messages like a political campaign would.

I welcome comments or examples of successful attempts at developing compelling, unique messages - and, I’d be just as interested in what other marketing lessons we can learn from the political campaigns.