Where’s Your Strategy?

While perusing this month’s Women’s Focus Magazine, I ran across a large QR code. As a fan of this emerging marketing/information tool, I took a second look at the ad — the only other information was a URL: advertisingdoesnotwork4.me. Now, I was doubly interested.

So, I pulled out my phone, scanned the code and visited the website. Upon arrival, I was greeted by a large headline and block of copy. Initially interested more in who was responsible than what they were promoting, I scanned the page for who was behind the ad and site and discovered a logo at the bottom that said “COLAB.”

I’m not one to bash my peers — it’s not easy starting a new business and there are plenty of people in the advertising industry who are brutal to their competitors. But, while reading through this site, looking at their ad and trying to figure out exactly who they are and what they’re offering, I was struck by the lack of strategy this new digital marketing company is displaying and felt compelled to write this post.

My comments below are just my opinion — I would love for the founders of the group to weigh in and share their side of the story and plans for where this new entity is going.

A Digital Agency Should Be Digital
If you’re going to be a digital marketing company, you should be doing digital marketing for your company. I’m pretty plugged into the digital arena here in Wichita, and I haven’t heard a peep from this group — my first encounter with them was in a small, print publication with a traditional ad. Secondly, having a URL like “AdvertisingDoesntWork4Me” while advertising in a traditional publication seems to send mixed messages. I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to communicate with the URL, but I assume (always dangerous) that they’re implying that digital tools are more effective than traditional advertising. If that’s true, why use traditional advertising? Maybe, they’re going to do a case study on how many hits they generated to their site via their Women’s Focus ad versus a strategic PPC campaign. (Note: Colab, if you weren’t already planning on doing that, feel free to take the idea.)

Have A Customer (Or Non-Industry Individual) Read Your Copy
When writing copy, one of the fundamental questions you ask yourself is “What do I want the people reading this to think/know/feel/believe/do?” When writing copy for your homepage, that question is absolutely critical. But when your homepage is the only page of your website — the sum of your existence as far as potential customers are concerned — the words are priceless. Reading through this copy, it’s not clear what they do, how they do it or, as we’ll examine in the next point, why I should choose them to do it for me. Additionally, there are some grammatical and punctuation concerns that should be cleaned up before going live. Again, one or two across a whole website might be forgivable (please don’t pour through my site — or even this blog post — to find all of my grammatical mistakes), but when one paragraph is all that you have, make sure that one paragraph is clean and correct.

Saying You’re Different Isn’t Different
Differentiate or die. There is far too much competition to talk, act or be like everyone else. But you can’t just claim to be different — there has to be substance behind your words. Something that really helps you stand apart and makes you unique. For me, it’s my focus on brand stories and a Noded-approach. No, it’s not radical. But it is unique to this market and helps me claim a space that no one else occupies. Colab’s point of differentiation? They offer the “peace-of-mind that comes from ‘knowing that you know your digital marketing dollars are working for you” and their process is “Goals. Measurement. Analysis.” To be fair, i don’t actually know what activities are involved in their execution of that process, but as this is all the information we have, it’s not a very unique approach to digital marketing (or, for that matter, traditional advertising).

The Future of Colab
I have no idea what the future holds for Colab. But I look forward to seeing where they go and how they go there.

To the founders of Colab: As I said before, I’d love to hear from any of you. You can leave a comment below, or feel free to shoot me an email. If there’s more to Colab on the way, be sure to let me know — I’ll gladly do a follow-up/correction/retraction post.