Content Marketing Today

3 Horrendous Mistakes Universal McCann Makes on its Website

Let’s hope they didn’t pay a lot of money for this disaster.

After waiting 15 seconds on a high-speed connection, this is the meaningless page that stares out at us. If you didn’t already know what Universal McCann did, you would still be clueless after staring at this page. And, if you were in a hurry, you would have moved right on by.

The good news is that this advertising giant proves once again that big budgets and big egos don’t add up to an effective web presence. In fact, you can and should do a lot better even as very small company.

Money doesn’t generate customer-centric content marketing. Thoughtful concern for your customers and their problems are the key to successful marketing strategies. That concern, expressed creatively as compelling content will achieve measurable results. For that, you may need big ideas, but you don’t need a big budget.

The net effect of Universal McCann’s website is to imply to prospective clients that your messaging should be hard to find, take a long time to display, contain huge segments of unbroken, cliche-ridden text, and be all about the client rather than their customers. In fact, it’s so bad, that you almost think it was done as a parody of really, really bad websites. Sadly, we know that’s not true. Yikes!

Here’s where they went very wrong and how you can avoid the same traps.

1. They don’t tell you quickly and clearly how they can help you with your marketing challenges. In fact, they tell you nothing. Universal McCann assumes that web visitors have lots of time on their hands to wait for a carefully multicultural, but completely meaningless image to appear on their splash page.They offer absolutely no indication of what they do or why you should care. It’s the ultimate ego trip. They assume that you should be well aware of how wonderful they are. Perhaps, the splash page images are culled from some of their creative, but I have no idea. I’m just guessing. And, as a marketer in a hurry to find solutions, I wouldn’t have taken the time to make that conjecture. They lost me from hello.
2. Their first content page is incredibly drab, boring, cliche-ridden, and self-centered. The copy is so bad that it might have been created by a cliche-o-tron. Here’s a sample:The proliferation and influence on communication channels is the most dynamic variable in driving consumer change. Big ideas are increasingly contact-driven and it takes a world-class contact expert to find new ways to connect to consumers and convert them into customers. Increasingly the role of ‘Media Agency’ is multi faceted. Being a good practitioner of media is no longer enough. Universal McCann’s purpose is to deliver sustainable communications advantage through engagement innovation and accountable creativity. We do this best by adopting a model of interdependence.
   
   Huh? After reading through this and two more paragraphs of gobbledygook, I would have no way of differentiating them from dozens of other practitioners of the magic art of advertising and communications. They do mention they ‘find new ways to connect with consumers and convert them into customers’ with what they call ‘accountable creativity,’ but they fail to say how that works or how its different from the other guys. That failure doesn’t give much confidence in their actual ‘accountable creativity.’

   Once again, as a busy marketer, I would probably take one look at this mass of text and hightail it somewhere else in search of solutions. They fail to provide a single example of their successful campaigns–and they surely must have some.

   They then go on with FAQS that are answers to questions that marketers in search of solutions probably wouldn’t have: how big they are, who their executives are, and links to related entities that don’t explain what those entities do. They do offer their client list which is helpful but premature.

3. They bury their creative several layers deep. If you have slogged through the meaningless splash page and tried to extract meaning from the cliche-heavy real home page, you do arrive at a page that shows some creative work. And, it probably also proves that sex sells in their XBox 360 campaign.Here they again say that they provide ‘ideas not for ideas sake, but ideas that can be measured.’ OK, but how do you measure the ideas? They don’t explain the nature of the campaign, what’s its measurable objectives were or what the ROI was. Again, they leave it up to us to guess. They could have provided meaningful case studies that would prove to marketers who are potential clients why they should trust their marketing dollars to Universal McCann. That’s all missing.

We can bet that Universal McCann did spend a lot of money on this website. But, it’s all about them. It’s not about the client. Even worse, they do a terrible job of interesting marketers in their company, their services, and their solutions.

Here’s how you can do much better for much less.

What we know for sure is that you have talented web professionals in your markets who can create a much better site within your budget range. It’s not about the money. To create a successful web presence, you simply need to do the opposite of what these big-time ad guys did. Here are the key elements to bringing your content marketing strategy to the web:

1. Don’t use a splash page. It takes too much time to load and will make your site harder to find via search engines.
2. Don’t make your visitors wait to learn how you can help them. Make it clear on your home page what you do that will solve the problems of your target buyers.
3. Make sure that the graphical elements you show are actually relevant to the content on your site. Don’t put a nice looking but meaningless montage like Universal McCann’s front and center.
4. Provide helpful, relevant, and compelling content. Demonstrate your expertise. Share great ideas with your visitors.
5. If you have achieved successful results for you clients, don’t be shy. Talk about them in concrete terms. It doesn’t matter whether you are an ad agency or a garage door company. If you have great success stories to tell, share them.
6. Make sure that your site is all about your customers not about you.
7. Don’t bury the most important content several layers down.
8. Use some form of content management system that enables you to keep your site current with content that continues to be relevant to your prospects. The world is changing fast. Don’t let your website content lag behind.

In the end, it’s all about providing great content that is easily accessible to your visitors. When you provide it, you will achieve measurable results. You will turn your visitors into customers.

To see simple, clear, and profitable content marketing at work, check out our article on how one small business owner uses his content-driven blog to build his business:

Simple Success Strategy for Small Smoothie Supplier Universal McCann could probably learn a few lessons from this blog.