Content Marketing Today

Both Bad and Beautiful–an eBrochure Gone Wrong

Award-winning print marketing materials may fail completely when translated online.

Churchill Corporate Services provides a broad range of rental, relocation, and disaster housing services both for corporations and individuals. 

They have a corporate website and several micro-sites that are dedicated to specific business divisions.  Collectively, these sites provide a pretty comprehensive look at what the company does and how they can benefit their customers.

Before I had ever looked at their websites, I was alerted to an online brochure.  The print version of the eBrochure had actually won a second-place New Jersey award in 2005 for a direct marketing mail package.  Unfortunately, what worked well in print works poorly online.

Intrigued by an e-mail that I received, I clicked on the link and went to this online piece.  In my browser window I could see a cover image with the headline “Feel at home.”  To the right of the cover image are tabs that relate to specific corporate services.  When you click on each tab you are taken to a new image accompanied by a short and relatively meaningless headline.  These include:

• get comfortable
• make the right move
• at home anywhere
• take it easy
• peace of mind

Each headline matches up to a specific service such as disaster housing or rental management. But that’s all I could find. What mystified me was that there was no visible content beyond the section tabs and the brief headlines. 

When I came back later figuring there must be something more, I realized that by playing around in my browser and reducing the size of the image, there was a way to flip to a second set of pages that actually contain content. 

Since I had been using the Opera browser, I thought that might be the problem.  So I switched to Internet Explorer. But when I used the link, I wound up at a page that said I was now at the home of the corporate brochure.  I was warned that I might have to download the Adobe flash plug-in–and also faced a daunting Flash player version test.  Yikes! 

Of course, that was just the first step.  I then had to click to open the brochure.  Unfortunately the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer prevented that opening. Then I gave up because it was too much hard work.  Just imagine if I had been a real customer, I probably would’ve given up long before.

The big missed opportunity for effective online content marketing

The Churchill Corporate Services’ series of websites contain a lot of information, but  are a bit cluttered and require more work than necessary to navigate. They would certainly benefit from more polished graphical and navigation rework. 

If the company had used the elegance of the eBrochure look and feel as the theme for their website, it might well have constituted an effective and attractive introduction to their range of services.

Instead, they translated an undoubtably effective print marketing piece into an eBrochure which you cannot find on any of their websites–unless you know its address in advance.  And, as demonstrated, depending on your browser and your pop-up blocker you may never get to read the brochure at all.

Effective content marketing integrates relevant content and relevant design.  Equally important, your content must be easy to find and easy to access.  Today, nobody is going to take the time to search out an eBrochure let alone trying to figure out how to extract hard-to-find information.

For Churchill, this means that what worked in print just doesn’t work online. I’m quite sure they provide excellent services.  But, in this case, a misapplication of content marketing has failed them. What was award-winning in print sure doesn’t win any awards online for content marketing excellence.