Content Marketing Today

Really Bad Online Marketing Concept: Refuse to Tell Your Visitors How You Can Help Them Solve Their Problems

Here’s a quick three question quiz.

Give the home page of this website a 10 second review (no cheating–you can’t look at any interior pages). Then answer the following questions:

1. Who are their target customers?
2. What product or service are they selling?
3. How can those products or services solve customer problems?

Here’s the best I could do:

1. Somebody in public transit
2. Some kind of technology relating to transit operations management
3. I have no idea.

Actually, I was probably cheating because I spent more time looking at the site before I decided to write this post.  So I might not have picked up both one and two in a quick look at the site. 

What’s wrong here?

The Avail Technologies, Inc. website is almost completely focused on the company and the idea that it is “integrating the latest technologies for public transit with old-fashioned values.”  If we read that, we have an idea that they are involved with technology but we don’t really know how that technology solves critical problems or provides must-have solutions for its customers.

In fact, the four photos near the top of the home page add very little in terms of a visual metaphor that would illustrate what they do or why I, as a prospective customer, should care. 

The only other image on the homepage is a map of the United States, which is mostly blue with a smattering of red states. The caption that accompanies the map (and no, it has nothing to do with John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton) says, “here’s what we have done…” What the heck does that mean?

But wait it gets better: here’s the mission statement that is, for better or worse, buried in an interior page:

To consistently go the extra mile in meeting our customer’s needs while maintaining a family oriented organization of highly motivated, transit-knowledgeable people committed to the advancement of our industry, our company, and our employees.

That still doesn’t tell us anything. It might well have come from the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. 

They actually do explain how they can help their customer.  But the information is hidden away in the solutions basement.

If you are blessed with infinite patience, you can dig four paragraphs down on the About Us page to find the following clue:

“Behind the scenes at Avail is a staff with more than 300 years of combined experience of working with transit professionals throughout North America and the world, to design, develop and adopt technology solutions, which provide the features and benefits that improve daily operations.”

Aha!  Now I get it.  They help transit operators improve their daily operations–and, by the way, it turns out that they work with those who have less than 250 vehicles.  That key fact is hidden away, too.

Avail Technologies probably spent a lot of money on this website.  Unfortunately that money is largely wasted because they buried the customer benefit deep inside the site.  They are so enamored with their “old-fashioned value” approach that they forget the most old-fashioned value of all as it applies to online marketing: explain up front and obviously how you can solve the problems that are most important to the customer demographic you are targeting.

When you dig far enough, you realize that they do understand who their customer is and how they can help them.  Unfortunately have decided to save that information for those who truly persevere and drill a few pages and many paragraphs down on an internal page.

A big secret to online success: Don’t keep what you sell, who you serve, and how you can help a deep dark secret!  Say it loud and say it proud!