The triangle of combustion: why websites aren’t advertising

Ask any Boy Scout how to start a fire. He’ll tell you it’s a triangle: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Get enough of all three and you get a fire.

There’s a triangle of combustion like that in advertising: message, delivery, and engagement. Getting that triangle right will light a fire under your sales. Message is fuel, delivery is oxygen, and engagement generates heat. Ignition comes at the moment of conversion, when a visitor becomes a customer.

What a website isn’t

You may have a smokin’ hot website. But, your website isn’t advertising. Advertising is intrusive. Advertising intercepts your customers, catches their attention, arouses curiosity, speaks to their desires. Your site doesn’t start that fire. It feeds it.

Yes, your message lives on your site. Yes, your site engages customers. But, you can’t optimize a fire that hasn’t started. That takes advertising.

If your site carries through on the advertising message but isn’t producing, look beyond the site. Look at the advertising itself. A website can’t catch someone’s attention from the side of the road. It’s not going to pop up on the 10pm news. It’s doesn’t ride along in the car.

Optimize with advertising

I ran a campaign for a retail client recently that proved the strength of these three legs. Even though we’d just relaunched their website, not one dime went toward ad words or paid search. Instead, we advertised: tv, radio, banner ads on newspaper and local TV station websites.

But, I left something out. The ads didn’t include their phone number, address or website. Instead, they said, “you can find us.” Upon hearing “you can find us,” people understood that meant, “Google us.”

How did it work?  Traffic went up 13x. Record setting sales weekends—for the tenth year in a row.

Metrics measure combustion

Your website’s metrics have a seductive quality. Tracking visits, page views, bounces is fascinating stuff. It’s also distracting.

Properly applied, metrics measure how well site visitors become customers. They indicate when your triangle generates sales combustion.
What metrics don’t measure is advertising effectiveness. Using web metrics to measure advertising effectiveness is like calculating sales by counting cars in the parking lot.

Help customers connect

Stoking a fire means making it easy for customers to connect the legs of your triangle:

• Message: Does yours articulate the customer’s felt need?
• Delivery: Do you reach out and touch new customers with that message?
• Engagement: Is there a clear destination for the message on your site?

Remember, every tool has its purpose as does each leg of the triangle. Expecting one part to do another leg’s job weakens all three. Giving each appropriate attention will put you on the path to the warm fire of optimized advertising.