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I hope your weekend went a whole lot better than mine did. No one in their right mind would want to spend any time ... and especially not the weekend ... sitting in the intensive care unit of the local hospital with a desperately ill relative but that's where Steve and I were this weekend.

Perhaps even worse than the hospital room itself was the waiting room where we had to wait while the very competent staff went about various procedures they needed to carry out. It was comfortable enough but it was not a place that did anything for me except make me want to leave.

The right message in the right place
The walls were decorated with lurid posters that described in great detail what could go wrong with your body if you didn't look after yourself. Was the waiting room in an intensive care unit the best place to try and get that message across?

I doubt it. Sure the message was important but was it effective? Is any important message seen in a place you are going to try hard to forget ever going to be effective?

Think about your own marketing messages and where you are placing them. Are they appearing in places that people will remember them? Are they even appearing in places where people will notice them?

Do they even deliver the right message to the people who will see them? Not only do you want people to see your message but you also want them to remember your message and be encouraged to buy whatever it is that you're selling because they feel good about your message.

Distractions
One of the worst aspects for me of that intensive care waiting room was the clock. In this day and age, when it's quite possible to have clocks that don't make a noise as the seconds, minutes and hours pass, to have to sit in a room with a clock that ticked loudly was torture.

Not far away a loved one fought for their life while we had that life, and ours too, measured for us with every single tick of that damn clock. It intruded on our thoughts, it intruded on our conversation and it was always there in our consciousness distracting us and annoying us.

How often do you distract the people you are trying to sell too instead of capturing their attention and encouraging them to buy from you?

Sure we don't have a ticking clock on our websites ... at least I sure hope you don't ... but lots of you like to use blinking banners and text wherever you can. Perhaps you believe that they're going to attract the attention of surfers who are hitting your website and sometimes they do. But once you have their attention that blinking banner goes right on blinking and distracting them from the message you want them to absorb. It's a bit like that ticking clock that annoyed us and distracted us so much ... instead of making a sale once you have their attention the blinking banner or text goes on blinking and annoying them to the point where they just have to escape from it.

Benefits not features
In a desperate effort to escape from those lurid posters and that damn ticking clock ... that I can still hear inside my head ... I picked up a leaflet that was on the table in waiting room. That leaflet advertised a nearby motel and that was fine. I'm quite sure that a lot of people from out of town find that themselves in that waiting room ... and they may well need to find some accommodation in town so having some advertising in a place like that was good.

But the advertising failed miserably ... even the lurid advertising on the walls was more effective ... simply because the advertising in the leaflet stressed the features of the motel and not the benefits the motel offered its guests.

The motel was less than five minutes from the hospital and was the closest motel by miles. The motel was located in a peaceful setting where people could come to terms with what was suddenly happening in their lives ... but none of those benefits were mentioned. Instead the advertising talked about the features and at times when people are in crisis who cares about a swimming pool?

So what does your advertising or marketing message concentrate on? Do you talk about how wonderful the product is that you're advertising or do you focus the surfer on what your product will do for them?

They were all lessons I didn't particularly want to learn ... or have reinforced this weekend ... but they're definitely important for you to remember. And for us the crisis is just about over now ... the staff at the hospital worked an absolute miracle and our loved one may be home by the end of the week but there was a time when no one, not even the hospital staff, thought there was any chance of survival.

Unless you want your family to face what we went through give up smoking right now ... don't finish the packet ... don't have one last cigarette ... give it up right now and give your lungs a chance to breathe!