Evan Carmichael reviews a catering website and finds branding problems: poor color contrast, broken links, and no emotional punch. His fix: pick one word that defines your business, then make every customer touchpoint feel that word. It simplifies decisions and makes people want to tell their friends.
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Hey, welcome to another Technology Tuesday. Today I'm going to be reviewing a website from one of my newsletter readers, Gaurav. He asked me to check out his website, takatakfoods.co.uk, so I'm going to give him my thoughts and hopefully help him improve. So this is the website when I load it, and it's takatakfoods.co.uk, and the first thing I see is, you know what, I like the clean layout, I like the clean design, the template, that's awesome. What I want you to do when I come to your website is give me a clear understanding of the values that you stand for. Okay, so you have this here, "For busy mobile people whose time is at a premium but desire freshly prepared food cooked in a homely style." Okay, first of all, it's a little bit hard to read, you know, the red on the black, it's hard to— you're forcing my eye to actually read this. But there's a lot of different things you're talking about here. So mobile people, time is at a premium, freshly prepared food, homely style, a lot of different messaging. I like how clean the website is and the simple page. You have an order and catering, but it's not making me feel anything yet. I come here, universe— the universe can take a while to deliver, we don't. So you're emphasizing the service. And then choose from a wide variety offered by our menus, spoiled for choice. I'm not sure spoilt is actually a word. Maybe it is in London, or maybe I am just ignorant, but I would think it's spoiled. Anyway, again, hard to read, right? Like, you're forcing me to read this. The font is not great. The coloring could be better, but it looks nice, but it's not memorable. That's the problem. So what I need you to do is find your one word. Find the one word that defines who you are as a person, who defines your business. So maybe after looking at all this, it's something like service. Maybe you really believe in your core that service is important. Service to your customers, service to your family, service to your country, service. And I'm just taking that as an example. If that's your word, then across everything should be service. I should feel service. If I go to— let's look at your Facebook. Oops, let's look at your Facebook. Why can't I click on the Facebook? Okay, let's look at your Twitter. Twitter is not working. Okay, well, I can't check these out, so we gotta fix that. But regardless, whenever I go to any of your marketing materials, that should come out. So number 1 is find your one word. Number 2 is then make me feel your business. Make me feel it. So I'll come to your site and and it should embody service. And if I love service, I should be head over heels, I gotta call this company up right away. 'Cause now, you kind of look like everybody else, right? Anybody who does this, anybody who's a caterer, is gonna say the same thing, right? They all say the same thing. You get lots of selection, you know, it's fresh food, it's prepared in a homely style. Everybody says the exact same thing, so how are you different? That's the problem. I can't separate you from every other caterer out there. But if I come to your site and you show me service, you make me feel service, or whatever your keyword is, your one word, now you're standing out because you make me feel something, and that's what I want. I want to hit 10 different catering websites, and when I land on yours, I say, "Wow!" and I feel something important. And that should be across all your marketing. If I click on your Twitter or Facebook, I'm assuming these things actually have pages. Let's see, if I cover over this, it says twitter.com/takatakafo— let me try that. I think I saw your Twitter account. So I load it up, so there's no tweets. Okay, so if you have no tweets, you know, you don't want to be linking to this here with nothing, no content. But you're saying your catering company providing lunch meals to clients from the Canary Wharf area, we deal 'with specialized non-veg and veg Indian delicacies.' This is so boring. This is so boring. And again, now it's another message, right? Before you're talking about speedy delivery, home-cooked meals for busy people that's freshly made, and now you're talking about vegetarian, non-vegetarian, Canary Wharf. It's so many things to remember that I don't remember anything. So make it easy for me, okay? I want to feel your business as soon as I hit your website, and as soon as I hit any piece of content that you put out, I want to feel something. And the third thing is we want to apply this to everything that you do. So number 1 is find your one word. Number 2, make me feel your business. And 3, apply to everything that you do. So service, if that's your word, you need to apply to everything, right? It's not just your marketing. It's when I call you up. Do I get good service? You know, when somebody drops off the food, do I feel like they really service me? Again, whatever your one word is, you need to apply it. But you need to live and breathe your one word, and it should be important to you because this is who you are. When you find that one word, it does a couple of things. One, it makes it easier to make decisions. Right, if your word is service, then it's easy to make a decision on, you know, who to hire what products to introduce, what markets to go into, because it all comes down to service. If you are bringing on somebody who, you know, maybe, you know, may show up on time and, you know, maybe able to do the job really well but doesn't like providing great service, this should be a no-brainer, right? That guy is not a fit for you. So it makes decisions easier. It also makes it easier for you to stay motivated, right? Like, if you really believe the world needs better service and you're on a mission to make the world better in that way, in your own small way, it makes it easy to get up and stay motivated. If you're just getting up trying to make a few extra dollars, it's going to be hard to stay motivated. It's going to be hard to keep going. You have to feel like you're doing something important. That's what we crave as people, is to do something important. And 3, and most important, most relevant to your question, is it makes it easy for people to talk about you. What am I going to say about you? You've given me like 8 different messages here and I don't remember any of them. But if you give me one simple message that embodies everything that you do and a value that you believe to your core and that moves people, then it makes it easy for me to talk about you. Say, "You gotta go to Takatak Foods. These guys get service." That's easy to say. That's easy to spread the word. So you're giving your customers a tool. You're arming them to go out and spread the word for you because you've made it easy for them to do it. Right now I wouldn't know what to say. So you've got a great, you know, design, but if you can follow those strategies— number 1, find your one word; number 2, make people feel your business; and number 3, apply to everything that you do— you have a lot more success. Believe. For those of you watching, you like this video, you can subscribe to the channel to see more just like this. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
