(Fair warning – this is a pet peeve of mine. And it happened again yesterday.)
I was scrolling through my Facebook feed yesterday morning, when an article about using your own images in your marketing caught my attention. I clicked through to the article and read it – and it was good! Great tips, great writing…really nice.
At the bottom of the post was the option to download a PDF with even more tips (btw – that’s what we call a content upgrade), so I happily entered my name and email address.
Then I was taken to the download page where I found a clickable link to download my very own copy of the Ultimate Branding Photoshoot Guide. Heck yeah! I’ll download and use that, for sure!
So far, so good.
So I right-click to download it and this is what I see:
Do you see that bleepity-bleep-bleep filename?!?!! FinalUploadableGuideMay??? Seriously?? Like, that has what to do with what in my world?
Don’t do this to your subscribers!!!
Name your digital assets something relative to what it is from the perspective of the people you serve!!! This file should have been named:
UltimateBrandingPhotoshootGuide.pdf
Or even better:
BrandingPhotoshootGuide-May2017.pdf
Could I have changed this filename before I saved it? Oh sure – and I did. But what would have happened had I been in a big hurry and clicked Save before I noticed it?
Would I ever have been able to find it again later?
When going to look for it, I’d have been looking for (and never finding) something in my Documents folder called Ultimate Branding Photoshoot Guide (because that’s what it’s called in the article AND in the optin copy), NOT Final Uploadable Guide May!
More importantly, I went from being all impressed and excited about receiving this information to unimpressed and irritated. Yes, over something as simple as a filename created from the wrong perspective.
This is the kind of avoidable mistake we marketers make all the time. Keyword: AVOIDABLE.
Slow down, folks…the devil is in the details. And the details matter.
(Note: If you ever download anything from me that has a meaningless filename, PLEASE email me about it. And I give you permission to chew me out, too. ? )
