Always include critical details when writing promotions

What is the point of promoting something without explaining how to get it?

Due to my connection with Love Santa, I keep an eye on Christmas news around the world. Recently, I went to a site to read about some Christmas movies coming up – it mentioned things like Home Alone and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (one of which is debated to its place as a Christmas movie every year!) This is a news type site with a section on entertainment – it was Australian but I hadn’t been there before.

What struck me though was the lack of basic and  critical details. Paraphrasing, the article said “SuperChannel {made up name!} is starting some Christmas movies in November and here’s their full schedule”‘ then listed all the movies for November.

The article had some links to other pages on the site about types of movies and so on, but no link to SuperChannel.

Personally, I have never heard of SuperChannel so I’m pretty confident it’s not a free to air TV channel. So how do I see movies they play? It is within a subscription to an on-demand service? Or maybe its an online channel of some sort?

Write it, don’t assume!

When writing, for pleasure as well as business really, make sure you give necessary information rather than assume people know it. Even when you know the audience well, be careful to not miss important details.

From the article I mentioned above, I can now tell you when Home Alone will be showing. I have no idea how to find it and watch it, so knowing the timetable is fairly useless. Maybe the writer or site assumes ‘our site members knows SuperChannel’ but what about new members or people coming across the article (as I did) for the first time? What about the members who know the name but can’t recall access details?

Even if your audience does know the basics, where/how to access something you are promoting is critical information to include.