Think revenue in upper right corner, lost revenue bottom left, boredom bottom right, and apathy top left.
Posts Tagged ‘Microsite’
Good vs. Bad
Over the years we know only a handful of things to be true 99% of the time. One is that the more people empowered to make suggestions that “have” to be included in a website the worse that website becomes.
A good analogy and example of bad is your t.v. remote control. Just because it has room for 100 buttons doesn’t mean it has to have 100 buttons. Keep the message simple. Keep the site clean and navigable.
Think about a remote with 10 buttons. What would you keep and what would you throw away?
The Whole Enchilada
Branding agencies are good at what they do, packaged goods at what they do, marketing consultants at what they do, and interactive shops at what they do. So, why would a customer go to one agency for the whole enchilada, for everything.
A whole plate of enchiladas is not what the client is asking for today. They want Fajitas; they want the sizzle. With our customers’ best interests in mind, let’s focus on complementing product and service solutions with something that gets seared into the minds of the consumers without bogging down the brand. We suggest micro-campaigns, because they are less expensive to execute, high impact, memorable, viral, sticky. But they are not permanent. As the life cycle of a marketing campaign shortens, so does the need to shorten the sales cycle.
In the crazy, mixed-up world that is marketing and advertising today there appears to be a trend that has fractured the idea and execution of marketing campaigns across all media. Once you have a brand the need for marketing support evaporates. Companies bring maintenance of the brand in-house and the agency loses. Once you build a website with a CMS the need for design and development services dwindles. I could go on, but you get it.
Down economies only increase a company’s desire to keep money in-house by sacrificing good-to-great advertising for good-enough advertising. And so the advertising industry finds itself in a period of transformation. As an agency we can’t put a retainer in front of a customer, because they don’t want to sign an annual contract and won’t. They want point solutions and better control of their budgets, which is fine with us.
The agency of the future, which we like to think we are, should prepare itself for this new customer/agency relationship. When your customer can take a power point presentation, convert it to Flash, add voice over and click “Go”, it’s time to think about your business model. Self-serve marketing has arrived. The question for our agency becomes, “How do I empower my customer?”, not “How do I trap them into a longer-term contract?”
Microsites with SEO Side Effects
Microsites afford the opportunity to separate and liven you messaging. As an added bonus microsites can actually boost SEO for your corporate site by delivering inbound links in greater numbers. Search engines baulk at digging too deep into a corporate website. Search engines deliver a variety of sites that correlate to your keywords in results to be fair to others. With microsites you can get your name out there by delivering enough variety to boost placement. It’s a pretty cool use of interactive media that often goes overlooked.
We, of course, would like to see interactive microsites used as a tactical component of a larger marketing campaign. Microsites need to be destinations and they need to be animated. There is a difference between a microsite and a landing page. Landing pages are like one-page corporate websites. Microsites tell stories and bring your brand to life. With more and more eyeballs focused on web browsers it might be time to consider adding microsites to your marketing mix.