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LinkedIn is no longer just another job-related social network. Used by all professionals across varying industries, it allows users to showcase their authority on certain subjects. As a result, they can ascertain their position as thought leaders. Pew reports that LinkedIn is used by 44% of Americans earning $75,000 or more. This comes to prove its high adoption among highly educated and high-income professionals. If you’re using LinkedIn, you should keep in mind that its biggest segment belongs to 35-44 year olds (22%) whereas 25-34 come second (21%) and 45-54 year olds come third (18%).
If you want to become a success on LinkedIn, i.e. win more customers, the following tips will definitely help.
Finding clients on LinkedIn is definitely harder than engaging them. However, don’t take this step lightly, especially since the following tips require a lot of your time and effort.
With your customers available through social media, you shouldn’t think twice before using this channel to get to them. So remember the information above to ensure your success both online and offline. We also wrote other tips on how to find customers on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.
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]]>The post How to Use These Effective Manufacturing Lead Generation Techniques appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>According to Cultivate Communications’ 2014 Benchmark Study on Marketing for Manufacturers, lead generation has become a top priority. However, what makes this change so notable is the fact that marketing manufacturers have decided to generate leads through inbound marketing rather than trade shows, printed directories and trade magazine ads. Inbound marketing allows companies to attract leads by providing helpful, educational and interesting information. Therefore, only those interested in your content and offering will give you their name and emails. As a result, the sale team won’t be wasting hours on dead-end leads (or complain about them!). Now, let’s dive into some effective manufacturing lead generation techniques.
If you’re planning a lead generation campaign using inbound marketing techniques, use the following six steps to guide your efforts.
A buyer persona is a profile of a fictional buyer but based on real-life data and characteristics that help you understand who your best buyer is and how they function. By developing this profile, you’ll be able to make your efforts more targeted. As a result, lead generation and customer retention will grow more effective. After all, you’ll be creating more targeted content and offers. To create a buyer persona, use the following questions:
(Read the Explanation of these Questions Here)
According to Cultivate Communications, manufacturing marketers use the following to generate leads:
You need to consider your buyer persona to determine which of these channels can help you generate maximum leads. For instance, if your target buyers are usually online, you can choose between email, social media, PPC and organic traffic. To further save your time and money, find which of these channels is most profitable and use it more often. For instance, CEOs aged 45+ are bound to rely more on email and organic traffic, so work on these channels to be visible through them.
Lead magnets are usually free offers which you provide to get potential clients’ email addresses. They make your prospects super excited, especially since they get ample value without paying for it. To develop a lead magnet for your brand, you can create a downloadable offer to convert traffic. Here are some options you can go for:
Choose the best lead magnet according to your persona. For example, CEOs and decision makers will prefer concise case studies since they showcase your brand and how it can solve issues similar to those they currently face. Next, create content they may be interested in. That way, you’ll get them to read what you’re offering until the very last line.
In addition to your lead magnet, you’ll need to have a landing page that incorporates the following suggestions:
Generate a buzz around your lead magnet by creating content around it. For instance, if your buyer persona is mainly online, you can have social media posts and blog posts explaining the value of your freebie and what others can expect from it. Even if your clients are offline, you can write about your offer in your trade show brochures. Just make sure to use graphics that stand out and content which can appeal to readers so that they can take note of your new addition.
With your offer and complementary content in hand, it’s time for you to start promote both and generating leads. While you can use trade shows’ brochures and ruffles for this, inbound marketing trumps every time. You can use the following three for this purpose.
Take a step back to determine which channels have ensures more conversions. Compare your results with the key performance indicators you established at the beginning of the campaign and tracked throughout. Based on your data, modify your campaign to ensure better results. Make sure to establish a plan for this process as well as a schedule. That way, you can hone your marketing techniques and ensure an edge over the competition.
With these steps, you’ll be able to increase the amount of leads and results of your sales and marketing teams. However, make sure to take into consideration othertips and guides to maximize the return on your efforts and ensure value for money.
Do you want to learn more how you can increase your sales and marketing results with inbound marketing? Download the guide below by clicking the image.
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]]>The post How to Attract the Ideal Customer in the Manufacturing Industry appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan couldn’t have been more accurate when they wrote: “By 2020, 60-70% of new car sales leads will be generated by a digital platform. Be it via websites, mobile sites, social media or apps.” It’s predictions like these that have pushed the manufacturing industry to embrace digital marketing and especially inbound marketing. Benefits such as connecting with more potential buyers, getting feedback or referrals easily, and lowering marketing costs further drove manufacturers to reconsider their marketing strategies. However, in addition to knowing what they’re selling, to attract the ideal customer marketers need to learn who they’re selling to.
Understanding your customers allows you to better craft your content. As a result, you can win their business and even ensure their loyalty to your brand. This is where buyer personas come in the picture. Through this tool, you can determine who your ideal customer is and target your marketing efforts at them. To develop a buyer persona, seek answers for the following questions:
After understanding who you’ll be targeting through your promotional messages, it’s time for you to start creating an inbound marketing strategy for your content. You can use the following steps to guide you on this aspect.
There’s more to content marketing for manufacturers than these five tips. However, they’ll definitely help you attract your clients once you successfully identify their personas.
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]]>Flaunting over 72.8 million users, Pinterest is quickly expanding its reach, claiming 47.1 million users in the U.S. Like Facebook, its top three demographics are 25-34 (26%), 35-44 (21%), and 45-54 (17%). Meanwhile, 18-24 year olds as well as 55-64 year olds equally make up 30% of the social network’s community. One thing worth mentioning here is that Pinterest is popular with women; 85% of the social network’s community comprises of females. As for industries, arts and crafts, travel, food and drink, fashion, music, and health and self-improvement tend to thrive on the social network. However, HubSpot recently added healthcare, manufacturing and engineering, education, software and IT, and insurance to this list.
Regardless of which industry you belong to, you can use the following to attract customers via Pinterest.
After finding your customers on Pinterest, use the following recommendations to keep them hooked to your brand.
Interested in learning new tips to nail your social media? Read our post.
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According to Twitter’s About Us page, the social network has 302 million monthly active users, of which 53.1 million are in the U.S. Like Facebook, Twitter has started aging with 22% of its users comprising of 25-35 year olds and 21% 35-44 year olds. However, 18-24 year olds come third at 19% followed by 45-54 at 18%. As for industries that succeed on Twitter, AllTwitter reports that retailers and restaurants are the most successful while engaging clients on Twitter whereas apparel brands need to work harder on their strategies. Now this doesn’t mean that your industry can’t make it; it just means that you should try harder.
In addition to sending a Twitter invitation to clients already in your database, consider the following tips to locate them on this social network.
To make sure that the customers you’ve gained through Twitter stay by your side, here are some tips to keep them engaged:
To know more about nurturing leads, I suggest downloading this guide.
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]]>The post How to Find Your Customers on Facebook appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>By April 2015, Facebook flaunted 1.44 billion monthly active users and 936 million daily active users. According to ComScore, the social network’s community mainly comprises of 24-34 year olds (22%) followed by 35-44 year olds (21%) and 45-54 year olds (18%). While these numbers show that Facebook has started maturing, the Social Media Examiner points out that B2C businesses are more likely to use Facebook groups and profiles than B2B ones.
Further confirming this is Social Bakers’ 2012 ‘Top 10 Facebook Industries by Engagement Rate’, which lists sport, retail, automobile, alcohol, airlines, services, telecom, fashion, news/media, and finance as the main industries benefiting from this social network. If you’re marketing a business that belongs in one of these industries, here are some valuable tips to find customers via Facebook and retain them.
If you’re not sure of how to reach to your prospects, here are some tips to start you off.
To engage your clients and ensure their loyalty, consider embracing the following practices.
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]]>The post Why a CRM and How It Will Improve Your Business appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>For as long as there have been businesses, there have been Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, though they might not always have been called that. Basically, anything that facilitates a relationship between a business and its customers – sales, marketing, service, adverting – is a CRM or part of one. But let’s dive into the big questios, why a CRM?
In the old days, CRMs might have been something as simple as an address book or a card file. The arrival of the spreadsheet was a great leap forward, but even today, despite countless improvements, it has its limitations. A spreadsheet package like Excel is handy for standalone functions such as telephone lists, but quickly becomes cumbersome when you try to integrate one function with another. A user faced with dozens of spreadsheets may be baffled as to which one to turn to for a particular piece of data. Worse still, getting one spreadsheet to populate another with data can be a nightmare. These problems are compounded when you have multiple users updating spreadsheets and copies of spreadsheets without any central control.
CRM systems overcome the limitations of spreadsheets by keeping data in a central depository and ensuring it is used and updated in a controlled manner.
BusinessDictionary.com defines a Customer Relationship Management system as:
A computerized system for identifying, targeting, acquiring, and retaining the best mix of customers.
Amongst other things, a good CRM system will help a business do some or all of the following:
At the heart of every CRM system lies a database containing information on customers and their interactions with the business. This information can be used by the business to tailor products and promotions according to the customers’ wants and needs. It can also offer insights into how to deal with each customer and what their worth to the business is and might be.
A Customer Relation Management System is not a Marketing Automation System
CRM is often confused with Marketing Automation. This is hardly surprising as the two systems have much in common and create a dynamic synergy when used in conjunction with each other.
Many CRM systems come with a so-called marketing module, however the functionality usually consists of little more than a bulk emailing tool. Marketing Automation software does a whole lot more. It enables businesses to market more effectively through online channels such as email, social media, blogs and websites and to automate repetitive tasks.
CRM systems and Marketing Automation systems both collect and manage customer data and use that data to trigger sales and marketing actions. The difference between the two is their approach. Whereas CRM is sales orientated, Marketing Automation puts the emphasis on online marketing.
Simplistically put, Marketing Automation is all about acquiring leads while CRM focuses on turning those leads into sales.
The Benefits of a CRM System
Without the use of CRM software, keeping track of customer dealings can be something of a nightmare.
Customer data comes to businesses from a plethora of sources such as telephone conversations, emails, social media and sales reports. This data does not always get to the marketers and salespeople who could use it to generate sales. Even if the right people do get their hands on it, they may not be able to make as much sense of it as they need to.
Salesmen are just that: salesmen. They’re not necessarily good administrators. They may have all sorts of valuable information on their laptops, in their Filofaxes or even written on scraps of paper.
All this leads to lost opportunities and disgruntled customers who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve.
A good CRM system:
Although no two CRMs are the same, they are all designed to do the same thing: to help businesses understand their contacts better and act on that understanding. The trick is to find the one that best suits your business. When doing so, never lose sight of the fact that CRM is more than just software; it is part of your company culture. CRM software is no substitute for salesmanship and service.
There are, of course, any number of factors to take into account when choosing a CRM system. Which matters most to a particular business is down to that business’s priorities when it comes to dealing with customers. That said, there are five factors which should nearly always be considered:
As well as the up-front costs, you should think about indirect costs such as running costs, system integration, software customisation and any additional hardware needed to run the system.
It is essential to understand how your business currently deals with Customer Relations and how a CRM system could emulate and improve upon it. Paying for features that are never used is a waste of money. Discovering after it’s been bought and paid for that your CRM doesn’t cover all the bases you need it to will cost time and money to fix. In a worst case scenario, you may have to scrap the CRM system and start all over again.
Going for a cloud-based CRM solution means you’re up and running in next to no time. It also cuts down on the amount of hardware you need to purchase. On the other hand, you may wish to keep the CRM in-house as this gives you greater scope to tailor the software to your needs.
The whole point of CRM software is to help you grow your business. It is therefore essential to have a system that will grow with it. You don’t want to find a few years down the line that your CRM system is no longer fit for purpose and you have to start all over again.
They say no-one ever got sacked for buying Microsoft. Can the same be said of whoever provides your CRM system? Before opting for a provider, check them and their software out on the Internet and in specialist magazines. You want to know that both provider and software are reliable. This really is a situation where Google is your friend.
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]]>The post Lead Scoring – Ranking Prospects to Ensure Effective Lead Nurturing appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>The behavior of today’s buyers has changed. Your prospects resort to online channels to research your offerings, find out about the best practices of your industry and skim through thought leadership, before making a purchase. To get them to pick your brand, you’ll need to engage them early in the buying process. However, engagement costs money; you need to be selective and pursue prospects that’ll prove to be profitable in the long run. This is where lead scoring comes into the picture.
Lead scoring, a methodology which both sales and marketing teams rely on, is used for ranking leads based on their readiness for sale. Basically, it’s a system that allows you to determine whether a lead is going to move to sales or if it requires more nurturing. You can assign points or letters to denote rankings, or use terms such as ‘hot’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’. However, to designate these ranks, marketers resort to two types of scoring: implicit lead scoring and explicit lead scoring. Both of these take into consideration behaviors and demographics, but in different ways.
Explicit lead scoring is based on information that is either observable or shared with you via online forms or during the registration process. For the demographics aspect of this scoring method, marketers consider demographic and firmographic attributes such as job title, company size and industry. As a result, they can determine how a prospect compares against their persona of an ideal buyer. As for behaviors, BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline) attributes are analyzed to assess sales readiness.
However, your prospects may not share this information right away, which is why you need to use implicit scoring as well. By definition, implicit scoring entails tracking your prospects’ behaviors to determine how interested they are in your products or solutions. For instance, opened emails, responses to offers and completed forms may be signs of your prospects’ readiness for a sales pitch. As for the demographics attributes, these include inferred geography, data quality factors, etc. collected via tools on your website.
According to HubSpot’s survey in 2013, 67% of marketers think that lead scoring plays a fundamental role when it comes to reaching their marketing goals.International marketers agree as well, with 75% of them considering lead scoring important, while 41% believe that lead scoring is of utmost importance. However, lead scoring wouldn’t have such a high approval rate, if it wasn’t for successful lead nurturing.
While lead nurturing and lead scoring aren’t necessarily dependent on one another, the surveys show that B2B businesses which implement both, have a higher rate of success when it comes to closing deals. Lead nurturing is a way to keep your potential buyers engaged, by delivering content which is sufficiently valuable and which matches their interest. Through the different marketing channels, you will be able to build a relationship with a lead, long before scoring, which will stay active until he’s ready to buy. Here are some of the key benefits of using lead nurturing:
According to MarketingSherpa, only 21% of marketing leads convert into sales. The reason for this poor performance is that the leads haven’t been nurtured enough sending them through the next steps.
If the leads aren’t nurtured enough, you will fail to understand their business and their needs, since you didn’t spend any time on building a connection with them or keeping them invested in your brand; not knowing your leads makes a dent in your business. MarketingSherpa says that because 61% of B2B marketers send their leads to Sales, without having any built foundation, a whopping 73% of those leads prove to be unqualified. On the same note, only 56% of B2B companies actually verify their business leads before sending them to Sales.
Lead nurturing, as well as lead scoring, have a poor establishment percentage among B2B marketers (35% and 21%, respectively), despite being the lifeblood of such businesses. Statistics show that nurtured leads are 20% more likely to materialize the sale opportunity than non-nurtured ones. The Annuitas Group says that nurtured leads also make 47% bigger purchases than the non-nurtured.
The Forrester Research surveys claim that effective lead nurturing not only boosts considerably the leads which are sales-ready, generating 50% more, but they also reduce the costs significantly, with 33%.
In comparison to standard emails, the response rate of personalized (nurtured) emails is highly encouraging (up to 10 times more). Such emails also manage to generate 5% more CTR than the non-nurtured ones. When it comes to unsubscribe rates, lead-nurtured emails are in fact 0.5% higher – but this is a positive result, because it means that you are less likely to have leads which are not recommended for your B2B, thus saving you time and money.
Lead scoring can easily be integrated into your automated marketing system, CRM, email marketing efforts, content personalization and business directory. However, there’s a reason only 21% of B2B marketers have established their own lead scoring program: it’s not for everyone. Yes, the benefits you’ve just read may be tempting, but there are times when implementing lead scoring is a big waste of time.
To determine whether lead scoring should be part of your lead management strategy, ask yourself the following three questions:
You won’t need to worry about lead scoring if your sales team is effectively managing the leads you’re providing. In fact, if that would be the case, it means you haven’t been providing enough leads for your sales team in the first place. Therefore, until you have too many leads and can no longer touch base with all of them, lead scoring shouldn’t be on your agenda. Instead, focus on generating more leads through analyzing your traffic and visitor-to-lead conversion rates.
If your sales team has been complaining about the leads you’ve generated and is hesitating to call them, lead scoring won’t help. Your problems may be running deeper than you expected. There’s a big chance that the sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned, in which case your lead scoring efforts will go to waste. After all, how can you expect them to trust the score you provide, if they don’t like the leads themselves? Therefore, consider having a heart-to-heart with the people in sales, to solve the underlying issues.
You’ll need behavior and demographic data in order to carry out lead scoring. Without these, you won’t be able to accurately assess the readiness of your leads and may end up failing to convert them. Therefore, you should focus on improving your conversion forms with the help of your sales team. That way, you can discover which data they need to follow up on leads. You may also need to use a marketing analytics and a lead management system to gather data automatically.
To sum it up, be selective when it comes to engaging your prospects and choose only those that line up with your brand’s identity. Keep in mind that ‘the more, the better’ is a philosophy that can make you lose time and money – it’s all about pursuing the right buyers for your business. Figure out if your marketing system is prepared for lead scoring and if yes, combine it with lead nurturing for a higher sales rate and a cost-effective strategy (click here for a lead scoring strategy), to maximize the revenue.
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]]>The post How to Create a Cost-Effective Lead Scoring Strategy appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>Lead scoring, a methodology which both sales and marketing teams rely on, is used for ranking leads based on their readiness for sale. Basically, it’s a system that allows you to determine whether a lead is going to move to sales or if it requires more nurturing. You can assign points or letters to denote rankings, or use terms such as ‘hot’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’. However, to designate these ranks, marketers resort to two types of scoring: implicit lead scoring and explicit lead scoring. Both of these take into consideration behaviors and demographics, but in different ways.
After understanding the concept of lead scoring, it’s time for you to establish your own strategy. Here are the steps you can confidently follow to be successful.
Contrary to what some experts believe, lead scoring is an activity where sales and marketing should collaborate to ensure its success. Hence, create a team that comprises equally of sales and marketing personnel, so that both can share their insights and determine the traits defining ideal prospects. Remember to pick your team wisely, since its members will be meeting regularly to assess results, provide feedback and carry out necessary improvements.
Study historical deal data and existing sales data to identify traits associated with closed deals, as well as those with transactions that either fall through or take a much longer time than expected. You should also have your marketing automation and website analytics data in hand, as they provide you with behavioral attributes such as which pages appeal most to your clients, what content they download the most, and which forms they’ll happily fill out. The key to successfully tackling this messy task is to start simple and identify a few key indicators of success or failure, rather than starting with a large amount of data points.
After collecting and analyzing your data, it’s time for you to create your own lead scoring strategy. Use the following steps to get started.
Taking action based on lead scores would mean sending ‘hot’ leads to the sales team and discarding ‘cold’ leads. However, you need to do more than that. First off, you need to define the process for delivering top ranking leads to sales representatives. Determine how quickly the leads should reach, who should approve and route them, how to transfer leads to the sales pipeline, as well as other technical issues. Next, define the process for ‘warm’ leads. The best solution for these is sending them to a nurturing program that engages and prepares them for sales in the future.
Finally, establish a policy for dealing with ‘cold’ leads. If you don’t believe that engaging them on any level is possible, create a plan to properly discard them. For example, you can stow them away in a database if you think they’ll offer 10% value or simply hand them over to another company that may be interested in having this type of leads.
In order to join the ranks of successful companies, you should always set some time for testing your lead scoring models. The best way of doing so is by comparing them to your actual results. For example, track the behavior of your ‘hot’ prospects to see if they’re contributing to more closed deals. If you do spot a problem, communicate its details to your lead scoring team immediately to correct it. Another way to track your progress is by reviewing data from your marketing and sales automation systems, to find patterns indicating the success of your strategy. To be very thorough, define metrics which you can use to measure the ROI of your lead scoring program. That way, you’ll be in a better position to prove just how effective your efforts have been.
Don’t expect your current strategy to remain the same, especially if the testing phase uncovers discrepancies. Even if you don’t notice any issues, never be afraid to experiment, to further improve it. After all, you’ll need to abandon some old assumptions you’ve made in the past, to match the constant changes taking place in your market.
In a nutshell, if your business is ready for lead scoring, don’t hesitate to implement this strategy after perfecting it. You should especially take this opportunity to bridge the gaps between sales and marketing and to establish a robust lead nurturing strategy. With these in place, you’ll be prepared to see higher conversion rates, higher ROI and more revenue.
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]]>The post Inbound Marketing Strategies: Are Microsites Valuable? appeared first on Sozialia.
]]>A Microsite is a small group of pages that are linked to a larger parent website, but have a different domain name and generally unique content and design.Microsites are usually used as a marketing tactic to specially distinguish certain information, campaigns, products, etc.
Microsites have been used for this purpose for some time now with varying degrees of success. They can be great for getting focused information across to intended users and have been a part of many brands’ marketing campaigns. However, questions about the value of microsites remain and they are definitely not recognized as universally effective.
While microsites may be good at times for promoting your brand or certain products, etc., they need to be approached very strategically, since they can also have a damaging effect on your SEO. The key to determining the value of a microsite is to consider it in light of your key marketing objectives. Stick to these following guidelines and decide when a microsite is good for your longer term marketing strategies:
You are bound to need a website revamp or refresh at some point. Maybe it’s desperate and your main website is a hideous UI/UX nightmare. Maybe it hasn’t been maintained or updated regularly. Maybe it’s disorganized and disengaging to visitors. This means it’s time for a redesign, not for a microsite. While the idea of creating a microsite as a solution can be tempting in order to avoid the trouble of going through enormous changes and cost of a site redesign, a microsite can never and shoulnever act as parking spot for your brand and foundational information.
The convenience of avoiding a redesign is outweighed by the negative consequences this has on your SEO rankings and traffic flow:
It should also be noted that creating and maintaining a microsite is not as easy and cost effective as you may think. Even if a total website overhaul is out of budget for you right now, you can likely do some housekeeping and updating for the same cost in time and resources it would take to build a microsite.
Finally, spreading key general information across multiple domains can be a frustrating to your visitors, who expect to be able to navigate from one relevant page to another and back again without being completely relocated. This experience is not going to encourage visitors to stay and look around your site. It will likely be disorienting and discouraging to their mission, driving them elsewhere to meet their needs.
Microsites violate a few key pieces of SEO wisdom. If you are under the impression that having a microdite will increase your page count or drive better SEO rankings, be prepared to be disappointed. While its true that one emphasis for many inbound marketing strategies is content creation and the SEO benefits of content, microsites don’t contribute to this overarching goal:
Even if your ranking does improve, the microsite will require regular maintenance and will need to have updated information to keep the ranking. Because most microsites are created for temporary purposes and are supposed to contain limited information, the race to keep the ranking up may cost more than you initially thought.
Ok, so we’ve established that having a microsite can hurt the health of a website instead of improving it. Now when, if ever, is it a good idea to have a microsite for marketing purposes? As long as you’re aware of the costs in SEO rankings, etc., discussed above, you may make a strategic call to build a microsite as part of a big campaign or product launch push. And, done well, under the right circumstances, this can be great.
Microsites can come with higher benefits than costs for short-term promotional activities in your marketing plan. For example, if you have a temporary or seasonal offer/product/campaign that does not mesh exactly with your website’s content and has a highly specific message, you can use a microsite to inform the customers about it. In this case the microsite isn’t out to extend your brand’s image. Instead, it’s focused on something unique and limited in scope that needs its own context. This is one huge plus of a microsite: focus. There’s little opportunity for a visitor to get distracted from the message and “next steps” of a campaign by content of a different nature.
Additionally, for your internal tracking and analysis purposes, collecting uncorrupted data about certain marketing campaigns or efforts can really inform your strategy.
Microsites can be effective if your company is introducing a new product geared toward a new target audience or market segment. It can challenging to incorporate this move into your main website without creating an anomalistic break in organization, direction, and target.
A microsite build for this purpose can focus your customer’s attention on the new product and make the product stand out. For example, Unilever uses microsites for its separate brands such as Dove and Axe, which have very different targets and branding in themselves. In fact, the branding for each is so unique that, unless you’re looking into the higher level corporate ties, you aren’t likely to know that Dove and Axe are made by the same company. You can see why Unilever has opted to give each of them their own web presence.
Additional Effective Microsite Innovations
Here are some other companies that are putting microsites to effective and interesting use:
AYGO 360 was introduced by Toyota in style by creating a webpage that could only be opened on smart phones. The microsite took advantage of the Gyroscope sensors in the phone to get a 360 look of cars by moving around. The microsite by Toyota is representative of one stunning and delightful use of microsites.
Coke is another example of the way microsites can be used to achieve effective results. Coke released more than 50 microsites, all with highly interactive interfaces. Coke keeps adding more microsites to its already large database to keep customers engaged and reminding them why Coke is “so awesome.”
One item to note across the above examples: we are talking about huge companys that have veritable highway systems of traffic and plenty of SEO capital that they can experiment with. The costs to them are not as likely to outweigh the benefits
In short, microsites can be beneficial, but shouldn’t be implemented without deeper consideration of the impacts they are likely to have on your longer term marketing efforts.
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