With back-to-back holidays (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, 4th of July, summer vacation, new school year, etc), small businesses are adjusting their focus to cater to a market of vacationers, shoppers, and those who just love to celebrate a good deal in honor of any special event. Summer marketing schedules are being finalized for Dukky clients making it a great time to shine the light on how to leverage the upcoming holidays to increase sales and customer engagement for those who are still in need of some ideas.

Everyone loves a party. Regardless the reason behind it, people love to be invited and included in on special events and savings from friends and retailers. That makes this upcoming season of celebrations the perfect opportunity to zone in on a few major business goals and run consistent marketing promotions to accomplish them. While other businesses are vacationing, here’s your chance to set yourself up for a great third and fourth quarter.

How to maximize a summer of marketing

1) Identify attainable and clear cut goals

• grow your email list
• increase social media presence
• master the art of multi-channel marketing campaigns
• identify the brand influencers in your customer database
• track/analyze all marketing channels to see which have highest ROI
• add social sharing components to all marketing
• centralize customer database to capture customer information/demographics from all marketing channels – email, website, facebook, twitter, online ads, blog, partner sites, tv, radio, etc

2) Create a marketing calendar

Organized people get more accomplished, it’s a fact. Not because they are just innately more awesome, but because they create a clear road map to accomplish and reach their goals. You’ve got a lot going on, we all do, and it can sometimes feel like you don’t even have enough time to make a plan. Truth is you cannot afford to not take the time to create a plan.

Take a few minutes and jot down some ideas for promotions/ideas that work well with your business and can play off the upcoming holidays. Here’s a few examples:

Mother’s/Father’s Day

• offer a discount – $15 off of $50 purchase or $10 off a giftcard for mom’s  (make it easy for the men while they are shopping for their wives/mom)
• buy one get one free off of products/services
• Enter to win a gift/vacation/free services/products. Hint: Dad’s love giveaways. Mom’s love coupons and winning things for their family. Put together a man cave giveaway collection or something sports/hunting themed all dad’s would love.

3) Run back to back promotions

4) Celebrate the winners

At the close of each campaign be sure to highlight on your marketing channels the winners. This validates the promotion to those who entered and is the perfect set up to mention your next upcoming promotion.

5) Mix it up

Don’t be afraid to try new promotions/offers with your audience in order to expand your customer database. Just because you’ve never run a coupon deal or giveaway doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever try in order to reach your goals. Gathering new customers and an expanded reach during busy times can help prepare your business to manage and grow during slower seasons. Nurturing new customers can lead to new sales.

6) Track your progress

Dukky’s analytics dashboard makes it easy to monitor and track each promotion’s activity and success. Knowing your numbers from month to month will allow you to see what’s working and which offers and deals your customers are the most responsive to. When you know better, you do better but you have to KNOW better to be able to see change.

This upcoming marketing season is the perfect opportunity for your business to focus and hone in on some important goals to see growth, expansion and increase in sales, your customer database and marketing engagement.

If you feel like you need more hands on help to get started, feel free to give us a call at 1-888-662-9096 to jumpstart your marketing success or email us at sales@dukky.com

If you are working hard to maximize the power of the web in your marketing outreaches, then I’m positive you’re very familiar with having to navigate the waters of change. New updates, new tools, new options, better content, simplified designs, a creative edge, don’t do that, do this instead, stats say everyone hates that word, stats say everyone jumps up and down when you do this…it’s a little tilt-a-worldish at times. But, if you’re an adrenaline junky like me then marketing and advertising can provide you all the change you need to keep your work days exciting.

Let’s take the recent article, Is Facebook Still Cool and Why Marketers Should Care. It’s packed with some really great (and not too shocking) stats about Facebook usage and user behavior shifts in the last year taken from Pew Internet Research. Did we all really think Facebook would rule the social media world forever? Please don’t say yes.

Our clients come to us a bit confused at times wondering why their results seem to be different from one campaign to the next. Our team will review their strategy and outreach methods and can normally pinpoint a few outside factors they didn’t realize had shifted. A little Facebook update to the newsfeed can greatly impact a campaign from one week to the next if you’re not aware Facebook is making adjustments.

So do we avoid the social media waves or ride them in our finest surfing gear? If you’re a Dukky client you go with option two, and you learn to navigate and conquer the social media waters.

Surfing the Social Media Waves

1) Not all waters are created equal

Dukky’s headquarters are in New Orleans. If you want to go surfing, you will be forced to get on a plane for a few hours to do so. Unless there is a hurricane, there will be no surfing here. That’s ok. We indulge in sunshine, blistering hot days and enjoy the greatest food, culture and music in the world. The trade off isn’t too shabby. However, if you want to go surfing you will have to find yourself in another body of water than the Mississippi River or surrounding lakes.

Each channel we choose to invest our marketing dollars in will not produce the exact same results. Just because you see water and wind does not mean you’ll see waves worthy of surfing, but it doesn’t mean you won’t garner response.  Tracking the incoming sources of traffic in your campaigns will give you the transparency you need to compare and analyze which waters you get the most action from. 

Pew Internet Research shows shifts in user’s behavior over previous years, so do we stop marketing on Facebook? No, but we do market smarter by interacting with customers from multiple marketing channels and through more targeted outreaches. We don’t put all of our marketing hopes in one network. Launching multi-channel marketing promotions will allow you to engage with customers multiple times in a single promotion. This alleviates the pressure for a single social network to be the source of consistent traffic and response.

2) Not all surfers are created equal

It seems like an obvious statement, but businesses miss this all the time. The greatest weapon in your arsenal are the customers sitting in your database. Not all customers are created equally, but if you take the time to do database research you can learn how to maximize the impact of your marketing by engaging with your customers in ways that will motivate them to engage or make purchases. Engaged customers turn into sales and what’s the goal of marketing? Increase response, engagement and ROI.

The answer to many of your marketing needs can be found by strategically engaging with your database of customers. Life is busy, so make it easy for your customers to provide you the information you need. Ultimately, it will help you better serve them.

1. What social media sites do they use?
2. How do they prefer to receive updates about your business or product?
3. When are they planning on making a purchase next?
4. Are they a new customers, returning customer, or old customer

Let your next Dukky promotion feature an offer or giveaway that will appeal to all of your customers, slip a few poll questions in the activation process (as seen above) and include a motivating share incentive so they even tell their friends about you. Next thing you know you’ve identified the active customers, have the research data needed, can evaluate their online behavior, channel preferences, sharing activity, and influence ratings. If your marketing campaigns are not providing you the customer data and promotion analytics you need to market smarter, you’re surfing in the wrong waters.

Influencers. It’s a trending marketing term these days, and rightfully so. A quick search will lead to an abundance of tweets, articles, reports, and books filled with the reasons for and benefits of nurturing the influencers in your customer database. Yet, still we see so many clients struggling to sift through their customer database and segment those who are participators vs social advocates vs true influencers.

In a recent article, The State of Digital Influence 2013, Technorati Media’s recent influencer report is summarized quite nicely. Being that all of Dukky’s campaigns provide detailed influencer ratings and identifies the relationships customers have with the people in their social realm, we were thrilled to see this write up only adding fuel to the already growing influencer fire we’re continuously fanning.

“It’s clear to see from the report that social media – and, by association, influence marketing – is maturing, with expectations of true business results versus social amplification and scores leading the way.

This is great news for the platforms adding true value to the influencer space, and for the brands willing to look beyond scoring and simple metrics to a bigger conversation.”

Third party validation coupled with our client success stories proves if you’re not currently identifying and nurturing the influencers in your database – your marketing is missing out.

So why wouldn’t a business identify and nurture their most engaged and active customer base? The number one response from businesses we hear is “We know it’s important, but we don’t have the right tools and/or resources to do it internally. We have limited time and just haven’t figured it out.” Lucky for our clients (businesses and agencies), our platform was designed with those problems in mind. You don’t need to be among the elite to grow, segment, and nurture your customer database, you just need a simple platform that does all the work for you.

How to Identify the Influencers in your Database:

#1 – Run a Dukky Promotion

You should have guessed that would be our answer. All Dukky promotion’s include  Share with Friend’s incentives and tools as a seamless step in the participation process on microsites. Our design makes it easy to share and by adding a simple share incentive for the customer, a campaign is sure to go viral. Houston, we have take off.

Once sharing has begun, the analytics dashboard is the next stop to be fascinated by as you watch activity, response, and the impact your influencers are having on your reach, conversion, and sales. As sharing increases so does your database. How much is a new customer worth to you?

Who you’ll Get to Meet in your Database:

Purl Responders- These people responded by going to the PURL from a direct mail piece or by clicking on a link in an email. They got to the site, but they didn’t fill out the form.

Participants- These customers arrived at your promotion (microsite) from purls, all marketing channels, and shares from friends AND they opted to participate by filling out the form. We have their data and can add them to our database now.

Social Influencers- These customers shared the promotion site with friends, their friends clicked on the links they shared, but haven’t participated by entering the form (yet!).

True Influencers- These are the customers who shared the offer with friends, their friends responded AND participated in your promotion.

The secret sauce in the today’s marketing world is equipping your team with the right tools to make their job doable. Influence marketing is easily attainable if you know which platforms (like Dukky) make it easy to launch and track multi-channel promotions and provide easy ways to access and nurture the influencers in your database.

Have you been searching to find the perfect marketing formula for your next promotion? Maybe you are a relatively new business and you’ve spent your days trying to find what your competitors are doing to drive traffic, grow their customer list and expand their business…and you feel a bit lost and overwhelmed.

Or you might be a very established business with an active marketing budget, logins to multiple online marketing tools that are sure to change your life, and analytics that are all over the place. Do you know if you’re maximizing your efforts?

Every marketing team, new or established, is constantly facing opportunities and challenges. Did you see this new cool tool? What are your analytics saying about your last promotion? Oh look we’ve increased our reach…oh wait there’s a big drop in conversion. It’s a revolving door of trial, error, success, and sifting through new tools and channels to create your next “bulletproof” strategy.

When the overwhelmed or just heavily inundated business makes its way to Dukky’s marketing door, we’re not surprised. We get it. There are more options than time. So how do you bulletproof your marketing campaigns without spending your entire life sifting through all the pieces?

Bulletproofing your marketing may not be a perfect science, but there are a few key factors you can count will ensure your maximum success.

1) Keep promotions simple, clear and enticing.

If it’s easy to enter and completely worth it your customers will LOVE it. If it’s confusing, too many steps, a visual catastrophic mess and an empty offer, your customers will ignore it.

Dukky Tip: Run a Dukky promotion offering a discount to customers who enter and provide an additional incentive to win a small giftcard if they share with their friends through Dukky’s share tools. It’s simple, clear, and they know exactly what they need to do in just a few easy steps. The offer is clear. The incentive is in place. The customer just needs to enter.

2) Reminders, reminders, reminders!

If you have a customer email list, mobile numbers, social media pages, blog, website, and pinterest account don’t limit the ways to engage with customers by keeping your marketing promotions exclusive to one or two outlets.

Dukky Tip: People are busy and they need reminders to make it to the dentist, attend business meetings and show up to the family party on Sunday. It’s safe to assume one means of communication is not going to be enough to keep your business and/or product at the forefront of their mind.

Send a variation of emails, text customers to enter your promotion through their phone, highlight the promotion on your blog, post an ad on your website that clicks through to your promotion site, regularly post on your social media accounts at various times, and get employees talking about it on their social pages.

3) Create marketing momentum – launch and launch again

We don’t believe in one hit wonders here at Dukky. Proof has shown from one promotion to the next there is great power in creating momentum with customers. Launch a campaign…and you guessed it, launch another.  Alternate discount driven promotions, with product giveaways and sweepstakes to keep your customers continuously engaged on your media channels throughout the year. Consistency in launching promotions maintain’s conversations with customers and provides you a continuous way to make small adjustments to improve your ROI from one promotion to the next.

There is no standard formula to attain marketing perfection, but you can set your marketing calendar up for success by keeping a few solid things in place when planning. Keep your message simple, send reminders, and launch and launch again!

Snowflakes and raindrops are beautiful, but all I really want is SUNSHINE this time of the year!

Weather (and notice my pun there) you are in B2C or B2B the long winter days before Spring can be the pits. Winter blues, sun-deprivation, cabin fever, call it what you will…once the holidays are over, it can feel like a long time before spring comes and good weather motivates us and consumers. It’s the time in every business when things slow down and the passion, energy, and go-get-em’ is low. So what do you do to get it back?

Here are some ideas to mix things up:

Celebrate: There is a slew of holidays that you could build a campaign around. Most notably: Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, etc.  These too played out by your competitors and everyone else? Get creative and make up a “holiday” that ties in with your business, and generates some excitement.  Head on over the Hallmark’s Ultimate Holiday site to get some ideas. http://www.theultimateholidaysite.com/holidays/2013-2/ Or, just use one of theirs. National Pistachio day, anyone?

Community: Does your town have a Business hub, a chamber of commerce, what about a facebook page? Down time is a good time to experiment with some community involvement. Get out there and find out what’s going on with other businesses in your area. You might even meet a few radical thinkers that spark some ideas for you.  You could also have a customer-appreciation event for your own “community” of fans.  And what about your own employee “community?”

Charity:   Spreading good cheer around doesn’t have to end after December. Help yourself by helping others.  Set your office up as a donation center or have a pet adoption day.  Don’t want to have it be right at your front door? Plan something offsite, like a park clean-up day or sponsor a team in a golf tournament.

Combine and Create:  Pick an off-the-wall date and celebrate it with an event designed to raise money for your charity. Get your communities involved and see the success. No business can operate in a vacuum; when things slow down, that’s the time to shake things up!  Good luck!

I’m a big fan of CBS’s show, Undercover Boss. I don’t get much tv time in my life, but it’s always one of my favorites when I do.There’s something captivating seeing the big man climb to the bottom of the ladder and getting to live normal life with his employees. And when the best CEO’s start dishing out big cash prizes at the end of the episode, I’m always moved by the ripple effect of their generosity. What an incredible place to be able to change someone’s world by freely giving them 10K, 25K, or like the episode I recently watched…. almost 200K. Talk about a game changer.

The undercover bosses always walk away learning both valuable life and business lessons  by slipping into the trenches and experiencing the ups and downs with their employees. Assuming your company vision and motto is trickling down to the bottom is easy to do, but actually investigating for yourself can expose the area’s that are threatening your ultimate success. This got me thinking about how it relates to marketing. It’s great to plan, launch a campaign and look from a distance in hopes it all goes well, but like the undercover bosses discover…the answers to increasing productivity and profits are really found in the trenches of our execution.

In order to drive increase in any area, you have to know the details. Occasionally, we get questions surrounding the big benefit in knowing your numbers in live time or really what’s the big deal about analytics at all. Sometimes the questions still shock us, but maybe we’re just that big of believers that you have to know the numbers and reasoning behind a campaign’s success or failure to keep a marketing strategy alive. We’re not into one hit wonders, we’re in the game of creating lifelong relationships between businesses and their customers and that takes dialogue.

So what can you learn from going undercover in your marketing? Here’s three things we can all take away from the undercover bosses.

What would you learn from your marketing if you went undercover?

1) Do your employees (or customers) understand what you’re saying?

What starts at the top doesn’t always make it to the bottom. CEO’s have a vision and motto, but sometimes when it finally makes it all the way to the employee it’s not clear, concise or seemingly possible. If you want to be known as the best hotel in the industry, yet do not equip your employees with the training and tools to represent your company motto when dealing with customers, they will not produce the outcome you want. If you want customer’s flooding into your stores, dialing into call centers, liking the business facebook page, and asking for new products or information, then you must be providing them with the incentive and tools to do so. It takes a village to raise a kid and a marketer with loaded toolbox to keep their marketing momentum alive.

In another post, How to Leverage Landing Pages to Increase Sales, we wrote about key factors to increase conversion in promotions. You can read the full article here. The main advice is to design your promotion for conversion. Keep it simple. Communicate your offer and steps clearly. Keep customer engagement and conversion at the forefront of how you are designing, wording, and executing. If a customer doesn’t know what your product or offer is or what separates you from the competition, they will not stay engaged. Be clear and conversational.

2) Simplicity of Use

CEO’s often discover archaic processes in their undercover research. Too many steps, too many lists, too much wasted time from employees, and worst of all too much room for error because employees are forced to manage systems that don’t make sense for today’s world. Wasted time = Lost opportunity.

This applies directly to marketing campaigns. Are you asking a customer to do 5 things just to enter into a promotion? Fill this out, like this, comment here, do this, and get me coffee too. Nobody has time for all that and we promise it’s going to show in low participation numbers. Make it a priority to provide the customer with an experience that is so easy they don’t even know they have just accomplished all the above for you (minus the coffee).

3) People Matter

There’s no denying the most moving part of Undercover Bosses is the last 15 minutes of each show. CEO’s sit down with the unsuspecting employee to review their time together and close up the meeting giving them gifts, scholarships, cars, new opportunities, vacations, mentorship programs, etc. based on the needs they were able to identify from their time earlier in the week. The professional wall falls and instantly CEO’s and employees are humanized by such incredible acts of kindness. It’s refreshing to be reminded that people matter…and you matter. CEO’s say over and over again how fortunate they feel to have such incredible employees on their team.

Do you know who’s on your team? Successful marketing appeals to our innate desire to be recognized and affirmed that we matter.

• Is your marketing personal?
• Is it engaging?
• Does it open the lines for you to create continual conversations with your customers?

Smart marketers are getting to know their customer database and engaging with them based on their preferences and interest. They are segmenting their database and identifying their brand advocates and influencers. It’s hard to appreciate the value of what’s in your database until you create moments to get to know them and see their worth. When you do, you won’t look back.

Have you taken an undercover look at your marketing team, tools, strategies and plans lately? If you did, what would your customer’s be saying about you? Our team at Dukky works hard to provide our client’s with easy solutions, quick answers, and promotions that  make their marketing toolbox more valuable than ever before.

For months we’ve seen the city in full Super Bowl prep mode enhancing the dome, city streets and tourist attractions for fans, but New Orleans’s businesses were not the only ones who spent months and millions prepping for the weekend. It’s no secret brands spent close to 4 million dollars on small segments of time for their commercial to be aired. But was it worth it? And can the smaller fish in the sea learn from their tactics?

Your business may not be working with marketing budgets in the millions, but that shouldn’t stop you from taking a few pointers from the standout brands when creating your next campaign.

3 Tactics Learned From Super Bowl Marketers

1) Emotional Appeal

Emotions are powerful forces to be reckoned with and when stirred right they can leave lasting impressions and memories, good or bad. That’s what marketing is about, right? Creating a marketing piece that stirs and appeals to your customer’s emotions will help you stand out in the sea of advertisements.

Which emotion should you appeal to though…

Heart Strings. Some ad’s pulled on your heart strings like Dodge Ram’s Farmer commercial. Farming has never looked so attractive and inspirational as it did in those three minutes. My facebook and twitter feeds were streaming with people commenting on how they could relate or were inspired by the example of hard work and family displayed. Associating family, hard work, commitment and bit of the American dream with their brand was a great lasting impression Dodge Ram left on viewers.

Sex appeal. Other ads used sex appeal to stir emotions like Calvin Klein’s ad with underwear model Matthew Terry. I do believe there were a few proposals made to him that night in the social media world.

Ew, what the heck just happened. You might already be able to guess which commercial we’re referring to. GoDaddy’s now infamous kissing commercial stirred quite an array of emotions from viewers that night. I am not the slightest bit inclined to ever buy another domain from them after seeing (and hearing) that video, but based on the continuous media coverage from it’s gross appeal, I’d say they have easily gotten their money’s worth.

2) Generate Buzz

The commercials were only one piece of the promotion’s full strategy. For days leading up to the game, companies were slowly releasing video clips, photos, and sneak peeks to start generating discussions with viewers. The actual aired commercial was only one piece of the strategy. Creatively engaging with viewers before, during and after a promotion will greatly effect how far you stretch your marketing dollars.

How does this relate to a small or medium size business? Begin talking about your next promotion with customers in stores, through emails, and on social media sites before it launches.  Ask your customers what kind of deals they are looking for and craft your next offers or giveaways based on their feedback. By doing so you can create a buzz about what’s coming. You’ll be able to ride the wave of momentum by keeping your conversations with customers ongoing.

Depending on the kind of promotion you are running be sure keep the post coming after it’s ended. Post pictures of customers in your locations during the sale, highlight the winners of your promotional giveaways or even give out some stat results. Letting customers know that over 500 of their friends came in to your location to redeem an offer will help remind them they either missed out or were a part of a great deal!

3) Real Time Marketing

If you see an opportunity, take it. If you weren’t sure what real time marketing was prior to the Super Bowl, there’s no doubt about it’s power, influence and presence in today’s social media world now that it is over. Not everyone can afford spending upwards of 4 million dollars on a commercial, but every business can be engaging with their fans and responding in live time now. Oreo modeled this quite well with it’s viral tweet that quickly surfaced during the blackout. Talk about taking advantage of real time events with a bit of humor and deliciousness…and it didn’t even cost them millions to do so.

This image was taken from a tweet during the Super Bowl from Oreo's twitter account.

As a small or medium size business, be available and present during big events and holidays on your social media sites. If an opportunity presents itself don’t hesitate to take it. Your presence during real life events helps humanize your brand and leave lasting impressions with your fans and customers. The reason brands spend millions for a commercial during the Super Bowl is because they know people will be actively watching and engaging in conversations. Pay attention to the moments your customers will be collectively engaging in activities and make it a point to be there with them.

In real life marketing, we don’t always have millions in our budgets. That doesn’t mean we cannot be effective and stand out in the crowd to our customers though. Don’t be afraid to try something new, think out the box and push your previous creative limits. And if you want to really shine in your next outreach – we dare you to add Dukky to it.

It’s time to adjust the marketing checklist.

When our team is prepping to launch a marketing campaign, we have a standard checklist we keep handy. It’s serves as our guide to ensuring we don’t miss anything we know that is both important to our campaign’s success and also to our customers. In 2013 one thing we’ve moved to the top of the list is reviewing each outreach method on a mobile device to evaluate the end user’s experience. We’ve also added mobile specific outreaches. According to the infographic below, we are only a short 11 months away from mobile experiences trumping the desktop experience. Is your marketing plan taking this into consideration?

As technology keeps us on our toes, it can sometimes feel like a constant juggle to keep up with fast changes without adding too much clutter to our work to-do list. It’s becoming increasingly pertinent we equip our marketing teams with the right tools to help us manage these shifts in the most seamless and efficient ways. We don’t want to just keep up, we want to stay ahead!

I don’t know about you, but we don’t have extra time in our marketing schedule to completely miss the mark. If we know our customers are changing, we want to be prepare for new and more engaging interactions with them.

Mobile isn’t important to consumers, it’s become a new way of life for them. Heck, you won’t see any ducks in this office without their phones strapped to them at all times. We can’t really pretend we’re surprised by these stats. Dukky’s team has been locked away for a few months planning and developing for these shifts to serve as enhancements both for our clients marketing plans and their customer’s user experience. The months ahead are promised to be very exciting as we unveil new features and tools that will not only help you stay ahead during these shifts, but won’t demand a list of experts to make it happen.

Are you prepping for the mobile shift? We sure hope so. Are you reaching your customers where they actually are instead of where they use to be? We really hope so. Stay tuned to see how Dukky can make you a mobile expert this upcoming year.

Microsites, a collection of landing pages, are a vital tool in the marketer’s arsenal, providing a funnel that serves as a doorway to trackable data on customers entering your promotion. So Team Dukky has compiled a list of our 5 favorite microsites we’ve had the pleasure of working on and why they work. Enjoy!

Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse

This microsite was launched for a handful of Ruth’s Chris franchise owners. Clean, tasteful and to the point, the site was in keeping with the nationally recognized restaurant chain’s branding and image. More importantly, it had a great offer – two offers in fact. For filling out the form all customers enjoyed a complimentary appetizer (with the purchase of an entree) through a printable coupon. Customers were then encouraged to share the offer with their friends via email, social networks and SMS for a chance to win free steak for a year. In total the campaign allowed the franchise owners to add 3,419 new customers to their databases. Their response rate was a mind blowing 33.88%. And of course we all know why. Who doesn’t want free steak for a year?

NewEgg.com

NewEgg is a very popular, highly recognizable website for purchasing all things technology related. This campaign was a huge slam dunk, bringing in a total response of over 870,000 hits. There are 2 reasons for this level of success. First, their offer rocks. Just in time for March Madness, the company offered the chance to win the Ultimate Man Cave which included everything from a massive flat screen TV and surround sound to a grill, XBOX and a computer. What guy doesn’t dream of owning that? The second factor was how they marketed their promotion. Combining email marketing, ads on their website, ESPN.com, CBSsports.com and Turner Sports with national and satellite radio mentions from Howard Stern and Dan Patrick as well as a social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter, the campaign was unstoppable. Nearly a quarter of the people who hit the site input their information and shared, bringing NewEgg over 208,000 customers into their database. The campaign was recognized as the winner of AdWeek’s Media Plan of the Year for integrated campaigns.

Educate Now!

This is one of our favorite campaigns by a small to medium business client. Educate Now! is a non-profit in New Orleans working to bring effective and sustainable reform to local public schools. Their campaign capitalized on their target audience’s love of all things NOLA by including a partner in their campaign – The Maple Street Book Shop. The shop, is a favorite independent book store in the community. The microsite invited those who entered to enjoy the spirit of giving and send their favorite public school classroom on a shopping spree at the store. All in all, the organization received close to 500 entries, which was a 20% response rate from the total number of visits to the site. For a small organization with limited funds this was a highly successful way of adding to their database without breaking the bank.

Sucré

Another New Orleans small business, Sucré is a gourmet desert shop that has exploded on to the local food scene. One of the sweet boutique’s greatest assets in its marketing arsenal has been it ability to be instantly recognizable by the design of the store fronts themselves, the packaging of the sweets and their collateral. Their brand image is synonymous with colorful, lively, delicious sweetness throughout the city. The company makes a concerted effort to keep customers aware of their behind the scenes activities too, branding their gourmet kitchen as the Sucré Confection Studio. The offer for this campaign was right in line with that branding, offering those who entered the chance to win a day in The Sweet Life where they could go behind the scenes, tour the studio and make their very own confection creations with their renowned Executive Chef. With this campaign, the local store gathered over 400 new customers to their database and increased the likes on their Facebook page as well. Sweet life indeed. 

Designer Social

Designer Social, an online community where stylish users can buy and sell luxury designer goods, has launched several successful campaigns using microsites. By running multiple campaigns, they’ve come to find that partnering with a designer brand in their offer has brought in a much higher response rate. With this campaign they hit their stride. By offering 1 of 3 designer looks from popular beachwear brand Vix to those who shared they were able to bring in a 22% response rate from the 8,497 people who hit the site. Considering they were only offering a sweepstakes and not a coupon or discount to every customer this was a very high response rate. The design of this microsite played a major part in the campaign’s success. Knowing their target audience is a fashion minded, highly sophisticated bunch, they ensured the microsite reflected the look and feel of marketing collateral from a high end retailer. In the world of fashion first impressions are everything and Designer Social made a huge splash with this summer campaign.

‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple…

Your landing page should have one goal, and one goal only: convince your visitors to convert. So, keep it simple. Anything, whether it’s content or visual elements, that distracts your visitor from that goal needs to be critiqued ruthlessly. Too much of anything is not always a good thing.

To create a tightly focused landing page, get the messaging nailed down first. Remember, more words are not necessarily better. Create a simple, persuasive call to action that makes it crystal clear why your customer should redeem your offer. Everything else on the landing page should support the call to action, not detract from it.

Keep It Consistent

Establishing trust is a crucial first step toward convincing customers to follow through and act on your offer. Consistent design and messaging will reassure them that they are at the at right place and that you aren’t trying to trick them.

That means that the text in the ad that brought your visitors to the landing page needs to be reflected on the landing page itself. The headline, call to action and offer should all match. If it doesn’t, warning bells go off and conversions go down.

The design of the page and the imagery used should also be consistent with the original ad, and it should remain consistent across each page of the microsite.

Design for Conversion

Your landing page design should support your call to action. People are visual creatures- include attractive images that will inspire them to redeem your offer, like that mouthwatering burger in the Wendy’s landing page above.

Also, use visual elements to direct your visitor’s eyes to your call to action. As with text, less is more here. Use blank space to surround and set off the elements you want your visitor to focus on, as Stine does below. Don’t let the page become cluttered or busy.

Make it Shareable 

Finally, use social sharing buttons to encourage your customers to share your offer with their friends and families. This exponentially increases the amount of exposure your campaign will receive, so you get more leads, more new customers and ultimately, more sales!

Stayed tuned: Tomorrow we’ll be highlighting our top microsite designs!