E-commerce : The New Landing Page

Widgets just might be the ultimate targeting tool

May 2008 By Thom Kennan

singlepage

A few years ago, many of us in the interactive marketing field were predicting the "death of the homepage" or "Google is the new homepage." About that time, some of us started touting widgets as the next big thing without really knowing why. It sounded right, and many of us were hungry for the next big thing.

Well, now we have a rationale. The reason widgets have become so important to digital marketers is this: Any campaign based simply on the premise of driving targeted consumers specifically to your brand, product Web site or landing page will fail.

Think of your own online habits. How often do you find yourself browsing a Web site that you've never been to before? If you're like me, the sad answer is, "Not much."

But now think about how often you find yourself on your favorite blog, or checking up on your friends on Facebook or LinkedIn. Maybe sounding off on a sports, finance or parenting forum. So, if our customers and potential customers are anything like us, when they're online they are likely somewhere in the digital wild, not on our brands or product Web sites.

When imagining, planning and developing your next integrated campaign, ask yourself: If I have a really compelling offer or powerful reason for a consumer to clickthrough, where is the best place to find those prospective clicks? And what's the best way I can target and capture those coveted clicks?

Good marketing is essentially about well-timed, well-placed and well-positioned interruptions. Hopefully these are relevant and meaningful to those we're interrupting. Figuring out how to time and place these moments of meaningful interruption is what we do for a living. So how does including a widget in your campaign add value to the overall success and, especially critical, ROI of the campaign?

What Widgets Are
Think of a widget as a little Web site or landing page that is capable of living, traveling and sustaining in the digital wild, untethered by your Web site and hosting environment. A widget is nothing more than a contained piece of functionality that should pass only one significant test in the eyes of your targeted consumers: Is it something they want to spend some time with?

Your brand homepage is about everything on the shelf. Your landing pages, ideally, are all about a focused, offer-driven fulfillment environment. The goal is to provide just enough messaging support and calls to action to achieve a simple goal: a lead, a sale or a registration.

But a widget is something we can play with. It has some aspects of both value and rewards, whether that's sheer momentary entertainment (think of a joke bank), a mash-up video from a friend (YouTube's API just opened up to us all) or something of real value to me as a consumer, say a calculator that helps me figure out how much I'm currently being gouged by my auto insurance company. Or, better yet, it might be a tool that I can use over and over-maybe a daily calorie tracker with a weekend payoff prize of a box of dark chocolates for being good.

And a widget must have one more important feature that separates it from our more traditional digital media assets-a widget demands to be shared or grabbed and kept. What makes a widget a widget, really, is nothing more than the simple, elegant and lightweight "wrapper" that acts like an envelope around your content and functionality, making it portable and distributable. And viral.

That's also why widgets can achieve a level of hyper-targeting that almost no segmentation or media plan can hope to deliver. Few media targeting models can rival the value and results derived by relying on engaged consumers sharing your content with like-minded consumers. The endorsement value of this simple act of "pass-along" is powerful and allows your portable content to act as digital Trojan horses-slipping through the gates of consumers' attention spans with automatic authority and assigned permission.

What Widgets Do
So what does a widget look like, and who is making them work for their brands? Minneapolis-based PR firm Fast Horse, working in partnership with Wunderman New York, has developed a "widgetized" quiz for a recent Nationwide campaign that targets consumers who could use some help with those sensitive, difficult conversations around the kitchen table. The content was hosted on the campaign microsite but could easily be grabbed or shared.

And this stand-alone widget application hosted on the campaign microsite also was repurposed as a Facebook application and served up and promoted on the campaign's page, created specifically to drive awareness and engagement in a potentially target-rich, high-density social network.

Bridge Worldwide in Cincinnati helped Folgers create a campaign for its Simply Smooth brand coffee, made for sensitive stomachs. The widget mechanism allowed customers to share their stories about being able to enjoy a second cup of coffee without fear of upset tummies.

Consumers could vote for their favorite stories, track winners, and, by clicking through to the Web site, add their own stories and share the good news with friends. The widget could sit on their computers, blogs or social-network pages and be automatically updated with new stories via remote distribution.

Another issue to consider is whether the ability to share or save the widget is dependent on a user requirement to download a plug-in, as in the Folgers case above, which relied upon Yahoo! Widgets.

For a campaign looking to target Facebook's ever-growing and diversified user base, the popular social network offers some good profile-targeting tools and increasing reach by using its popular "applications," which essentially are sharable and grabbable widgets that work within Facebook. Remember, widgets developed for wider Web distribution also can be easily repurposed and added to a Facebook page or social ad feed, as Wunderman did with Nationwide's Have the Talk Quiz.

The Wild, Wild Web
Ultimately, what makes your widgets different from the rest of your online media and communications is that, fundamentally, they unlock the value and promise of your brand or product from your digital mother ship and unleash it into the wild. A wild where consumers have control over consideration of your widget's value as they fiddle with their profiles; watch and share YouTube videos; search on Google; and blog about their kids, boyfriends and bosses.

A functional, well-conceived widget affords you the opportunity to let your customers become your advertising, simply by giving them a good reason to share your content with their online friends and their communities. Widgets are inherently about accessing the viral power of distribution that should be the grail of every interactive campaign.

But there's an even bigger payoff: Widgets can be measured. Like a rogue satellite pinging about beyond the fringes of our solar system into deep digital space, they can be tagged to send back all the information you need to track things like pass-alongs, opens, downloads and clickthroughs. And, developed correctly, widgets are two-way devices, which allow you to dynamically update them with new content and messages wherever they may reside across the far-flung digital grid.

Of course, just like all your other branded digital media, widgets include the most important thing of all: a little, clickable button that links back to where they began. After all, you're trying to drive and deliver the next level of targeted engagement with your brand-whether that's a sale, lead or registration.

That's where landing pages and Web sites fit back properly into the conversion mix. They're not dead yet.

Thom Kennon is vice president of digital ad marketing services at Wunderman, with its headquarters in New York. He can be reached at thom.kennon@wunderman.com.

• MORE ON
• ONLINE MARKETING