Geary Fresh

The pros and cons of microsites

Now more than ever companies are using microsites for highly focused product promotions, guerrilla marketing tactics and demographic-specific campaigns. These mini websites work differently than parent sites and can reach audiences in new ways.

Pros and Cons

In most cases brands employ one main company website, but others use a series of smaller, focused websites to augment a corporate website. The pros and cons depend on the goals and objectives of the microsites.

One of the main problems with using one main company website is the need to build pages featuring several products and services. This makes it easy for visitors to get sidetracked, confused and struggle to find what they were looking for. There are also search engine optimization problems that arise when trying to optimize one website for such a diverse array of keyword phrases.

The single biggest contributor to reach top search engine ranking is keyword rich, inbound links. These links are difficult to cultivate when pages must address several different topics at once. PPC campaigns can provide a solution to this problem, but it’s potentially a very expensive option.

We recommends using microsites to complement a main website and drive larger marketing campaigns to these smaller microsites. One benefit of using microsites is that they are small, highly focused websites tied to unique domain URL to promote a service, incentive offer or product. They can be a great way to increase exposure for your business as a part of a comprehensive internet marketing strategy. Because they are highly targeted, visitors are presented with a small number of pages that relate to the product or service that they are interested in. This makes it much more likely that your visitors will convert into sales or inquiries.

Having dedicated microsites for each product or service offers the potential to double a brand’s internet exposure via search engines. The chance to get different pages ranking for an array of keywords is extremely beneficial for digital marketers. Optimizing a microsite for search engines can be much easier and more effective because marketers don’t have to worry about building links to inner pages of your website, which can be very difficult. Efforts can stay focused on optimizing homepages for targeted keywords and phrases that relate to specific products or services. This also means marketers can take full advantage of multimedia technologies like Flash without detracting from search engine rankings. It is important to note that sometimes microsites may not make sense from an SEO perspective when content is best served under an existing domain.

Microsites can be particularly useful to work alongside a specific advertising campaign. They are also used most often with Social Marketing Campaigns. This affords a strong promotional branding opportunity without impacting a main site’s look and feel. As a separate entity, microsites offer the chance for variation in visual style and branding for that specific product, service or event.

Microsites can be a great addition to your internet marketing strategy. The advantages can far outweigh the relatively small amount of work and cost required to develop microsites. The flexibility they offer outside of the constraints of a corporate website and the sizeable SEO advantages mean they are worth considering as part of an internet marketing strategy.

Fortune 500 companies and their SEO struggles

A recent report published by MediaPost shows that Fortune 500 companies are not syncing their paid search campaigns with their search engine optimization efforts. These companies spend a collective $3.4 million daily on paid search, however, their SEO lags behinds.

The article goes on to say that “53% [of these companies] have no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords.” While the numbers quoted in show an increase in search engine visibility over the last year, only 25% of PPC keywords rank within the top 50 natural results.

So how important is SEO? Very important.

The synergies between SEO and paid search are well documented, so don’t waste an opportunity. Marketers should take both into account. One of the greatest aspects of planning SEO and paid search together is sharing intelligence. For example, the PPC keywords that convert at high rates should be a top SEO priority. Here are a few more reasons why SEO and paid search should run toghether:

• Appearing in both natural and paid listings adds reputability and continuity to your brand.
• Paid search ads can direct users to specific pages, while SEO typically leads to homepages. The combination makes sure you’re covered.
• SEO and paid search can target users at different points in a conversion funnel.
• It just works better!

Google to Phase out Support for Internet Explorer 6

Google announced it plans to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6 or IE 6. This is good news for the web development world since this browser doesn’t support key web standards and progressive user interface techniques. Our team affectionately refers to it as the thorn in their side. In short, IE 6 makes web developers’ lives difficult because what works in other, more current browsers does not render correctly in IE 6.

Geary Interactive’s analytics department shared Omniture’s most recent breakdown of browser usages, which support’s Google’s choice to let this dinosaur browser just go ahead and die already.

Internet Explorer (IE 7) rakes in 30.4%

Internet Explorer (IE holds 22.5%

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 maintains 14.7%

Internet Explorer (IE 6) aka the browser in question has a 12.8% market share

Safari 4.0.4 rounds out the top 5 with 4%

Augmented Reality in Action…these are good.

A recent iMedia Connection article highlighted how marketers are using augmented reality. They were really interesting and show how this technology can actually be implemented (it seems a little space-agy at first).

My personal favorite is the one by Esquire Magazine. We all know the print industry has lost its luster to a certain degree, so its nice to see a few publications exploring how to keep up with trends.

Enjoy…these are good.

Hope for Haiti Now –Benefit Tonight

Join Geary’s client MobiTV support the global earthquake relief effort. Watch Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief tonight at 8 pm EST. If you’re a Sprint user you’ll have live access to the program through Sprint TV.

Tonight’s telethon is hosted by George Clooney, and other guest include Madonna, Bill Clinton, Taylor Swift, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock, Keith Urban, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera, Dath Matthews, John Legend, Justin Timberlake, Stevie Wonder, Wyclef Jean, Bono and many, many others.

If you want to get involved, text GIVE to 50555 to help.

Twitter and Foursquare the new virtual currency. Are you game?

Tastirewards

Tasti-D-lite recently announced a social media rewards program that earns consumers points for updating their twitter and foursquare accounts each time they peruse a location at the New York City-based chain. As Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove reports, this initiative is the first of its kind to directly link customers’ social media behavior with their physical shopping habits and actually put a monetary value on the abundant free publicity driven by social media. The immediate impact of this program on social media marketing, Van Grove says, is threefold:

1. It enables a measureable association between social media and sales figures

2. It will motivate other stores and venues to implement similar programs, which will create competition for social media loyalty, adding value to social media presence beyond influence

3. Location-based social media marketing will become more commonplace. Since sharing your location is an order to collect rewards for social media use, people will become more accustomed to disclosing.

In a subsequent article, Van Grove explored how campus-wide initiatives have been established at several innovative institutions of higher education. The increased value of the social media-savvy consumer will likely soon expand into other industries—we predict that rewards for entertainment and tourism check-ins are imminent.

Beyond social media efforts, what does this mean for a digital agency? In the near future, anyone in digital marketing will have to evaluate the effects of the integration of geolocation and increased offline activity associated with social media rewards on several levels of strategic planning:

• Website/microsite design
• SEO
• user experience strategy
• performance
• analytics

At Geary, how will this influence our results-based digital strategy? We’ll get closer to our clients and our resources.

• More collaboration with client to tie in on-site/location based aspects of a digital campaign
• More collaboration with 3^rd party developers (mobile apps)
• More emphasis and measurement of visual/mobile searches (google goggles, for example)

Facebook Vitamin Water–Coming to a Store Near You

Social has gone CPG with VitaminWater’s newest flavor “Connect.” Facebook’s logo dons the newest VitaminWater, set to hit stores in March (according to TechCrunch).

The water flavor, created and debated by Facebook fans, is black cherry-lime. At the time of this post over 600 fans like the flavor, and a lot more seem excited for the release.

The marketing push behind this included satirical infomercials and help from 50 Cent.

Will you connect with VitaminWater?

Happy Holidays from Geary Interactive

Here is our tasty treat for our colleagues, partners and vendors. Hope you enjoy it. Gingerbread your head…you know you want to.

Geary Interactive, WD-40 Loosen up the Holidays

Rick Lyon and WD-40 Company wish you a lubricated holiday season courtesy of Displacement Records (water displacement that is).

This year WD-40 wishes their fans a merry holiday through the power of song and video marketing. Mimicking the infomercials we all love and hate, Rick Lyon’s alternate personality Rick McSlickerson sings campy songs like “It’s Beginning to Lube a lot Like Christmas.”

The video has garnered over 90,000 YouTube views in about a week. The voiceover talent alone is worth a view.

See it for yourself.

8 things we loved in 2009

1. The plethora of iPhone apps that make life a little easier and a whole lot more fun.

2. Facebook vanity URLs. There’s something about seeing our names included in a URL that makes us feel merry.

3. Augmented reality. Thank you Google Goggles and Monocle. With you, 2010 might just be the year of mobile.

4. Twitter lists.

5. The Adobe-Omniture acquisition. We’ll now get a more comprehensive view at how Flash assets impact website behavior.

6. Bing! Not that we don’t like Google. We love the Google, but we also like to root for the underdog.

7. Coca-Cola adopting a performance-driven marketing model. It proves Geary’s mantra of Real Results as Coke was one of the first international brands to steer away from time + materials contracts.

8. I Wear Your Shirt. Who would have thought leasing out your wardrobe could be so profitable? We had too much fun working with Jason on our contest, and we have already booked our date for 2010.