Your Web site is your flagship marketing communications tool. But how can you go beyond informing your customer to truly interacting with them? How can you make your Web site work for maximum ROI?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for encouraging consumers to engage with brands via Web sites. What works for one company may not work for another. The most important factors? Target audience and call to action, based on desired objective. Take the candy industry, for example.
Skittles® and M&M’s®, though vastly different in taste, are similar products. In order to create an identity, both brands use their Web site in different ways. One focuses more on the culture behind the brand and viral sharing possibilities, while the other recognizes the potential baking use of the product and provides its audience with application tools.
Skittles’ Web site is mostly user-generated content—the landing page invites visitors to “Experience the Rainbow” and functions as an exploratory maze of quick links to Twitter conversations and YouTube videos. Very much in the same vein as the addictive “Do Not Press This Red Button” viral web game, Skittles.com practically begs you to keep scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling.
This platform almost forces consumers to engage with the brand through social media, encouraging videos and images to be shared with the world. As you can see, with close to 4 million Facebook fans, active Twitter conversations and user-generated videos, this aggressive strategy is working well to promote the brand and drive traffic to Skittles’ social media tools.
Compare this to M&M’s more traditional Web site. Social media isn’t nearly as important; Twitter and Facebook links are provided at the bottom of the page.
By offering recipes, games and shopping options which allow the visitor to engage with the brand, M&M’s Web site focuses more on its products and characters than generating commentary from the global community. It’s a different type and level of engagement more appropriate to its broad-based audience.
These Web sites use different strategies, but strive for the same goal: giving their visitor something to interact with. M&M’s has successfully built a long-term marketing campaign centered around the M&M characters and also recognizes the potential sales gained from offering recipe ideas using their product – both of these factors play an important role on their Web site. On the other hand, it’s a safe bet Skittles is marketing to a younger audience that reflects the quirky nature of their site. Recipes and applications don’t really apply (I don’t recall ever trying a cookie baked with Skittles candies). Which is why they’ve focused their efforts entirely on viral outreach. But both created unique web real estate that, when you look at the bottom line, does the same thing: sells their brand of candy.
