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Holy crap - look at this video from Techcrunch about a Google interface being tested at the moment.

Small, focused websites - sometimes called microsites or feeder sites - have been around for quite a while now, but it seems their importance is becoming realised for online marketing. Brands are actively embracing niche micro sites for products and there is no reason why you can’t do the same for your business.

This article at Livemint (via Bluhalo) focuses on the importance of brand websites for direct customer engagement with the “attitudinal shift from browsing to searching” (Ogilvy and Mather India’s executive director of digital services).

For me this also ties in with a recent report from Google that they say proves that search can have a big impact on branding. The research shows that coming top of an organic listing raised purchase consideration of a brand by 4%, coming top of paid listing, by 20% and combined 22%. (NMA 10.07.08).

So this is all very well but how does it fit your business? The chances of large scale domination of search is very hard and time consuming, but creating niche website offerings allows you to dominate smaller markets.

We have just delivered a feeder website design and build for a client who has seen a remarkable payback in terms of connecting with a specific audience and for them, it happened very quickly.

I’ve bought some niche domain names already for developing feeder sites this year for our business, very much focused on our local market. One for Escape client, TSBeauty, is a product named domain - Zeno Pro. This is driving traffic through to the shop and actually selling product.

Ideas for your micro site

Ideas then. What can you do? I would start with these simple ideas:

1. If you are in the service industry, why not set up a geographically local domain with lots of relevant advice to your business? Basingstoke marketing will do just this for The Escape over the next few months, offering real marketing advice for local companies.
2. Do you have a large amount of clients in one market? Vertical market websites are another great way to create specific market content based on what you sell. Housing Marketing is an example that we created two years ago (it needs some work but it still works well for us).

What may seem like the unnecessary investment of creating and managing additional websites can actually allow you to become noticed as a bigger fish in a smaller pond, by having a relevant message for a relevant audience. Not so much traffic perhaps, but a very engaged visitor when they find you.

Back in June we ran a survey online. We also had a little help from email marketing specialists emedia, who mobilised their audience to participate.

The Escape Email Marketing Survey 2008 results can be found here.

Highlights include:

• The need for companies to make a compelling argument for subscribing to an email marketing list
• Marketing and sales Campaigns are being sent with too much irregularity.
• Correct technology to send email campaigns is being used, but more still needs to be done for better penetration
• Personalisation and testing could produce higher levels of engagement for campaigns.
• Companies need to focus more on goal oriented campaigns rather than generic messaging.
• Confusion from marketers about e-mail marketing regulations.

I love it when you load up a website rebuild and results are instant - like this project for emedia.

The website (and content) is a refined offering for marketing their products and services and already, less than ten days later, we have seen search engine traffic more than double.

It’s early days yet but the client has bought into the need to generate content and they have attended our seminars on web strategy, so we are confident that they should see a rise in sales leads through their new website very soon. Case study to follow.

Due to requests from new clients, we will be presenting our Website Strategy Seminar on 25th September 2008 at our offices in Basingstoke. This is a free seminar open to clients and non-clients alike but spaces are limited.

For current Escape web clients, we are also running a website copywriting workshop on the afternoon of 8th Octobe. This paid event is limited to ten spaces (one has already gone today) and we are also offering an early booking discount.

When it comes to commissioning a new website, there is a lot of choice these days. From large web agencies, to one-man bands and students, the price you pay for a website will vary.

But, cost is one thing - value is another thing entirely.

Here’s a new article from The Escape which may answer that big question: How much should you be paying for a business web site? And, more importantly, what you should expect in return?

We’ve externalised a new tool for you lucky people. Basically, that means that we have a suite of tools that we use for our everyday jobs that we have made so you can use it too.

The latest one is the web page inspector -  a real time peek at your web pages to check the integrity of your headings, images, links and meta data. It’s not fully functioning yet and it can’t handle some older technology, such as frames, but it does give you a quick overview of how good, or bad, a web page is.

We don’t all sell lifestyle products, I admit, but when you think a little differently, you can make anything fun… including automated pipette machines…

Thanks for the link Debbie.

Does your business have a website so that you can burn up your marketing budget to get rid of it? I hope not, but if you do have spare marketing cash, feel free to throw it my way!

The reason I ask is that I get the impression that clients almost don’t believe that they should expect sales leads, sign ups, etc. from a new website or a rebuild. Perhaps this is their experience talking, perpetuated by a relatively poor performing website in the past, I’m not sure, but I certainly don’t agree.

In fact, I can’t actually understand why return on investment on a marketing website shouldn’t be a necessity for any business. Many lazy marketers get around this by suggesting that their website is purely for ‘brand awareness’. Yeh, right.

Time and time again at The Escape, we have created websites that do actually deliver tangible results, so I know it is a realistic expectation with the right resources and focus.

So, how do you end up with a website that delivers results? Well, you start from the back… (more…)

In web pitches, it was always quite comforting to state that Google doesn’t like Flash. I’m glad that it happened, as it got rid of most of those awful Flash websites, but, it looks like the bad old days may be coming back as Google learns how to crawl Flash.

I’d like to think that we have all moved on since then and there are some great examples such as carlosulloa (thanks Andy R). But I can’t help thinking that we are about to see a whole new generation of shite, lazy websites.

Flash is undoubtedly a great piece of software and very, very useful… when used appropriately. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you of you have to start “skipping the intros’ once again.