Life online feels more and more like The Matrix with so many tools and programs that monitor and report on our every move. Or what our customers do….
Now that’s something we’d like to know more about—what are my customers doing on my Web site? Could be a simple question for Google Analytics, but more likely, it is that you need and want them to engage with your site, your products and services, and you, the sales person. Let’s be real—that can be super tough.
Enter the world of widgets—mini-applications that do something useful and practical to get your customer engaged. Chunks of code you can embed on your Web site as well as other Web site (as in viral marketing, if people grab your widget and post it places). YouTube is a great example of widget leverage —users can embed their videos into almost any website using widgets. Microsoft calls them gadgets—see Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/114/fast-talk-ahari.html. The goal of a widget is to let people get a taste for your services or products in a fun and easy way. Wikipedia has a decent entry on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget. I have a range of widgets, or extensions, or add-ons for my Firefox browser. One I really like is a search engine optimization tool that analyzes traffic stats and displays them on each site you search—SEO for Firefox http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html.
Here are some places to explore different widgets:
http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/
I got into the world of widgets
when working on a client’s
project for an online demo. They were building a “sales call ROI
calculator” that would tell you how much it cost you to send out a
sales rep on
each call, based on your overall costs. As I started to explore how
they could do that, I found widgets. Their online demo doesn’t seem to
port into
something another person or company would want to put on their website,
but it
did offer a fast and functional look at part of what their solution did
for a
company.
Why think about creating a widget? It can become a viral marketing
opportunity. Also, you don’t need a huge audience to generate new
sales,
if they are the right prospects. If you
can build a tool that serves your market, they will come back to use
that tool,
or load it on their desktop seeing your brand every day. We want to be
ahead of
the curve in sales and marketing—widgets are a growing trend that will
impact
our work. Ultimately, widgets can drive awareness that can drive new
sales.
TJ McCue is president of Q4 Sales, LLC—a business
development and sales consulting company in the
Seattle area. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Journal, Sports
Afield, Backpacker, and others. His blog
Beyond the Algorithm is going through
an extreme makeover… He can be reached at [email protected].
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