To keep pace with today’s consumers, companies are taking steps to breathe life into their websites by allowing visitor dialogue. Chat rooms, blogs, forums, bulletin boards, newsletters and calendars are some ways companies are encouraging communication among site visitors. This often results in increased site stickiness, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and long-term business relationships. However, one of Starkmedia’s clients has found a unique way to engage their visitor.

Meriter Health Services

Meriter Health Services has been a long time client of Starkmedia. In addition to their recent redesign to support the new “My Meriter” marketing campaign, Starkmedia developed an application that allows visitors to share their Meriter experiences. Patients now have the ability to interact with the community by writing “My Meriter Story”. By allowing this “interaction”, Meriter anticipates growth in their visitors’ loyalty, advocacy, emotional attachment and commitment to their brand. Furthermore, it illustrates to potential visitors the quality of this organization while reinforcing their mission to heal, teach, embrace and serve.

The benefits are endless with the establishment of an online community. Here are a few examples of their value:

• A New Marketing Channel
  More cost effective than advertising, direct mail, or telesales and far more effective. Use the power of word-of-mouth to create awareness and attract new visitors.
• Immediate, Unfiltered Feedback
  Members aren’t answering a survey or sitting in a stuffy focus group, they’re simply conversing with online friends – often about their experiences. There is no better source for unvarnished customer feedback.
• Reduction in support costs
  Strong communities can become living, breathing FAQs. The collective knowledge of the group and members’ willingness to help each other can mean significant savings in your call center and email support teams.

The best online communities bring people together to connect around a common point of interest. The attraction is a passion for your product and a desire to share experiences and views with others who feel the same way. If you ask members of your community why they come, not one of them will say “Oh, to build loyalty to the brand.” But that’s exactly what happens.

To start building a community with the help of Starkmedia, call us at 414.226.2710 or contact us.

Communicating efficiently and effectively with both employees and your customers, clients, and partners can be a difficult and expensive task. So how can these management areas be monitored and streamlined in one location? A well-maintaned extranet can boost the reputation of your organization, change your organization’s relationships with trusted parties, and be a first step to encouraging flexible working through the provision of secure access by mobile and home workers to corporate IT resources.

American Gypsum
American Gypsum contacted Starkmedia to build an exclusive internet portal where their 800 plus customers could access their most current account information 24 hours a day.

Starkmedia built a customer extranet that incorporated their current branding efforts and collateral design. This password-protected site, allows customers to access their order history, pricing data, volume reports and shipping schedules. An online survey tool was added to glean important information for marketing and customer service research. Promotional announcements can also be added to the extranet site to encourage repeat visits to the site and more interaction between American Gypsum and its customers.

Some advantages of an extranet include:

• Boost Productivity
  Automating processes that have been done manually will increase your company’s productivity. Critical information won’t get buried in the mail or inbox, and busy employees won’t miss key events. An extranet can monitor projects and serve as source of new, important information for internal employees.
• Flexibility
  When you use an extranet to make information and applications available to partners, vendors, clients and customers, everyone can operate when and where it’s most convenient. This self-serve approach frees you from unnecessary meetings and phone tag, and it cuts down on the costs associated with in-person information exchanges.
• Timely and Accurate Information
  Instantly release and update sensitive information such as price lists, inventories, or manuals. Compared to typical paper-based publishing processes, an extranet offers a unique opportunity to get hot information into the right hands before it cools and before it’s out-of-date.
• Reduced Inventory
  One of the hallmarks of a business-to-business extranet is its impact on supply-chain management. By linking your inventory system directly to a supplier, you can process orders as soon as the system knows you need them, thus reducing the stock you keep on hand and making the procurement process more efficient.
• Client Marketing
  Attract new clients or gain additional business from existing clients. By effectively communicating that you not only provide excellent services and advice, but you do so in a way that makes it much more convenient for the client to use, consume and monitor, you differentiate yourself from competitors.
• Community Building
  Extranets create a community where a shared set of values and purposes is given a new forum. Rather than each of your clients, vendors, employees working through or around each other with the benefit of only partial or third hand instructions, they can all be brought into the same circle and work toward the common goal by the very structure of the site itself.

Whether your aim is to cut costs, automate processes, or improve customer service and business relationships, deploying an extranet solution can be done quickly and securely with the technologies available today at Starkmedia. To find out more about extranet development, call us at 414.226.2710 or contact us.

If you’re looking for a highly effective method of increasing your sales, then mini sites may be your answer. Mini sites are one of the most effective marketing tools online. They can also be used with any affiliate programs you may be promoting. The sole purpose of a mini site is to attract highly targeted traffic. The more targeted the better. For example, if you have a web site that sells a number of products, a good mini site would focus on one specific product instead of all of the products. You could create a mini site for each product you offer.

Incentives such as a free bonus for purchasing the product or even a personal recommendation are a great way to “presell” the product. By offering useful articles, reviews and resources, you can also educate your customers, who will then buy your products based on the trust and rapport you’ve been able to build.

Briggs & Stratton Power Products

One of our clients has created several mini sites highlighting their standby and portable generators, pressure washers and outboard motors. Each of Briggs & Stratton Power Products’ mini sites are streamlined with a large amount of content that focuses on each individual product category. For example www.outdoorcleaning.com focuses on pressure washers. This mini site features valuable tips and demonstrates proper techniques to effectively use the product on any surface. Care and storage of the product, accessories, and ask the expert (Ask Pat) are also available on their site. By building these mini sites, they have made it easier for their visitors to find and view specific content related to these product categories rather than weeding through it on their corporate site.

Search Benefits

Each mini site is focused on the optimization of one specific product or category. By concentrating on just a few keyword phrases, this will assist in ranking higher in the Search Engine for your targeted audience. Remember … the tighter the targeting the better.

The reason why mini sites are becoming so effective now is because they are “direct response sites” and the visitors are usually targeted individuals who have a genuine interest in what the site has to offer.

In summary, build a content site that addresses your consumers needs, optimize it for the search engines, and be ready to hang in there for the long haul if you want to achieve success. For immediate results, rather than obsessing with organic search engine results, you might be better off by focusing your energies on one of your profitable products, building an effective mini site landing page, and learning how to craft pay per click ads that produce high click through rates of targeted, profitable traffic.

Starkmedia can provide the right solutions for you and your company, contact us for more information.