We believe that microsites can revolutionize the ways in which businesses communicate. Our technology has been leveraged by everybody from sales teams through to educational institutions and recruiters, to elevate how they do business.
In this whitepaper, we will be focusing on the sales use-case and, specifically, how you can use microsites to competitive advantage.
We recognize that transitioning from a Powerpoint (or Word)-centric organization to one that is dynamic and digital-first, isn't likely to happen overnight. It's a business transformation that requires planning and management to achieve the best results. However, it is possible to gradually pivot and focus on creating compelling digital content experiences. That's why we've been sharing lots of content on this blog designed to help you make the most out of our software.
Here, we'd like to tie some of that knowledge together to help you to get maximum impact from your microsite designs. By putting together the most compelling content experiences, you can:
Here's the basics that you need to know in order to create the best content experiences possible. Feel free to bookmark and refer back to this guide whenever you need a guiding hand in mapping out the process of creating winning microsites.
Firstly, before embracing microsites and digital content experiences, it's a good idea to be clear on exactly what is content experience and which technology makes it feasible in today’s business environment.
Traditionally, when businesses want to communicate information with external parties, they do so by creating static documents. Think about: Word documents, PDFs, Powerpoint presentations.
These kinds of documents aren’t exactly ideal content engagement platforms as you can't measure content engagement. After all, there's no way of collecting analytics from a file-based document. If you can't measure engagement, you can't know what's working, who's reading what, and what you could improve. Sales teams are increasingly moving towards data-based performance tracking and measurement. To collate data, you need a way of receiving it. Microsites can help to plug that gap.
Once you create and share your Word document / PDF / Powerpoint, the content is fixed. There's no easy way to update it on the fly. Online content, by comparison, can be edited easily, keeping it fresh for your audience.
Just like these types of documents aren’t great for content engagement, they aren’t good for creating user experience. Platforms that depend on static content such as PDFs don’t allow elements aimed at improving navigation. For example, you might need to send a sales proposal to a purchasing committee which consists of 5 people. But each will likely only be interested in one specific part. Under the traditional static document model, it's very difficult to cater for this kind of situation. Everybody gets the same document even though there may, in reality, be many different kinds of audiences that you're interested in communicating with. Microsites enable you to add navigation bars and content menus.
By moving your client communication over to microsites, you can effectively address these issues.
Read more: Setting up a team to manage your content experience workflow.
If you're dealing with RFI / RFI responses, then you're no doubt already well-versed in what's required to put together engaging Powerpoint decks.
Transitioning to a digital content experience platform such as microsites should be relatively easy. The good news is that you already likely have all the core players within your organization.
What might a typical microsite-building A-team look like? Consider looping in:
All these resources can come together to work on the design of the proposal so that it has the best chance of winning business for your firm.
It's worth noting:
Read more: Creating an effective design brief for a digital sales proposal
Effective brief-writing is considered an essential skill in creative environments like content and graphic creation agencies.
In order to make the best use of the internal resources on your design and content experience creation team, you'll want to make sure that your sales teams get up to speed on how best to provide them with the information they'll need to make the best possible microsite.
There's no rigid format that you have to follow when putting together a design brief targeted at creating compelling content experiences.
In addition to the above you'll also want to include all the core information that your design team will need to pull together an effective microsite:
Naturally you don't want to overwhelm your design team by including lots of irrelevant information or bogging them down in details that only sales really needs to know about. But a measured degree of quality background information can go a long way towards helping them put together the best possible design for the job being undertaken.
Busy bids and pursuits teams don't have time to build a fresh new site every time they want to put together a proposal that offers compelling digital content experiences. At Zoomforth, we see many users making extensive (and effective) use of our template and hide/reveal feature in order to more quickly roll out versions of microsites.
In fact, this kind of iterative replication process is how most of our customers use the tool and even how we use it ourselves internally.
Using the Zoomforth digital content platform you can create a core template for all your sales proposals. Into this template, you can:
Non-designers can then use the template to create the ‘bones' of their sites in seconds, quickly and easily adding the personalized content they need - e.g. Executive Summary, imagery, video etc.
Some organizations like to maintain various different templates in their Zoomforth accounts while others prefer to model everything off the one skeleton. It's important to remember that there's no right or wrong approach. But both these options will save significant time and make using the tool more scalable than building from scratch every time.
That said, even users that work with templates sometimes prefer to build a new microsite from scratch. Using Zoomforth users can:
Ultimately, most design and sales teams will find the approach that works best for them. This can be a gradual process.
Read more: Five UX Rules For Designing Beautiful Digital Sales Proposals.
When it comes to creating microsite-based content experiences, the only limit is your imagination! Nevertheless, it's advisable to keep some core design principles in mind when creating your sites.
Audiences expect certain visual clues in materials that they read. By deviating from these, you risk making a less than professional impression upon those you are sending your digital sales proposals to.
As we mentioned earlier, multiple stakeholders are likely to be involved in evaluating a digital sales proposal. Not everybody is going to be interested in reading through the whole thing. To make your recipients' jobs easier, add a clear navigation to your proposal that makes it easier for certain recipients to jump to the section(s) that interest them the most.
Decide upon your visual branding guidelines and then stick to them as you iterate on your sites. Remember that with Zoomforth you can utilize templates to make this substantially easier.
Research has proven that people don't read online—they scan. You should write in short paragraphs and break up long stretches of text with bold subheadings.
You want to make the proposal as engaging and easy to read as possible. The microsite is there to provide color to your proposal but there is no reason why you should not also include the written proposal document as a downloadable file as well. That way, recipients can choose to consume the content offline if they prefer. Remember that you're trying to work with your recipients' content preferences and not box them into staying on the site.
We recommend running A/B testing on certain elements. You can then accrue useful data that proves that your digital sales proposals are working for readers. With the advantage of analytics at hand, there's simply no need to rely upon guesswork when designing sales proposals digitally.
It is widely recognized in the design circles that interactive content platforms are on the up. However, visual designers are expecting to see several other design trends receive more prominence across multiple content platforms this year.
You'll want to consider:
It would be a pity to make the transition over to digital sales proposals without taking maximum advantage of all the perks that modern-day content platforms have to offer.
Static Powerpoints are notoriously dull. By sending secure microsites, you can really provide your recipients with a much more immersive reading experience. To learn more about Zoomforth's security settings, please see our help resource.
Not sure how your proposals are performing? Don’t forget to dive deep into the analytics. You’ll be able to see which parts of the site are captivating your audiences’ attention — and which might be leaving them in the cold.
Read more: How to influence a potential customer that you've never met
At this stage, most of us have become quite well accustomed to working remotely—including selling.
One of the pitfalls of this way of doing business is having to get used to online-only relationships. How can you suss out the personalities of those to whom you are selling? And why does it even matter?
Spoiler alert: it does, and it's a relevant consideration for your design team to keep in mind. After all, what is content engagement other than ensuring the recipient’s attention and persuading them to move towards a specific direction? So, it should not surprise you that getting a handle on what kinds of personalities you're dealing with can actually give you a surprise secret power when it comes to selling more effectively remotely.
Want to get the most out of your content experience design? Keep the following tips in mind to design the most impactful proposals that will have you converting sales leads into customers in no time!
Moving towards immersive content experiences and away from static documents can make a significant difference in terms of how engaged your prospects are with your sales materials. It also gives you access to an entirely new pool of data that you may not have been able to tap into before.
Follow the above tips to make the most of the new and improved way to send digital sales proposals to prospects.
Gather and manage media, easily create content-rich microsites, and analyze communications effectiveness. Create stand-out digital experiences for your clients from scratch—no design skills required.
In addition to our self-service software, we also have a professional design team who can build your microsites for you as a managed service.
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