If you're ready to go global but want to test the waters first before jumping into comprehensive website translation, a microsite is a great way to start. The 10 teasers below are taking from our full newsletter article, published in Q2.
1. Refine your scope: Reduce your microsite wish list to fit your goals: which countries make your product or service a natural fit? What industry-specific research interests you in these countries?
2. Understand operational impact: Will you ship physical products? If so, you’ll need to understand how to fulfill orders. Can you narrow down which products or services you can sell into the market from existing operations (or online)?
3. Define your goals: What objectives do you want to meet from the outset? Walk through the story of your microsite from the point of view of your international audience. Before they leave, what’s the best possible outcome?
4. Choose the right metrics: Match metrics to goals. Do you want visitors to register for more information? Order a sample? Site registrations, direct sales, time on site, likes, tweets and reblogs are all different metrics that may matter.
5. Reduce translation costs with images: Consider leveraging images to promote your business to the audience. User-submitted photographic content is a good way to achieve this. You’ll just want to make sure that any images you use are culturally appropriate for the target country or region.
6. Leverage interactivity: What can you add to make your site sticky? What would make it social and shareable so that people will promote it for you? The “gamification” of a microsite can be powerful both for social sharing and user engagement, thus lowering your marketing costs.
7. Build for your audience: In some instances, it may be more advantageous to create unique content specific to the country of choice.
8. Mind mobile: Understand how your target country interacts with brands online. How mobile are they? What are their platforms of choice? Does this site need to function in the same way on a mobile device as it does on the web?
9. Engage social media globally: The success of your microsite may live or die based on how well you tap local language social media pages. At the very least, you need to look beyond U.S. social media when it comes time to promote your microsite.
10. Budget beyond building: Budget for the length of your commitment to the microsite, as well as any updates or maintenance you anticipate along the way. Remember: Product updates, monitoring of user-generated content, or usability revisions.
Want more detail? Read our newsletter article or take a look at this article from our President, Michael Kriz, originally published on Vator.tv. Have ideas? Comment below!
