The Campaign Site — Please Rest in Peace

This is a guest post by Tom Daly.

Design, user exper­i­ence and social media-friendly fea­tures con­tin­ue to drive web devel­op­ment, but the most import­ant factor will always be inform­a­tion architecture.

The Trend

Agency billing is a com­plic­ated beast. Or per­haps not.

The need to inflate billing to the max­im­um level has led to vari­ous agen­cies pitch­ing and cre­at­ing cam­paign sites. After all, design­ing and devel­op­ing a site to house your innov­at­ive con­tent will cer­tainly boost your rev­en­ue by $20,000 – $50,000.

The Problem

If you are cre­at­ing cam­paign sites, you do not deserve your cli­ent for the fol­low­ing reasons:

1. You are cre­at­ing tem­por­ary inbound links to the e‑commerce infrastructure.

2. You are cre­at­ing dead links. Click-happy users world­wide will link to your cam­paign site, and these will become dead links. (Common prac­tice is indeed to set up a redir­ect how­ever, serving me con­tent I don’t expect or want is as bad as a dead link).

3. You are try­ing to take a site from 0 unique vis­it­ors to a sub­stan­tial fig­ure rather than host­ing on the brand site and bene­fit­ting from an exist­ing vis­it­or base.

4. Your cli­ent’s cam­paign site will hang itself slowly. As Burberry’s “Art of the Trench” and Tiffany’s engage­ment ring cam­paign sites know: sub­stan­tial hype is cre­ated, and unique vis­it­ors come flood­ing in… Then the site matures, it becomes stale and dies a slow and pain­ful death. Why not pay the Sartorialist to shoot addi­tion­al con­tent to make it seem some­what alive — I hear every blog­ger has their price these days? ¹I don’t trust com​pete​.com, but it puts ArtoftheTrench​.com at around 6,000 uniques per month at the moment.

5. Commerce and con­tent should be inter­woven. My pur­chase tak­ing place away from the cre­ated con­tent gives me anoth­er reas­on not to buy. If you cre­ate the desire, ful­fil it right there and then.

The Solution

I’m not a geni­us. You know per­haps bet­ter than I that a sol­id online cam­paign or social media ini­ti­at­ive will drive con­ver­sion when you have your 4 C’s: ²Disclaimer: This mod­el belongs to Mr Mark Bartlett of IntersectNYC​.com. I haven’t spoken to him for a while, but I hope he’s still almost as beau­ti­ful as his mod­el.

Content + Catalogue (Shoppable Product) + Community = Mass Conversion

I believe any advances we see in e‑commerce (and it’s all about money) will be the first indi­vidu­als to ques­tion the tra­di­tion­al archi­tec­ture of an e‑commerce site. Through new con­tent and design, we are all seek­ing to shorten and alter site inform­a­tion architecture.

Hence, seek to integ­rate your ever-evolving and long-last­ing cam­paigns into the inform­a­tion archi­tec­ture of the exist­ing site frame­work. It’s bet­ter for everyone.

About the writer: Tom Daly is a digit­al con­sult­ant pas­sion­ate about e‑commerce integ­ra­tion, con­tent strategy, and social media.

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