Landing pages for widgets

“What’s a widget?” It’s a great line from Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School movie:

It’s also the question that a lot of marketers have been asking themselves.

In a previous post on widgets, landing pages, and marketer freedom, we actually distinguish between two different types of widgets. Promotion widgets are widgets that you distribute to end-users to plug into Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle start pages, etc. Engagement widgets are widgets that you place on your own web site or landing pages as a way of plugging in more on-page interactivity and dynamic content.

We’ve talked a lot about engagement widgets on landing pages because, well, we’re a landing page company, and widgets are a great way to modularize exciting features on your landing pages without getting into the traditional IT development quagmire.

But promotion widgets are exciting in their own way because they can be a source of traffic.

Bob Garfield recently wrote an article in Advertising Age Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren’t More Advertisers Using Them? He makes the case for the marketers developing and distributing useful widgets to their audience as a way of building their brand and generating purchase-intent clicks:

Wanna get away… from the Old Model? Look no further than widgets, the mini software applications downloadable to browsers, desktops, social-networking pages, home pages and mobile phones. The widget may not be the holy grail, but it’s arguably pretty damn grail-ish — maybe the highest expression so far of online marketing in the Post-Advertising Age.

Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World. These compact, portable little software apps — from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators — are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful.

The natural question to ask — at least on this blog — is when people click on links in your promotion widget, where do they go?

The natural answer is landing pages for widgets that are strongly message-matched to the context in which people clicked. The widget can pass along behavioral parameters directly to the landing page, which can maximize the in-the-moment synergy between the two. And, in a landing page environment, it’s easy enough to continue to test and refine new versions of the post-click experience.

Of course, you can also use engagement widgets on your landing pages.

Perhaps another way of thinking of these two kinds of widgets is promotion widget as pre-click widgets used to generate traffic and engagement widgets as post-click widgets to efficiently optimize the experience once those respondents click through.

Garfield gives a plethora of examples of different kinds of widgets in his article. Well worth reading — and thinking about the post-click follow through.