Online Properties

Blogs, communities, microsites, websites... they each server a unique purpose, but they need to feed each other.

The Opportunity:

It's a problem that many enterprise and B2B websites struggle with: focusing on their audience. Ask five stakeholders in the company who the audience is that their site needs to serve, and you'll get 10 different answers. Looking to revamp and expand your growing mountain of content; it quickly becomes clear that no one structure, and no one backbone, will address all your requirements.

Soon corporate adjunct websites start to pop up. Each one tailored to the content needs and tools required for the audience segments. A blog: for thought leadership content. A customer portal: for binary downloads. An online community: for users and Product Management to converse directly. A knowledge base: for self serving support. And finally, an informational research site: that serves a greater good for the world... and builds some brand awareness.

Having so much focused content is never a bad thing. It's just a missed opportunity if you don't cross-pollinate.

The Payoff:

With multiple online properties, come multiple on-ramps to introducing your brand and convert a prospect into an opportunity. Regardless of the audience segment, and how they found one of you, you have a "big picture vision" to sell them. And it's best to tell that story one piece at a time. Give them what they came for. Nicely, and without impeding the primary content, offer a just a little extra. Then follow that with an opportunity for a conversion.

The Example:

Recently Lumension redesign it's blog. And by redesigned, I don't mean that we revamped the layout and added some new imagery. We did that, but with forethought and purpose to a higher strategic goals.

The Lumension Optimal Security Blog

Our blog audience is a unique one for Lumension. They tend to find us quite by accident, largely via Google search for key terms. Ever look up if "Yes Mac's Get Viruses" – you'll find one of our blog entries as the #1 search result. You weren't looking for a blog post from some company you've never heard of, but you found it... and now you're going to click on that link.

While a large number of these viewers are not going to be the primary audience of a B2B security company, a share of them will be – and those are opportunities. Opportunities: to build brand awareness, to introduce and repurpose our various web properties, to convert to a prospect.

Tie in #1.

The first thing you'll notice when visiting the Lumension blog is that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. Literally. And by literally, I mean quite figuratively. Right there - under the logo you'll see it in big red text... the Current IT Risk Posture is HIGH. Planting our flag of knowledge as a IT security thought leader should, we're telling you what we as company with global reach knows about the raging wars of cyber threats. And this info is not something that is just made up for the blog. It's actual data fed by our Endpoint Intelligence Center. An online resource: that our prospective IT security administrator can leverage for free in his daily fight against viruses. Building that awareness as a thought leader.

Tie in #2.

Premium content. That stuff you normally would charge registration for... well here's a bit of free content for you, the reader, from your good friends at Lumension. Some whitepapers, some on-demand webinars. And since you're reading a post about viruses; how about this topic appropriate whitepaper called "Think Your Anti-Virus Software Is Working? Think Again". Wouldn't you like to click this link?

Relevant Registration Free Content Offers

What's the catch... nothing. But when you click on the link and go read the whitepaper on our corporate site, two things are going to happen. 1. We're going to track where you came from. 2. We're going to give you the opportunity to now register for three offers... all of which are contextually relevant to your issue.

Your Free Content With Registration Opportunities

Tie in #3

Reseeding. Not only did we look to bring other great sources of content into the blog... we took the blog out. Namely to our corporate website. Reading about one of our products or solutions, here's some related blog posts you may want to peruse.

Tying all the together.

While each our corporate sites serve a unique audience, that doesn't mean we should do what we can to educate our base on the existence of these other sites.
To round out our cross-pollination opportunity, we have for you this elegant drop down navigation "what" and "where" you may find the rest of our content.

Intuitive and Interactive Website Switching Dropdown

See it in Action

See how we tied all of our online properties together at Lumension by visiting our Optimal Security Blog