If you haven’t already noticed, the past two months have been notable for sites upping the community and audiencing antes—and finding new and innovative ways to communicate with users. We’re speaking, of course, about HP.com’s new home page which launched last month. Now you can add Intel.com to the list.
The new Intel.com allows visitors to navigate into the site using task-based Work and Play metaphors.
The new Intel.com allows visitors to navigate into the site using task-based Work and Play metaphors. Like HP.com, it’s pretty hard to miss the new Intel.com. The changes start with a brand new global page that brings a couple of new wrinkles to the party. Unlike other global home pages that provide a list of country links, Intel.com allows visitors to select their country location and instantly navigate into different parts of the Intel site. Here, Intel.com uses a combined task & audiencing metaphor: Work (read: business), Play (read: consumer and gamers) and About Intel (read: corporate info). Interactive fly-outs provide snippets about what’s in each zone. Add the classic links at the bottom of the page, plus a few others (jobs, RSS, investor relations, press), and you have a simple & easy to use global front door.
The Play Zone Delivers a Marketing Tour de Force
Once inside the site, it’s pretty obvious that the centerpiece of this update is Intel.com’s new “Play” zone, which is optimized for consumers. This zone is the home for Intel’s new “What’s Inside You?” campaign which (like Cisco.com’s very successful Human Network campaign) creates community by encouraging visitors to share their stories online. Here, Intel pulls out all of the stops with beautifully designed interactive graphics and a streamlined registration process.
Intel.com's smartly executed "live action" techniques are a marketing tour de force.
But the real gem in this new zone lies in how Intel.com has truly revolutionized how a site can be used to educate visitors and lead them through the product discovery, selection and shopping processes. To see why, start your journey at http://www.intel.com/en_US/Consumer/Learn/Processors/index.htm or http://www.intel.com/consumer/index.htm.
Forget pages packed full of gnarly lists of Intel processors that only an engineer can understand. Forget technical jabberwocky, boring speeds and feeds, and marketing manifestos. In this zone, Intel.com harnesses the power of interactive videos to tell its story. The landing page starts with a smartly executed video that explains why processors matter (who knew?) and encourages visitors to learn more. This, in turn, leads visitors to interactive videos that align Intel’s processor families by form factor (desktops, notebooks, mobile devices) and by target applications & uses. There’s even a path for visitors who don’t know which way to go.
And what’s the net effect of this video journey? By the time you finish listening and learning, you’ve made enough logical selections to shop for Intel-based products offered by prominent retailers, such as Lenovo, Acer and HP. From start to finish, it’s a 5 minute journey. From an online product marketing perspective, it’s a million miles ahead.
From start to fnish, it’s a 5 minute journey. From an online product marketing perspective, it’s a million miles ahead.
SITEIQ VIEW | Although there’s much, much more to this launch than Intel.com’s savvy use of videos (including some product marketing pages that have all the right stuff), there’s no doubt this is the breakthrough best practice that shouldn’t be missed. Why? Because every IT Website team we work with struggles with the same basic problem: how to lead visitors to the right product based on their technical, application and usage needs. Once they are there, the challenge turns to clearly communicating the company’s value proposition, explaining product benefits, and encouraging visitors to take the next step.
If you look closely at Intel.com’s new best practice, it achieves all of these objectives—plus some. It starts by explaining the company’s value proposition in easy to understand terms; organizes and presents products based on the visitors needs; stresses benefits and capabilities—and then hands the visitor off to retailers to take the next step. Best of all, it achieves these objectives in less than five minutes–and without expecting visitors to wade through a blizzard of links backed by deadly dull marketing prose.
This, of course, brings us to the gazillion dollar question. How likely is it that Intel.com’s best practice will change existing online product marketing rules? My magic 8 ball says “stay tuned.” There are too many gating factors in play. First, these features are clearly budget busters. If that’s not a problem, one could argue that this technique consumes too much bandwidth, which limits the audience and might make the site appear to run slow (although that hasn’t been a problem with my garden variety high speed connection). It’s also important to consider the impact of these ‘fat’ applications on mobile devices and other Internet appliances—especially in countries where PCs are not the access points of choice. Auto-play videos can also be annoying if visitors pogo-stick around a site (like us). Intel.com’s speaker icon is handy solution, but a cadre of usability gurus will argue (probably with some merit) that auto-play behaviors are a sin.
Whatever the long term outcome, Intel.com gets a huge thumbs up in my book for pushing on the product marketing envelope. Through its savvy videos, it has succeeded in taking a product misunderstood by zillions and has woven it into digital gold. If Intel.com can do this for a piece of silicon that is invisible to users, just think about what the rest of the IT industry could do.
Tags: best practice, consumer, intel.com, product marketing, small business, Web 2.0, website design
