And the winner is: Barack Obama

By Frank Chamberlin

I don’t know any more than you about the race to be President. But have you had a chance to look at the Obama site?

It’s absolutely worth a visit. I promise. www.barackobama.com

If you have ever wondered what a perfect online marketing campaign looks like, maybe this is it.

The Obama online marketing team is implementing every online marketing strategy available, including social networking, search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, email marketing and mobile marketing.

But that’s not all. As far as I can see, the implementation is flawless.

OK, I know, they have a huge budget and maybe you don’t. But this is a site that you can learn from.

If you are looking at ways to improve your website’s conversion rate, look at how the Obama website is designed. If you are looking at ways to implement social networking, check out the profile pages on MySpace or Facebook.

Let’s look at just a few of the specifics that make this such an excellent site.

1. The first time you visit the site you are asked to join his mailing list. Before you can view any part of Obama’s site you are taken to a page where you are asked to subscribe – but it is an easy subscribe and if you don’t want to be in it, you don’t have to.
   
   
2. Every web page furthers the primary action to ‘Donate Now’. No matter what page you are visiting on the Barack Obama website, the red ‘donate now’ button grabs your attention. It is essentially the only red image on a blue, grey and white website.
   
   
3. Clear layout. The way that the information is laid out and presented makes it easy to use and, more importantly, to scan. As we all know, website visitors have the shortest attention span of any mode of communication, quickly jumping between pages and leaving sites when they cannot quickly find what they are looking for.
   
   On the Obama home page, the information draws you in. You can quickly find what you are looking for, and it is easy to take action to learn more.
   
   
4. A blog is used to communicate messages. It seems that posts are added to the blog multiple times per day to communicate with supporters on a daily basis, as well as providing a channel for supporters to keep up to date.
   
   
5. Social networking is used to maximise exposure. Social networking is growing so fast and Obama is there. If you scroll down to the bottom of Obama’s site you will see that he has an account with virtually every high traffic social networking site on the Internet. They are all active accounts and they all drive traffic to the main site.
   
   
6. Mobile marketing is used to further his message
   Barack Obama includes a mobile subscription section on his website where you can join his SMS mailing list.

Your site may not be as good as you would like it to be. By spending some time on the Obama site, maybe you’ll see how much better it could be.