Advertise on Your Customers' Desktops with Widgets

Whether they’re for quickly checking stocks, the weather, or what’s playing at a local theater, applications known as “widgets” can be the perfect tools for businesses to market and advertise their products while allowing people to stay current on changes and offerings right from their desktops.

Nearly every type of business can use widgets for brand propagation, instant transactions, and even customer analytics. Widgets, which are almost always offered for free, are a great way to get your business on the desktops of your customers. Take a popular lunchtime restaurant for example. By building a simple widget for customers to download, the owner can easily market and advertise the specials of the day and quickly update them at any time.

Widgets have also gone mobile on smartphones and other pocket devices. By creating a mobile widget, business owners can target customers in their vicinity who have GPS on their mobile devices and announce new product arrivals, store discounts, general store information, product updates, and so on.

Creating a widget is fairly easy. KickApps is an authoring tool that uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, which makes it great for anyone who is a first-timer and wants to build a widget from scratch and be able to see the result as they go along. With point-and-click, drag-and-drop features that include adding images, RSS feeds, lists, buttons, and video capabilities, any business owner can build a widget that looks like it was outsourced to a seasoned programmer.

If that isn’t easy enough, KickApps also offers dozens of default widget layouts with real-time preview capabilities; and its one-click syndication feature will place your company’s widget on a number of major Web portals. What’s more, KickApps has recently partnered with Clearspring, which offers creation, distribution, tracking, and monetization services.

What does this mean for your business? Simply, this will enable Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease, using KickApps’ WYSIWYG functionality. In turn, KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services to provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps platform. Businesses can get started using either KickApps or Clearspring, which has tallied more than 47.5 million unique widget viewers in one month, according to comScore’s Widget Metrix report, for free.