A microsite – a smaller website that is distinct from your main business or corporate website – can be a great marketing tool. Designed, deployed and maintained appropriately, it allows you to track a campaign’s success in terms of web traffic and registrations on the microsite domain. A microsite can also be geared to attract audiences who wouldn’t necessarily visit your corporate website. For example, the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, Inc. runs several microsites that appeal to specific cheese consumers, such as Grilled Cheese Academy, Cheese Cupid and Cheese & Burger Society.
Or consider Elf Yourself, a microsite by Office Max, where users create a holiday greeting featuring themselves as a dancing elf. It may not directly sell office supplies, but goes viral every year, with accompanying media coverage. It’s an easy to remember link that users want to share, and is an example of how a microsite can break out of the corporate website template and let the brand out to play.
Why Not Just Use Social Media?
Microsites were not slayed by social media, although social media can be a cost-effective way to do some things microsites used to, such as promote short-term content. A microsite gives you more control and ownership over your content—and your analytics—and you won’t be boxed in by social media templates and user restrictions.
Other Kinds of Microsites
Beyond splashy Flash-driven marketing websites, microsites serve other purposes too:
- A mobile microsite offers a stripped-down, action-oriented, narrowly focused slice of your website to tablet and smartphone users.
- A landing page microsite is a single, highly-customized page that contains all the information your user needs to fulfill your email marketing or pay-per-click campaign, such as a contest or deal promo.
7 Reasons to Create a Microsite
- You want to focus on one thing. A microsite helps your product, brand, campaign, event, etc. stand out, rather than getting lost in the navigation of a larger website.
- You want design flexibility. Whether to integrate with a media campaign, create distance between the corporate mothership and the brand name, or to create something more attention-getting than a standard website, microsites offer creative possibilities.
- You want to users to do something. Stripped from the navigational mindset of the web design, a microsite allows marketers to marry content and design to get users to the call to action. You’ve carefully pulled them in through email and social media and SEO tactics, so don’t lose them or distract them!
- You want to optimize SEO. As well as appearing under a unique and memorable domain name of its own, a microsite can be optimized for a few highly focused keywords – including keywords you may not have in your corporate site.
- You want to reach out to different audiences. As in the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board example, microsites can be targeted toward specific groups of users. Another example is the Be Remarkable microsite produced by Credit Unions BC to educate young adults and students about money—and the benefits of credit unions. Though users can go to the sponsor’s website for more info, all the relevant information and the call to action is on the microsite.
- You want it to go away, someday. While some microsites become integrated with long-term campaigns (such as Got Milk?), many microsites live for a relatively short time. And because it is only loosely integrated with the rest of your web content, you can easily take down the microsite when your campaign is over. In fact, you should never let a good microsite go stale!
Developing a microsite is quicker than developing a full website, although not necessarily cheaper or easier. Your marketing objective must be strong, your focus singular, your user path crystal-clear and your content, of course, great. Tell a story and get them to your call to action—and don’t forget the sharing buttons.
