For brand building and lead generation, the internet has leveled the playing field. It’s not enough to have a website or rely on brand awareness to make digital marketing a success. The Internet provides several marketing resources, but one that is sometimes underestimated or under-recognized is a microsite.
What is a microsite?
A microsite is a branded website that operates independently from the main website. The concept behind a microsite is to be a platform for prospective consumers to explore the brand and interact with specific content. This interaction can vary from simply reading the content to storing documents in a specialized hub to signing up customers for email newsletters or text messages Although a microsite always includes the brand components (logo, color schemes, fonts, etc.), there are other ways to make the microsite stand apart from the usual website or create a specific message.
If you have hundreds or thousands of pages on your website, a microsite is a perfect place to outline or narrow down to the purpose of your specific campaign, debut product, or expansion of your services. Microsites are a great way for brands to leverage what digital media delivers, especially if they are in competitive industries.
What is the difference between a microsite and a website?
Unique domain name
One of the main differences between a microsite and a normal website is that a microsite lives on its own independent domain i.e. its own web address or URL that need not contain your brand name. If your website is www.example.com, your microsite domain could be, say, www.bestmarketingcampaignever.com.
Microsites are not subdomains
It’s important not to confuse microsites with subdomains, which are sites that exist under your main domain. Some of your favorite websites have blog sections with the word ‘blog’ in front of their URLs. What you have is a blog within the main website. Using the case, the subdomain for a blog will be www.blog.example.com.
Microsites are usually temporary
Microsites are temporary sites in most situations and are part of unique marketing campaigns or strategies. When the campaign is done, the microsite ends as well. Some microsites are constantly updated, repurposed by companies, or are finally integrated into the main website.
Microsites has unique content
A microsite has its own exclusive audio, images, and videos that are not on the official website. Creative communication tasks are often in microsites.
Size doesn’t always matter
A microsite also has limited pages compared with a traditional website. What microsites marketers try to do is eliminate clutter and confusion because content becomes far more centered.
Microsites have their own strategy
A digital marketing plan is not real if it does not impact keyword advertising, consumer purpose, client advertising, call-to-action, social media, link-building (referral links to the microsite from high-quality third-party websites), and email marketing among others. How a company addresses these considerations would be specific for a microsite than how it manages them with the main website. For a targeted campaign, the aim is to streamline these factors. Such considerations can then quantify output and establish benchmarks.
What makes a good microsite?
A microsite exists for one of these two reasons:
- Highlighting a specific campaign like a promotion, an exclusive product, or a game
- Creating daily content such as a video content portal or a popular newsletter topic
Microsites can support the company with automatic email campaigns by building segmented groups of email clients based on certain factors, because of their emphasis on specific audiences.
A good microsite must be accurate with its messaging and satisfy both the brand’s marketing intent and satisfy the visitor’s intent. A perfect way to do this is to simplify your microsite while still delivering a delightful experience. A few other items create a strong microsite here:
- Unique content
The microsite should provide something that is as original as possible, worthy of being unique, and stands out from the regular website of a company. This means you can communicate with unique, targeted audiences. A microsite shows different aspects of your business that you want to show off.
- Search experience
If a microsite contains more than one one tab, navigation will be simple and intuitive. Microsites can help improve conversion levels by taking away obstacles (such as website navigation). They push people to a certain action – only by providing them the details they need to take that action.
- An immersive experience
Gamification (integrating gameplay mechanics) is a perfect way to get the visitor to take part in a promotion and to engage with them. The longer they linger and browse, the more their visit’s memory endures.
What about Microsite and SEO?
Since microsites focus on specific topics, you can build web pages that contain SEO niche keywords (especially within your URL). The more you use specific SEO keywords, the quicker people can find you. Tick these off these items on this microsite checklist anytime you try to build a microsite:
- Describe your reasoning for the microsite. Is it for a special promotion? Are you looking to house any specific content? Whatever it is, this needs to be answered before anything else.
- Create an SEO strategy within the microsite niche. This website is not merely a smaller version of the main website. It needs to use clear SEO keywords that will specifically lead users to it.
- Make a single domain or a subdomain. A microsite is intended to be a website different from the main website and that operates for a special reason.
- Be inspired. It’s nice to look for microsites to emulate, if you build the microsite yourself or outsource for development and design.
Benefits of Developing a Microsite
Microsite helps a company to target their audiences through other content strategies. Companies also have websites that are static in design and messaging. Not to suggest that this is a negative thing: these websites often make sense for companies in certain industries. What a microsite will encourage any company to do is:
- Be very imaginative
- Reach markets who need separate advertising than the traditional brand model
- Play with various media platforms (blogs, photo, audio, etc.)
- Develop another medium to achieve online exposure
- Invite users to preview a potential product or service
- Build an innovative means of collecting emails or creating social network followers
- Display another aspect to the company (this could require changing the voice tone)
- Include a website that functions as part of the whole program (e.g. spring fashion campaign)
By now you’re already beginning to understand how useful the digital marketing strategy will be for a microsite. Time to go into detail!
1.Increase brand awareness
Microsites are giving companies another path to increase their brand recognition online. If they’re used for entertaining, insightful, and imaginative stuff, they may help achieve or sustain top-of- the-mind recognition. Anything worth investing like a microsite will give you the advantage over your rivals.
2. Generate new leads
Generating new leads is at the root of any marketing strategy. A microsite should draw in a prospective consumer, instead of driving them into several actions that may turn them into a lead. Customers have never been more conscious or suspicious of targeted web ads. By developing experiences that appear insightful and entertaining rather than the typical hard sale or force selling strategies, the best microsite offers a smooth, effortless cycle from excitement to real interest. Prospects go on to the next phase in the sales pipeline, as they venture and experience the microsite.
3. Inexpensive
Microsite should be as inexpensive or as costly as your budget requires. Since loads of money spent isn’t necessarily equivalent to fantastic outcomes (you’ll be surprised at how low-quality many expensively designed websites and apps can be), microsites’ affordability might still outdo all others. This ensures that by being innovative and delivering valuable content, smaller companies can contend with the big businesses.
4. Can be part of the purchase process for customers
Customers now go through many touch points in the sales funnel thanks to the ever-changing Internet. The “Micro-moments” invented by Google (consumers focus on apps for knowledge collection purposes and may purchase) is becoming a big part of customer behavior. A microsite that provides enough information for a customer is a great way to increase interest wherever they browse for purchase. You can create a microsite for any of the steps in the sales funnel.
5. Engage with more customers
These days the customers are seeking more from brands. A TV ad, a radio commercial or a “Please purchase us now!!! ” page banner just won’t do anything. Customers want engagement and they expect loyalty. A microsite is a way to do it more quickly. If you give them this, they would be grateful for your efforts by communicating your content and your brand’s reputation by word-of-mouth marketing and being brand fans, repeat visits, and more.
6. Perfect for CRM
Your marketing experience through a microsite should be more complex, creative, imaginative, entertaining and unforgettable. Although email newsletters are always a fantastic way to keep your existing / former customers updated and (hopefully) return for more sales, they can end up becoming redundant and boring. You can personalize a microsite according to your brand’s style by adding exclusive content, offers, discounts, and games for customers. For example, it might use their past purchasing experience to get their personality style.
Cross-selling more goods and services via a microsite to current customers can be more successful than sending out more email newsletters with the subject line “You might like this too.” Want to have them come back for more? Give them more information!
7. Calculate the success of the microsite
A microsite is based around one campaign and several targets and/or goal (sometimes as little as three) in contrast with a standard website. That includes establishing KPIs and making it far simpler to decide what indicators will gauge performance. Calculating the microsite’s ROI with great software like Google Analytics is a breeze. A microsite might help streamline how you approach assessing performance on your main website.
Other benefits of a microsite
- In the “mobile-first” age where Google prioritizes user-friendly websites in its search results pages, a microsite is more likely to appear that is quick to load, self-contained, highly SEO-optimized and delivers better UX.
- Using microsites to run split tests provides another opportunity to test customer actions and what they react to and interact with, which you can use for your main website.
- With people constantly choosing to ingest small chunks of knowledge, what better way to convey information to them than a platform designed for this like a microsite.
Microsites Lead the Way
A microsite is a website or website cluster that is typically temporary and appears to fulfill a limited function ranging from introducing a new product to showcasing knowledge in a specific area. Although microsites vary in URL and naming from regular websites, the end goal is to get users to click to the main website and raise brand recognition. Although there are a few drawbacks of investing in one, a microsite has much greater benefits. MiLynk will help you create a microsite to increase web exposure, produce new leads and achieve useful ROI.
