Summary
Microsites are great ways to boost promotions and launch new products to help improve your brand’s digital presence. They are separate from your brand’s main website and are more focused on sharing certain aspects of your content with a more specific group of people.
Before deciding to use a microsite to improve your brand’s audience engagement, you must also weigh out its pros and cons. These are carefully laid out to help you identify whether creating microsites will be beneficial.
Hundreds of landing pages may be crammed with products, e-books, blog articles, and videos on your website. While a well-organized site architecture should make it easy for users to traverse your site, it’s occasionally preferable to keep things even simpler.
This is where microsites can come in. In short, microsites are mini-websites created for specific events and campaigns. In this article, we’ll talk about what microsites are, when you should use them, and how they are different from a true website. Interested? Read on!
What is a microsite?
Microsites are becoming popular today for marketing campaigns and increasing the brand awareness of several businesses. These are small groups of web pages or content sites outside of the main website of a business. In creating microsites, you can assign a different domain to them, or they could exist as a subdomain.
They were created so that your target audience could focus on the events posted on these mini-websites.
Features of a Microsite
Some of the features of a microsite that are general to all are the following:
- Microsites are short-lived; they are designed to market particular events or initiatives and are taken down after.
- They have separate domains from the main website to work efficiently.
- Microsites are content-rich because they target a specific initiative.
What are not microsites?
To let you understand better, microsites are not any of the following listed below:
- An entire website of products and services
- A landing page to generate leads for an office
When should you use microsites?
Using microsites allows you to focus on one product or idea and limit the information to a few pages; thus, creating a resource that’s easy to be understood by your customers. Microsites are useful when you need to:
- Launch a new campaign and test its effectiveness.
- Share resources on a particular product.
- Promote an event or seasonal products.
- Host a campaign involving competition or a giveaway.
- Expand your reach to a brand new group of audience.
What are the advantages of using microsites?
When you know how microsites work, they can be an effective marketing strategy for your business. Take a look at some of its advantages below.
Targeted Campaigns
With microsites, you have the chance to deliver your content to a more specific audience; your message does not necessarily have to connect to the rest of the people in your target market. If you plan to launch a new product, you can use a microsite to highlight its specific benefits to a smaller group. Therefore, increasing its effectiveness to those who are interested.
Brand Awareness
Because microsites are commonly stand-alone from your brand’s main website, they can help establish your presence digitally. As mentioned earlier, microsites are easy to consume resources; a certain group of people can easily grasp your niche just by visiting your microsites.
The Potential to Become Viral
When you create a microsite for a certain campaign or launch a new product, you create engaging content to drive traffic to your main website. Doing this can help create buzz online, which can benefit your brand, allowing your business to have the potential to become viral and gain publicity.
Easy to Manage
Because microsites are targeted campaigns, you only need a small team group to work on these. Smaller teams are easier to manage and save you time, energy, and resources. With microsites, you can better control your focused content and maintain a consistent tone of voice.
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Boosted SEO
Microsites create focused content for a certain product launch or ad campaign; they can also help your brand rank better in search engine rankings.
When creating a microsite, you can use certain keywords throughout your page URLs to boost your brand’s ranking in search results and allow other customers to reach your brand easier and organically.
What are the disadvantages of using microsites?
Before deciding on creating your first microsite, aside from the advantages, you also have to learn its disadvantages. In this way, you’ll know how to manage better and control the microsites you create for your brand.
Audience Confusion
One of the most alarming issues of using microsites is that they can generate confusion, especially among first-time visitors to your brand’s website. When a brand new visitor lands on your website and clicks on one of your microsites, the information on it may not appeal to him.
When new visitors fail to understand your microsites, they may not return to your main website, which can cause you to lose a possible addition to your growing list of customers.
Shorter Life Cycle
When a promotion or a targeted ad campaign ends, the microsite’s terminated or abandoned. With this, ensure that your brand has properly utilized the microsite so that no resources, time, and effort are gone to waste.
Higher Costs
A microsite is like a mini-website. Basically, you create a website from scratch to create a microsite for your promotions and product launches. However, building one requires resources outside of your brand’s main website, including the site’s architecture, development, domain, and design.
With all the resources you need to create a microsite, your budget should also be ready.
Ideas for Microsites
Creating a microsite is not entirely difficult when you know the right steps. The following steps are what you need to make a successful microsite for your brand.
- Create a buyer persona.
- Set your goals for your microsites.
- Look for examples of microsites that can inspire you to create your own.
If you are looking for ideas on what type of microsite you wish to create for your brand, there are three general kinds that you can begin with.
- Informative – to inform and educate your audience on a focused campaign, product, or promotion.
- Interactive – a fun way of encouraging your audience to join in games or giveaways.
- E-commerce – microsites that sell products or services to consumers.
What’s the difference between a microsite and a website?
While a microsite solely focuses on providing content to a particular audience, websites are larger hubs that allow potential customers to know everything about your business. With a website, visitors are introduced to your brand’s story, vision, mission, products, and any other content you have to allow them to get to know it better.
In short, your main websites show up when people search for your brand on the web, while the microsites are what they’ll see when they search for a particular aspect of your brand or content.
Choosing between creating a microsite or a brand new website
If you want to build or improve your brand’s online presence, you may have to decide whether a microsite or a website is the ideal step to take.
Calculating your ROI can help you decide between creating a microsite or an entirely new website. Answering these questions can also help you conclude if you need to create a microsite or not.
- How long does the site need to be up and running?
- How can the microsite affect your audience’s engagement with your brand?
- Can your main website not accomplish the objectives of your microsite?
Once you answer these questions, you should already know which path to take.
Final Say
Microsites are targeted campaigns that boost your brand’s audience engagement. You can create promotions, host giveaways, and launch new products without disrupting your main website’s online presence through these mini-websites.
When creating microsites, keep in mind the steps to create one and the disadvantages to help you strategize. You should know when microsites are needed and when to stick with your main website to lessen customer confusion.
In the comment section below, let me know if your brand has tried using microsites and how they have affected your online presence.
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