Recently it has become common in online marketing, especially in B2C online marketing, to build microsites for specific products. More and more companies are embracing this practice because a good argument can be made for why you should build a microsite. When you are considering building a microsite for yourself, consider these 5 advantages:
1. Search Engine Optimization Benefits
Many marketers build microsites for the SEO value. A microsite can be very targeted around a specific service or offering. This can help significantly boost rankings in search because search engines will understand exactly what your site and content is about.
Another way microsites can boost URLs is through keyword rich URLs. If a website has a keyword as its URL, it will often get a rankings boost for that specific keyword.
2. Keep Visitors Focused on a Specific Topic/Area
There are some campaigns where marketers want web visitors to be focused on a specific service offering or conversion task. Think along the lines of a pay per click (PPC) campaign or a social media promotion effort.
For those types of campaigns, marketers have very specific actions they want visitors to take – such as downloading a specific book or filling out a form to request a proposal. Sometimes a landing page (a specific page set up for the conversion action) can be enough to accomplish these goals. However, if you expect web visitors to be interested in educational content before taking the action, it makes sense to set up a focused site for them to do that.
By setting up a focused microsite, you will ensure that web visitors are focused on only the piece of content or service you think they would be interested in signing up for.
3. Creative Freedom
Microsites can give companies that have standard brands and design elements a chance to show a little more of their culture and creativity. Since your microsite isn’t a part of your actual website, you can use it to create something that will stand out and be more appealing.
4. Recruiting
For some companies, a microsite is built to help recruiting. The reasons for this are tied to the reasons above, specifically reasons 2 and 3. Recruits want to see your culture and learn what your firm is like. A microsite is an ideal channel to focus on those two things.
From a marketer's perspective, it is also great to keep recruits on a site that is focused solely on them. You know that they will be reading the right information and will have no trouble finding what they are looking for.
5. Appealing to a new Audience
When a company decides to market to a new segment or group of people, it is important to make sure the new segment receives the right messaging. Building this messaging into an existing site can get quite confusing for the company’s other audiences. For this reason, companies may opt to build a microsite that will incorporate the new messaging. Visitors in the new audience will be passed to the microsite instead of the main website. This allows the message on both sites to be clear and targeted for a specific audience.
At Hinge, we have recently designed our second microsite to test the value of microsites for professional services firms. The site is meant to target those people searching for an online marketing agency.
While we have designed microsites to promote past content, such as Spiraling Up, we are testing to see if a service can be promoted as well. We hope that by creating this microsite, we will able to drive traffic to our new book, Online Marketing For Professional Services.
By following the guidelines above, microsites can be very effective at accomplishing the goals of a marketing campaign.
For more tips on making the most of your website, check out our Lead Generating Website Guide.