Find Out What Works Before Spending The Budget On Expensive Mainstream Media

Virtually all organizations have a website to convey their purpose, products and organization. Yet, many websites grow unwieldy over time by accommodating the general communications needs of internal departments. A corporate website can expand substantially given the many goals and objectives that may be collectively set for it. When this happens the online marketing strategy can become diffused and ineffective. The prescription for this particular web disease can be found in building a compelling microsite, a series of landing pages, or a combination of both:

• A microsite represents a single topic website that’s been set up for marketing reasons. It is often used as a limited online channel, with fewer pages than a fully developed website. Sometimes a microsite is more like a print advertisement, or brochure, with a set of limited objectives based on a common theme or campaign.
• Landing pages are used for keyword driven pay-per-click campaigns and for measuring the effectiveness of online display ads and other initiatives. They allow you to measure ROI and funnel your testing into varied copy appeals and offers in order to optimize a larger online marketing campaign. Specific landing pages contain information for making a choice, or responding to a particular offer.

How to Distinguish Between Websites, Microsites and Landing Pages:

• A website is broadly defined with content made to please every department, visitor and customer;
• A microsite is narrowly defined to help realize a focused marketing goal;
• Landing pages exist to optimize response and conversions for individual marketing campaigns.

With a more strategic use of Internet marketing, everything should tie back to the question of strategy. The mission for each component, from website to microsite to individual campaign landing pages, should be clearly defined. This is where Inbound Marketing should be developed using white papers, e-books, YouTube videos, social media and other rich content. You don’t necessarily want to drive your marketing through a complex website that has to be cleared by many stakeholders. Often, it’s a case of letting a single group with a clear objective take the lead.

How Microsites and Landing Pages Are Used

Typically, a microsite has a different URL and offers more in-depth content for a targeted audience. A microsite can reside on a sub-domain or folder (e.g. www.yourcompany.com/olympics), or it can support a special cause or subject with its own vanity domain. Although the main website has to please everybody, a microsite is free to focus on a niche audience or group in a very unique way. It may contain special information that leads to a defined action such as:

• Click through to a landing page;
• Special offer for free premium content;
• A subscription to a valuable online newsletter or e-book.

Microsites and landing pages can enjoy faster development times and increased flexibility with fewer people or approvals needed. You can change copy appeals, offers, and introduce new events or simply change images more easily. Microsites and Landing Pages are perfect places to test messages, offers and other content driven ideas. You can even change products mid-stream. They can help you refine the most meaningful way to support a new initiative, or give you new ways to alter your strategy to find out what works and what doesn’t before spending the budget on an expensive roll-out for mainstream media.

• A microsite can provide the right online tool for a limited objective, while giving you more space than a landing page might need.
• Microsites tend to convert better than similar content on a company website. Since it’s more focused, it performs better in search engines.
• Since the microsite domain name will often trigger some recognition of its own, the content can be more easily perceived and shared.
• Additionally, visitors tend to respond more readily within a microsite or landing page where they are engaged and not distracted by the full navigational menu of the parent site.
• Microsites can facilitate social sharing via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• A microsite can also provide a creative firewall for the company website. In the current social media environment, as ideas are discussed and opinions solicited from new audiences, one can send up a trial balloon for new ideas while insulating the company website from unsolicited surprises.