Websites For Marketing People

Why a Microsite?

We’ve been doing this since 1999. And we’ve seen the concept of a Microsite evolve, grow and wane in popularity, and even mutate into absurd iterations for gaming search engines (see column to the right). We’ve written the Wikipedia definitions and spoken at numerous conferences to educate businesses on the value of an effective Microsite.

Here’s a summary of “Why a Microsite?”

A Microsite is a website, separate and distinct from an organization’s primary site, that focuses on communicating a specific message or selling a product or service. In short, it’s a marketing tool, and should be managed by the marketing department.

A Microsite is typically not your corporate website, which probably took years to build, created an irreparable schism between your marketing and I.T. departments, and needs to accommodate many objectives and stakeholders.

A Microsite acts as a dynamic online digital sales representative for your organization that can:

  • Serve as a destination or hub for a marketing campaign. (An organization’s main website often serves too many agendas to play this role)
  • Mimic the approach, style, and language of your best sales rep or leading advocate – allowing the message to reach more people 24/7. Most corporate websites can’t focus solely on this approach (see note above)
  • Provide more focused, relevant content about a specific product or service, unencumbered by other corporate objectives. In other words, a visitor doesn’t have to hunt for the marketing message
  • Promote word-of-mouth more easily by including items and information that is relevant, exclusive, entertaining, and timely
  • Improve search engine rankings, if built correctly
  • Be updated more easily because it will have fewer stakeholders to approve the content
  • Help establish individual brand identities
  • Provide almost instant market learning by showing what visitors deem valuable

Not Your Idea of a Microsite?

Sometimes, microsites are used as one-page newsletters and landing pages where a company creates dozens, hundreds, even more primarily for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

While the success claims are typically dubious, more importantly Google considers it Black Hat marketing and will often punish or ban the companies engaged in this practice.

The way to rank high in natural search is to build a site correctly with valuable content that brings in visitors and links. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut.