Microsites are focused, high impact sites useful for advertising an event, launching a campaign or promoting a brand. These are employed as tools by companies to acquire customers for their business, since they allow incorporation of many components (that cannot be included in other media) to create engagement and participation, and to generate return traffic. A multitude of companies like FedEx, Accenture and McKinsey have already incorporated these microsites into their websites.
Microsites are usually a cluster of pages meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. These sites usually run from 1 to 10 web pages that feature the company’s product, expertise on a particular topic or service, along with description, offers and a call to action. In many ways, it is an electronic version of direct mail which includes newsletters, promotional emails from the companies, polls and surveys sent directly by the companies. These sites help companies focus on a specific purpose or cause, help to promote new merchandise, provide customized pricing as well as help the company segregate between B2B and B2C clients. These microsites can be blogs and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, animated and interactive graphics, several articles that have been grouped under one common theme, videos and podcasts, reader point-of-view development, reader polls and surveys, self diagnostic tools and comments from readers. However, for a company to achieve optimum traffic and user engagement, its microsite must focus on the following four elements:
- In-Depth point of view
- Topical narrative
- News
- Audience participation
The main aim of microsites is to provide specialized information which may be either commercial or editorial in nature. These sites should not just be a simple collection of news articles but should feature a company’s point of view on how to address a complex issue and therefore must feature in-depth articles on that topic. These articles should contain news and latest development of the company and should be updated regularly to keep the reader interested in the site. In order to engage readers on to the site, a comment and feedback section should also be included, where the reader can post their comments on the topic on the website.
It is due to this narrower focus that microsites can be effectively used as hub pages featuring specific products or services and their detailed attributes. Since, these sites contain premium quality topics; they can be easily optimized for the search engines as well as several Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo Search often prefer quality content on microsites and hence rank them higher as they satisfy the users' thirst, which in turn increases the rank of the overall website. These mini-sites, as they are also known, are also one of the best and easiest places to run PPC campaigns, since a specific topic is the focus. The user will not be distracted by other topics concerning the business. Rather, he will see only what he has come for, which in turn, would increase the chances of converting his leads into business opportunities and would also lead to higher conversion rates over the period.
Advantages of Microsites:
- Actionable results – Microsites drive action. Lead generation, information requests or orders can be generated through a microsite.
- Continuous promotion – the content promotes the company as well as products/services of the company.
- Customizable – the design of microsites can be personalized.
- Microsites are ideally optimized to convert readers into business opportunities.
- Microsites are primarily customer-focused.
Keys to Success
In order to be successful, an average microsite must follow these criteria:
- The landing pages should convey the company’s stories quickly and succinctly. Readers arrive at a website with definite queries in mind, if the content is irrelevant and does not meet their requirement, they prefer moving on to another site.
- Continuous improvements and updating of content are imperative to keep the site in trend.
- Effective and cost-effective promotions serve the very purpose of a microsite.
No comments:
Post a Comment