A microsite is either a single-page branded website or a group of branded web pages that exist outside of the main website. A microsite framework is situated outside of a company’s core domain and marketing strategy. It has its own URL structure, product-specific content, and user interface that might be entirely different from the image for the rest of the brand. While a microsite contains all the brand elements (name, logo, color schemes) of a company, the framework allows the option to vary these to make the microsite stand out from the core website and attract the attention of curious customers.
Since microsites have their own URL structure independent of the company’s core domain, they serve as an excellent testing ground for experimenting with new ideas and strategies. The primary purpose of microsites is to offer potential customers yet another platform to discover your brand and engage with the unique content displayed there and perform an action. These actions can vary from signing up for the email newsletters, downloading an ebook, or watching a video, to simply reading the content. Microsites are information-laden, interaction-based sites to engage as many customers as possible with their niche content.
There are several benefits of building a microsite, including:
- A microsite dedicated to a particular product or campaign will increase awareness of a specific product and the brand.
- A microsite is a great platform to drive quality leads. It can help usher information and marketing qualified leads down the sales funnel who have previously shown interest in your brand and convert them into paying customers.
- Microsites offer marketers creative freedom to divide a brand into sub-brands targeting specific products and building content-rich, interactive websites around it, which is slightly different in look and feel from the primary branding.
- If a specific section of your business you’d want to see perform better in search engines, a microsite can help accomplish that. Since it has its own URL, you can target specific keywords dedicated to that section alone and see your site rank well in search results.