One way to run an effective multichannel messaging campaign is to create a microsite—a centralized site with a unique and easy-to-remember URL. This can be a stand-alone site or part of a larger Web site. The purpose of a microsite is to attract specific audiences and get them to take precise actions—subscribing, placing an order, replying to an invitation, or simply asking for more information.
When developed as the strategic core of a multichannel campaign, a microsite can guide and support the entire promotion. Each marketing effort drives its target audience to the site, which then reinforces key messages, special offers, and promotions.
Another benefit of a microsite is your ability to track and report the results. In fact, you can set up separate URLs for each marketing channel so you know which channel drove how much traffic to the site.
For example, CircuitAlert.com is a microsite developed by Gardner Bender for the launch of its hand tool, the Circuit Alert wire stripper. All advertising, public relations, and other marketing done for the product invited prospective customers to visit the site and “see the tool in action” by viewing a 60-second demonstration video. The effort was a success: tens of thousands were sold within months of the launch.
Stick to Your Message
People usually are on a mission when they come to a Web site. If their goal is to buy your product or request more information, you don’t want to distract them in any way. Microsites can focus on one main message and prevent the visitor from getting lost or disoriented within a larger Web site.
Target a specific audience and tailor your content especially for this group. Provide exclusive content, special offers, breaking news about new products, and allow visitors to sign up for e-mail lists or take surveys.
Benefits of microsites:
Efficiency. Microsites are easy and relatively inexpensive to create and reuse.
Tracking. Monitor how visitors arrive at your microsite and where they click on the page(s).
Customized URLs. Track targeted audiences for each campaign.
Control. Customized content shows visitors what you want them to see.
Data. Research indicates that visitors to microsites share more about themselves than visitors to regular Web sites.
Leverage content. Editorial can be repackaged from other sites and media.
Savings. Using a microsite as a response mechanism is more cost-effective than telephone, mail, or fax.
Get your message heard. Attract visitors to the microsite and tell your message.
This post was adapted from the article Central Station by Grant A. Johnson in Direct magazine.
What does this post have to do with “Promoting the appropriate use of the Web to spread information about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”?
As a reader of your blog, I’m primarily interested in topics more closely related to your blog’s mission statement. (Of course, you’re free to post whatever you want on your blog, but I thought that you might appreciate some reader feekback.)
Thanks for the feedback. I think the topic of creating several separate sites around a topic of interest can be helpful in spreading information about the Church. For example, several separate microsites about the restoration of the Church would be more powerful than a single large site on the topic.
I guess I would just like to see you give more effort to relating the topic of “microsites” to the Church and it’s web presence. Simply regurgitating content from another source doesn’t give me any “value”. (If I wanted to, I could get it directly from the source.)
I found more value in your two sentence reply to my comment than in your entire post. If you feel that creating several separate sites around a topic of interest can be helpful in spreading information about the Church, then that’s what I’d like to see you write about because it specifically relates the subject in question to the Church. I think that this could be an interesting discussion and I’d be interested in your detailed thoughts on the matter. But I can find a generic primer on microsites elsewhere…