In October 2008 the Rugby Football Union (RFU) launched a new Twickenham Experience microsite. Designed and built by agency Grasshopper, it aimed to inform potential business customers about Twickenham’s corporate hospitality, conferences and events facilities. Since its relaunch, the RFU claims the microsite’s visitor numbers have increased by 80 per cent. Event enquiries and bookings for meeting rooms and on-site accommodation have increased tenfold.
This clearly demonstrates what a microsite can do. Indeed, there is a clear logic behind the idea of providing sites that are specific to a campaign, product or location: your audience is less likely to engage with a generic site than they are with one that is focussed on their specific requirements.
There is, however, an extra cost involved. The challenge for B2B marketers is to produce microsites that justify that additional investment.
Fit-for-purpose
The first step towards getting the best return on your investment in microsites is to use them for the right purpose. In general they are ideally suited to situations where you need an online presence but are unable or unwilling to rebuild your main website.
As Hugh Taylor, MD of Grasshopper, says, “Most company websites are updateable but don’t allow the flexibility to support particular marketing campaigns or address tactical requirements. For example, many are built for international requirements, and are not suited to support regional or country campaigns. Microsites offer a solution to this problem.”
Barry Richards, senior planner at digital consultancy Publicis Modem, provides some other examples.
“If you’re trailing new ideas and want to experiment with people’s attitudes to extending a brand, or if you want to run a campaign that’s not a permanent part of your online activity, microsites allow you to have an online presence without the need to rebuild your core website. They are a great way of instigating and delivering partnerships to customers, places where two brands can come together.”
Freedom of expression
Very often microsites, which are aimed at a specific audience for a short period of time, allow marketers a greater degree of freedom on content than they have on the main website, which needs to be all things to all people over the long term. However, it can be easy to get carried away with this. As almost always the case in the online world, less is more. Kayas Fayyaz, consultant at Coast Digital, says, “Know what you want your audience to take away from the microsite and then give them exactly that. Don’t digress by providing unnecessary information. Deliver the information as concisely as possible and provide additional information in the form of downloadable documents. For a B2B audience, a library of downloadable resources is often very popular, and if it’s on a dedicated microsite it’s that much easier for them to find.”
When Sophy Duarte, account director at Volume, was briefed to increase online demand generation for Oracle’s database products, she rapidly recognised that the issue was one of content prioritisation. “We found a lot of noise coming from a variety of sources across the market, and a wealth of information from within Oracle itself,” she says. “The challenge was to build a microsite that contained only information relevant to the intended audience.”
She and her team achieved that objective, and as a result online traffic on database issues increased by 30 per cent after the first launch communication and the microsite is now producing a return on investment of roughly 55-to-one.
Design
In terms of both content and site design the key with microsites is to understand your audience. Dave Ivy, creative director at email marketing provider DotMailer, says, “If you are targeting MDs and board-level execs, then make the site iPhone and mobile device friendly, so it will render properly if they view it on the move. If your campaign is aimed at a more front-line audience, then the content can be more light-hearted and you can add some movement, brighter graphics and imagery.”
He continues, “Creative people will appreciate seeing and reading a story, whereas directors and financial people will prefer an uncluttered design, which allows them to clearly see the benefits of your proposition quickly. However you approach the design, ensure that the site is easy to use. Nothing frustrates a user more than a site that fails to work. So, consider testing on a variety of machines and browsers, and, as always be extremely cautious with plug-in features.”
Practicalities and costs
It can be easy to forget that you need to drive traffic to your microsite, just as much as you do to your main site. According to Matt Hall, senior account director at TDA, “The golden rule for a successful microsite – and one which is often overlooked – is developing ways to drive traffic. This should be central to the planning process, and in addition to online activity such as paid and natural search, display advertising or email communications, remember that offline marketing can also be a powerful trigger for online engagement.”
In the same way, you need to put in place processes to collect, store and use data from your microsite. Ané-Mari Peter, MD at On-Idle, says: “The data you collect from your microsite should either be entered directly into the main company database, or – where this causes implementation difficulty – at least checked for duplicates and erroneous data.”
She continues with this advice on costs, “A very simple microsite can be designed and implemented in about two to three days, and so costs upwards of £1000. If you need more complex functionality and interaction on a microsite – say polls, ecommerce, user log-ins and profile modification – it can be as expensive as developing another full scale website.”
Personalised landing pages
Not everyone agrees that microsites are always a good idea. Adam Sefton, head of innovation at digital agency Reading Room, reports that more and more often he is using personalised landing pages for his clients. He explains, “The inherent problem with microsites is that they’re a distinctly different URL. You end up placing an extra layer of communication between the initial advert and the site itself.”
He continues, “Whilst a stand-alone microsite might offer more freedom in terms of design, you lose the overall structure and ‘brand home’ that a main website provides. The truth is that building a microsite is often a sign of the shortcomings of your digital platform. A microsite also represents a large investment for a campaign that may only run for two to three months.”
Approach with caution
Microsites can be a useful weapon in the B2B marketers armoury, but they must be deployed carefully. Stuart Dean, COO at Cognifide, compares microsites to government satellites – they cost a lot of money to get launched and then we don’t do anything with them. He says, “There are a lot more poorly conceived microsites than good ones and a lot of marketing budget is spent in this area without the results being realised.”
Indeed, as he concludes, “Given that it is often easier, cheaper and better from an SEO perspective to have the content on your main site with the correct signposts to it, a microsite needs to be doing something special to warrant the time and expense. If the justification is sound then a microsite can offer returns, but as with everything you need to go into it understanding the costs involved, a clear idea of why it is necessary, and a strong plan for making it happen.”
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