Make it a microsite and bank your bucks

If you’re like most people right now, you need to maximize your marketing without burdening your budget. In our opinion, microsites offer the biggest bang for your marketing buck because they come with all the functionality of a fully-fledged Website at a fraction of the cost of a rebuild or build-out. Plus, the ROI for microsites has been known to approach 200%!*

A microsite is exactly what it sounds like: a small Web site used for a special, targeted and measurable purpose. It may be a single landing page or several pages that include a home, enter to win and a rules page, but it operates on its own url (or a forward slash suffix off of your existing business web site), and lends itself seamlessly to marketing and promotions, niche marketing and short-term initiatives like the following:

• Sweepstakes Promotions & Contests/”Enter To Win”: Paper entries are continuing to become obsolete. Use the web to run a small or large consumer based sweepstakes promotion, contest or employee sales incentive.

• Special Offers: Need to collect customer data, build a database of new prospects or up-sell existing customers? Use a microsite as a launchpad for giving away free trials or a special offer to those visitors that fill out your online form. 

• Test Marketing: Not sure what message and offer is right for your target audience? Test a few by using multiple landing pages associated with specific ads or mail pieces and measure from hits, to click-throughs all the way to sales to see what works and what doesn’t.

• Tradeshows & Events: Extend your show environment and theme to the web, distribute sales materials and interact with prospects and customers pre and post show.

• Lead Generation: Turn cold organic web searches and online advertising responses into warm leads for your sales team. Use microsites to capture prospect inquiries and contact information, run surveys and get valuable, candid customer feedback.

Microsites may take on a life of their own and eventually form the core of a future Web site build out, but for the most part they should be considered temporary and be designed with a specific short-term purpose in mind, such as tracking a promotional campaign, conducting polls or surveys, or hosting a contest. When the goal is clear, microsites are relatively quick and inexpensive to launch and monitor while remaining true to the brand and strategy of your ‘main’ site.

So if a penny saved is a penny earned, a microsite might just be the best way to perk up your profits without busting your budget.

*Results may differ depending on where you start and how customized you get.