Promotional Microsites | The ‘What?’ & ‘Why?’

What is a microsite?

Microsites are effectively small websites with 1 or more pages or can be a single webpage that usually uses a different URL from a brand’s main website. Microsites typically focus on a specific part of a business like a particular product, service, or campaign, so the messaging on promotional microsites typically differs from a brand’s primary, day-to-day website.

The differences between microsites vs. websites and vs. landing pages

As mentioned before, microsites are more of a sub-website for specific parts of the brand and business, this allows these promotional microsites to focus on one thing rather than the entire company and all of its offerings at once; logistically and purposefully separating them from the main website. They’re specifically tailored to reach more specific and targeted segments of the customer base.

A website would instead, be a hub for all a brand’s information, including multiple pages showcasing products, offerings, and blogs. Whereas, a landing page improves conversions by minimising distractions through being a singular webpage and depending on the goals and aims of the business, can target a broad or specific customer base.

Importance of promotional microsites: Purpose & benefit

Having a microsite provides brands with a channel to zone in and focus on one thing, and with this focus, comes many additional benefits. 

It covers a fairly niche section of a brand’s larger product or service offering, which makes those interested in that niche section more engaged and targeted since the subject matter is so focused. It creates a sub-brand that helps the microsite stand out and differentiate from the primary brand website.

Promoting promotions 

One of the more obvious benefits is helping brands bolster the visibility of key products, services, and campaigns. We often see brand promotions like prize draws, instant wins, and try-me-free opportunities using promotional microsites as a digital destination for shoppers in stores to join and engage with a brand beyond the shelf activations.

Achieve your promotion live date

Meeting a promotional live date is crucial, moreover, it’s a regulatory requirement in many cases, for example, if the brand promotion is displayed on-pack. Your digital partners need to understand these live dates are immovable and cannot be delayed. Contracting with a specialist promotional digital vendor to produce a microsite takes away the risks of using in-house digital teams who may be under-resourced, lack an understanding of the nuances of promotional technology, or are just simply unreliable.

Engaging and targeted content

Focusing on one thing in great detail may be difficult to do so on a brand’s primary website which already has a lot of content that leans on the more ‘general’ and ‘broad’ side. It’s a way to gain brand awareness and improve conversions without having to worry about the main website’s consistency, previous content, or cluttering pages.

Since microsites contain highly focused and specific content, it’s a lot more engaging and shareable; easy and quick to read through or scan. Enabling the opportunity to create some very engaging and targeted campaigns through the implementation of promotional microsites. This is why they’re used for gathering high-intent leads for upcoming events.

Improving ranking and SEO

The benefit of such specific keywords also boasts an opportunity to improve search engine ranking and SEO. Highlighting targeted keywords will bring in organic visitors and having dedicated and targeted content for your audience will bring in more organic visits which becomes an opportunity to increase brand engagement. Backlink opportunities may increase, further bolstering your brand’s ranking. However, the SEO and ranking ability of microsites is often debated, which is something we will delve into soon.

When should I use a microsite? Scenarios and examples

There are many scenarios where having a microsite may prove beneficial to a brand. Some common uses are as follows:

• To showcase new products, services and brand values
• To promote events
• To bypass in-house digital constraints
• To target a specific audience
• To support campaigns
  • When used in conjunction with an active campaign, it’s a great way to use the web traffic of an exciting promotion to gather some valuable data, which will help in understanding customer behaviours for future campaigns. 
  • Since the data collected is first-party data, it also takes away any reliance on third-party data providers. The first-party data provides more accurate and valuable customer insights directly from their customers.

A recent example is seen in the Flight to Final promotion, held by Turkish Airlines who have leveraged and targeted football fans by offering the opportunity to see the UEFA Champions League Finals live, creating a microsite for this prize draw instead of hosting it on their main website.

This allows the promotional microsite to provide an enhanced experience versus their usual website, thus avoiding any potential confusion.

Isolating and creating a distinction between the main website and a microsite protects the core functionalities of the main site, in this case, booking and buying flight tickets. Moreover, having a microsite is a reliable way to integrate engaging web app functionalities without worrying about potential vulnerabilities or interferences with the main website’s day-to-day activities and functions.

The Turkish Airlines' “Flight To Final” promotion was also accompanied by a personable touch, sending participants a promo boarding pass, available for download once they had entered the promotion.

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For reference, below is what Turkish Airlines’ usual website looks like:

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And here’s what the microsite looks like:

Non-profit and activism-based usage 

Microsites are also not limited to for-profit uses, whilst popularly used in the promotional space, many non-profit causes and campaigns use microsites as a means of education and activism.

A popular example of this is, clothing company, Patagonia's microsite Blue Heart of Europe which advocates for “the fight for Europe’s last wild rivers” i.e. fighting against the destruction of the Balkan rivers from destructive hydropower development. 

Using clear and simple calls-to-action and funnelling visitors through the process by educating, appealing to emotion and logic, and prompting action, the microsite is a well-rounded example of how powerful microsites can be, just by the nature of being straightforward.

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Elements of an effective microsite

• A clear call-to-action (CTA). Rather than bombarding visitors with tens of calls-to-action, base your microsite around a single or a few call-to-actions, for a promotional microsite, it may simply prompt visitors to enter a brand promotion.
• Provide an interactive and engaging experience. Although the simplicity of a microsite doesn’t allow for many pages, it should still include various media types like images, animations, and videos that provide value and a point of engagement for users. This is why gamification and interactive experiences are so popular in the brand promotions space, making them a valuable addition to any promotional microsite.

• A unique domain name. Having an individual domain name for the microsite consolidates it as a singular website rather than just a few pages on your primary site. It also becomes an opportunity to backlink to the primary brand site and reinforce the promotional microsite as part of your larger brand without lumping the two websites together. Of course, doing so also helps with SEO and lead generation.
• Integrated messaging. Communication and interactions are crucial to the consumer experience. Microsites often provide an easier way to hook into automated messaging, winner notifications, prize claim workflow, and third-party APIs. (Such APIs can serve up coupons, vouchers, validate entrants, and much more). 

Challenges to overcome

Temporary-nature

• Creating a good microsite can be a lot of work if the microsite is temporary, it may feel like the cost-benefit ratio is not even enough to warrant creating one.
  • For this reason, it’s worthwhile to consider creating a microsite that is an ‘always on platform’ and ready to go whenever there’s a new campaign, event or promotional opportunity to take advantage of.  The second-hand car marketplace, cinch, runs activations via https://www.cinchpresents.co.uk/ which is an ‘always on’ platform. Likewise, cheese brand, Ivy’s, runs ongoing monthly promotions to their audience, with gamification deployed via the digital specialists at Promotions Interactive, along with monthly email comms.

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Weak SEO

• Microsites may not be as effective for SEO as thought.
  • In the past, multiple microsites were commonly developed around different keywords to rank at the top of the search results, often more than once. They were also sometimes used to backlink to a brand’s primary website since backlinks generally improve the SEO of the main website, however, now, it’s rather harmful to SEO when it’s done. Black-hat techniques are getting easier for search engines to catch and safeguard against, so it’s advised that a microsite shouldn’t be built solely to bolster the ranking of your primary website.

Backlink density dilution

• Another weakness is ‘backlink density dilution’. When there are multiple microsites for your brand, the number of backlinks is spread out across your microsites. In comparison, if a brand were just to maintain one primary site, the backlinks are all condensed within the website and will then, theoretically, rank much higher in search engines than any of the individual microsites.
  • This is why each microsite that is created should be done so purposefully, having just a few could prove to be much more beneficial than having several at once, not only will it be more difficult to manage, but on average they may not perform very well. To prevent the constant creation of new microsites, in a situation where your brand is promoting a campaign, the promotional microsite can be reused for future competitions, promotions, and events rather than getting a new URL and creating a new microsite each time. 

Authority potential

• An issue with microsites is that they’re difficult to make into authority sites, due to the usually temporary nature of microsites, there’s simply not enough time to build that authority. Secondly, they usually don’t have many diverse and incoming links from other authority sites. This would be a different story if a microsite were a potentially long-term to permanent addition to a brand’s digital estate. For example, if a brand sees itself hosting several promotions, starting a promotional microsite and regularly updating it with new content and promotions almost acts like a loyalty scheme and invites customers to revisit the site for new content and promotions. some text
  • A great example of this usage of microsites is Sony’s Xperia Rewards microsite. The promotional website, an ‘always on’ platform, shows any live promotions, and a small archive of previous promotions which directly tells visitors that they have done promotions and likely will continue to host them.
  • Another example is Batchelor’s winwithbatchelors.co.uk microsite. Although they don’t log previous promotions or have multiple running at once, every so often, this promotional microsite sees a new promotion but uses the same URL each time a new one rolls around.

Brand consistency

• Some brands may prefer to keep microsites as part of a brand’s website for the sake of maintaining consistency in their branding and quality. This would therefore require a promotional platform that has higher capabilities in UX and UI design and is not restricted by templates.
  • A fix for this issue is to use iframe embeds, creating a microsite that looks and feels like a webpage to the general consumer. With this, there are various benefits. It’s a good way to collaborate with other parties when creating a promotional microsite on your primary website. The party involved in creating the promotional page can do what they need to without interfering with other pages and activities of the website. Effectively, giving them just enough control to create and maintain the microsite without feeling disconnected from the site if it were its entirely own website.

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Conclusions

Microsites have the potential to be highly effective in several scenarios and brand activations. Promotional microsites in supplement to a competition, promotion, or campaign are a great way to attract high-engagement targeted leads and entry participations. The ‘always on’ promotional microsite platform is a powerful tool to support ongoing campaigns and events. As long as the vision and direction of a microsite are focused, clear, and consistent, brands will usually benefit from having a microsite.

Perhaps you’re still unsure whether your brand will benefit from a microsite, instant win promo management and other tools. Or maybe you’re curious about how to get started and still have more questions, fill in and enquire in the form below.

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