Top 10 Reasons for Marketers to Build Microsites
Engaging, interactive brand microsites have many benefits to your brand and company. Who wouldn't want increased brand awareness, improved SEO, and increased engagement with customers?
1- Outbound marketing doesn't always deliver enough leads to increase sales.
Many companies decide to just use a strictly outbound marketing approach. By now you might have realized that it alone won’t get you the sales leads you want or need. Microsites create valuable “inbound marketing” opportunities that help to attract customers under their own initiatives and drive sales.
2- S-E-O, S-E-O, S-E-O
If you think that seems like an overkill than you haven't been using SEO correctly. The success of search engines and their organic search have taught us that content is contagious. Content is why clients and customers visit your site and why they return. Organizations with static or custom-built websites just can’t turn around content creation and distribution fast enough, putting them at the bottom of the SEO mix and ultimately at a significant competitive disadvantage. Microsites, built quickly and easily refreshed with new content, are SEO magnets. Good for traffic, good for your marketing reach.
3- Microsites pay back big branding numbers.
This touches on ClickWrite's recent blog post about the new research from Dynamic Logic that shows microsites are working as effective brand awareness and messaging tools v. more traditional display advertising. They found an increase in brand awareness and purchase intent with microsites. A good user experience for the microsite is key, where easy navigation, straight forward messaging and benefits are associated with value.
4- Meet your Corporate branding guidelines.
Microsites are a great way to roll out a campaign, launch a product, or communicate about an event. Using a platform like ClickWrite can help you target your message, yet still have a site that meets corporate branding standards and applies your corporate template. Carrying over the architecture of your whole corporate site is not always the best move but preserving the brand look and feel is.
5- Today marketers are more involved with multiple aspects and wear many hats including web designer and content creator.
This means that building websites need to incorporate the features and functions important to a marketer like community and content, but they also must be easily created, designed and maintained. Let’s put it this way, when a marketer puts on his web designer hat, the process should be painless and require little web development experience. We have to have sites up, running and ready to generate return NOW.
6- Preservation of Brand Equity.
Customers have been given enormous influence with the popularity of social media. They have become as much your brand marketers as you are. Microsites designed with social media tools built-in, give you the ability to create a destination for your biggest brand cheerleaders to help spread the word.
7- Increased traffic should be a good thing.
Many of today's marketing leaders believe that their next product, video, campaign, etc. is going to “go viral” and drive huge amounts of traffic, activity, conversions to their site and result in increased revenue. Many never consider a system or server failure due to unexpected volume. Microsites, when built on a platform like ClickWrite, give you the ability to build “viral” sites, but the capacity to manage traffic the way a large enterprise site can.
8- User-generated content
User-generated content driven by the advent of social media has created tremendous opportunities for us to understand what our customers are thinking, market directly to them, etc. UGC is important to engage customers, provide a way for them to be heard and feel heard, improve relationships, and increase the CLV (customer lifetime value). Microsites give UGC a place to flourish and helps put it to work within an integrated digital marketing plan.
9- User management and feedback
Like we mentioned in #8 when it comes to support forums, customer feedback pages, and similar areas, being able to respond quickly to comments and conerns and moderate is very important. Many sites don't enable you to sift through the cluttered mess of messages and interact with the customer in a timely manner. Using a microsite can divide the areas and make it easier to recognize customer issues and address them quickly and efficiently.
10- Budgets are getting smaller while ideas are getting bigger.
Most marketing budgets have been cut, some permanently. Even with this being the case marketers are always looking for the next big idea and creating brilliant campaigns, only the budget is smaller and they are using cheaper tactics. Microsites will help achieve bigger goals for less money by using a variety of ways to communicate your message with a consumer or client.
As you can see microsites aren't just for random marketing campaigns or viral sites. They are one of the most valuable tools in a marketers toolbox, especially in todays rough economic climate where marketers are looking for innovative and inexpensive ways to reach their target audience effectively and efficiently.
ClickWrite can help you build and maintain your microsites and develop strategies to achieve your marketing goals. Please visit us at www.clickwrite.com for more information.
