Stop Building Microsites?
Many brands will use a microsite – a single-purpose li’l website – to serve as a landing page for a new advertising/branding/marketing/social media campaign.
This FEELS like it makes sense.
Most brands are too “big” to allow a one-off campaign of any sort to dramatically affect their official corporate website … yet, corporations spend enough $$$ on such initiatives that they want to maximize the investment; and, for fans of the newly rolled-out campaign, a microsite is a handy, utilitarian place to show off more multimedia assets, aggregate conversations related to the campaign, etc.
Why it might NOT make sense? It’s rare to see a microsite with any real traction.
Have a look at Stride Gum’s “Save the Arcades” microsite. As an avid (if rusty) gamer who’s plunked down far too many quarters in my day, you can count me as a booster of neighborhood videogame arcades. But does a site like this have anything more than niche appeal?
Maybe I’m having a curmudgeonly morning, but are we so swept up in our belief in the Long Tail that we’re willing to spend thousands upon thousands of marketing dollars using a nit-comb to find a new brand fan?
How many visitors must a microsite get to make it worthwhile? Would just a few thousand visitors be considered a success, for the money spent on ideation and creative execution? These microsites don’t tend to get millions of eyeballs.
On the plus side, Stride Gum did think enough of the “Save the Arcades” campaign to prominently feature it on its Facebook Fan Page, which counts over 350,000 fans… but I don’t see anything more than the static microsite image, and no “discussions” of the arcade-salvation campaign across this vast user base.
What I did see on the Facebook page was plenty of consumers willing to engage on quick & simple stuff they’d spotted in their Newstream, e.g., when Stride asks, “What’s Your Favorite Flavor?” plenty of folks leapt to answer. It’s quick. It’s simple. It’s free. Yet it reminds thousands of Stride’s known fans of the brand loyalty they originally expressed when they first tapped the “Become a Fan” icon.
When DOES a microsite make sense? I need to answer this because a) it’s not always a bad idea and b) we are building one for a client!
I think a microsite makes sense when you are part of a highly regulated industry, e.g., Financial Services or Pharmaceuticals, which need to be scrupulously careful about content, disclosures, and consumer engagement.
If Pfizer creates a Fan Page for Viagra (there are some on Facebook that one can be pretty sure were fan-created), and some poor guy posts about his gruesome episode of priapism, Pfizer personnel need to scurry about reporting adverse events to the FDA, wondering about whether it is kosher to delete that guy’s post from the Wall, etc. And what happens when a far happier customer graphically describes how he’s being intimate with his wife for the first time in years? Good message, but inappropriate details. “Do we delete?” types of questions arise. And so on. A microsite can tame these tricky issues.
A microsite also makes sense if the brand is willing to Go Big. If the advertising campaign is gonna be HUGE, long-lasting, brand-changing, then yea, you can rightfully expect a million+ consumers are gonna tap some keywords into Google, and you want them to find “a separate place” where they can interact with additional content.
Dos Equis’s “Stay Thirsty, My Friends” campaign is a great example. A microsite for such a compelling campaign is appropriate. Only problem is that this particular site is bloated with Flash, boasts terrible navigation, and doesn’t feature The Interesting Man! Still, my son and I laughed over the several additional commercial-grade videos that found their way to YouTube (like this one: The Most Interesting Man in the World: on “Rollerblading”). A well-designed microsite that promoted additional content like these “minisodes” would have been sought-after and well-received.
At the end, all I am really suggesting to brand marketers is that they think long & hard about developing microsites. They absolutely have their place, but given a likely dearth of eyeballs, the pay-off for most consumer brands will often be hard to determine.
But maybe the best way to conclude this micro treatise is with the alternate title I’d considered for this post.
Microsites: Go Big, or Go To Facebook.
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Someone should write a recruitment version of this post RT @chrisbrogan: @tdefren : stop building microsites! – [link to post] -
Add to this my “barbaric yawp” (of agreement) RT @chrisbrogan: Love this post by @tdefren: stop building microsites! – [link to post] -
@chrisbrogan @tdefren FYI PHP Fatal error widgets.php on line 24 on Top Building Microsites [link to post] Looks like a traffic spike -
Interesting post, take a gander RT @tdefren Stop Building Microsites? [link to post] -
AMEN!!! RT @TDefren Microsites: Go BIG or go to Facebook. [link to post] -
I’m glad you did, cause I missed it. RT @TDefren Can I do a late-p.m. retweet? Microsites: Go BIG or go to Facebook. [link to post] -
RT @TDefren: Can I do a late-p.m. retweet of today’s post? Microsites: Go BIG or go to Facebook. [link to post] -
Brands need to play in the right sandbox, not sandbuckets. RT @TDefren Microsites: Go BIG or go to Facebook. [link to post] -
RT @djsmith4: Brands: play in the right sandbox, not sandbuckets. RT @TDefren Microsites: Go BIG or go to Facebook. [link to post]
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I love the World’s Most Interesting Man campaign too and it highlights the number one problem I see with microsites – all Flash, no brains – as you noted in the post. Nice work!
I think there is definitely a time and a place for the use of a microsite, but just like any other communication, there has to be a solid strategy to back it up. The “if you build it, they will come” approach just doesn’t work. The agency I work for implemented a successful microsite a couple of weeks back at a major trade show event. The programs was a success because we used the event to promote the site, the call to action and offer, and the fact that our target audience was all in one place at one time.
http://tinyurl.com/ylkl9dv
Great insight Todd, I think it is valuable to get marketers to think of ways to change up the old go-to’s and think of what actually makes sense to 1) promote your brand and 2) to your customer. Similar to the Dos Equis example, I remember the Old Spice microsite featuring Bruce Campbell, I went back to that time and time again because I thought the commercials were hilarious! It was totally entertaining and if I were a man, I would have purchased Old Spice – too bad they don’t make products for women
Yea it may FEEL like building a micro site is the right thing to do, but seriously how many people have sought out “Save the Arcades”? The niche is so small, and did you notice that “Save the Arcades 2″ will kick off in 2010?! Stride advertising is great, print and tv ads, but how many people even seek out a gum site, let alone an off-shoot like this one?
It makes sense that huge corporations might create micro sites because yes, they can be easily discontinued if the campaign fails or ends. To create a new line extension and slap it on the established, trusted main site could be scary. The new product could fail or even worse, it may take over the brand entirely.
One brand that’s willing to GO BIG is Coca Cola with Coke Zero. In that case, I think a micro site is a smart idea. The site is still very brand identifiable, but the sleek design is an appeal to the line’s target market. Big companies don’t have time to worry about a negative wall post, yet who knows how many eyes read that every day. Micro sites create a more close knit consumer community than main brand sites, especially if they have blogs.
I love this blog post — not sure why we don’t talk more about this as an industry.
So, I think that campaign-specific landing experiences – like landing pages, microsites and conversion paths – are very useful if you have identified objectives in advance and work towards achieving those objectives.
The problem is when companies invest heavily – time, resources and dollars – in creating ‘the ultimate micro-site’ only to find it gets little traffic or isn’t effective and reaching the goals established.
I favor campaign landing experiences that can be built in minutes, hours or days — NOT weeks or months — and easily tested. Campaign specific experiences are transient, not meant to stand the test of time, but only to stand the test of the campaign traffic funneling in during the campaign. They can be very effective at helping organizations achieve high conversions, but the return needs to be balanced by the amount of resources invested.
I agree. With the tools, traction and capabilities of Facebook fan pages and applications it doesn’t make sense to build microsites unless they are going to become a destination in their own right.
The viral nature of Facebook can be extremely effective for companies branding efforts.
Doug McIsaac
This post is exactly what I was trying to get at in a recent review of State Farm’s new “Thank you” social media campaign (http://www.juliaepflaum.com/?p=129). If there aren’t long-term plans utilizing the microsite, why build it? Just integrate everything into a Facebook page. It’s a lot easier on the users.