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.

Continue reading here: ROI for Social Media Marketing: It's Complicated

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