(Direct) Bill Hanekamp is a huge fan of small Websites. Technically, they’re called microsites — small, self-contained Web destinations that are separate from a company’s primary site,have their own distinct URLs, and consist entirely of content focused on a particular product or service. And Hanekamp, CEO of Chicago interactive agency The Well Advertising, is such a micro-booster that he’s launched www.microsite.com, a microsite devoted to the analysis and appreciation of…well, microsites.
Because of their narrower focus, these small Websites can be used as hubs for a specific marketing campaign. They’re more easily optimized for search engines and, if their content is good enough, can drive word of mouth or viral marketing via links and pass-alongs.
And developing a separate microsite for campaigns can put marketers back in the corporate driver’s seat.
“Your company’s main Website is first and foremost a marketing tool,” according to Hanekamp. “Ironically, since the beginning of the Internet, it’s resided primarily in the IT department. That makes no sense: IT doesn’t get involved with television spots, for instance. But that involvement makes it difficult to make the home Website a marketing tool.”
The Well develops microsites that exist entirely within a company’s marketing department and can be changed quickly and easily according to marketing needs. “Anything a corporate site can do, a microsite can do better,” Hanekamp says.
Philips USA is a case in point. The corporate site for the manufacturer of consumer electronics ranging from TVs and medical equipment to coffeemakers and electric toothbrushes reflects the company’s diversity, with links to relevant content and to an e-commerce store. It works as a central destination for the company as a whole. But using the site to market specific product lines proved to be complicated and inefficient.
So when Philips chose the Web to market an electric razor designed for grooming men’s “personal areas,” Hanekamp’s agency established and mounted a microsite dedicated only to that product. Using the URL www.shaveeverywhere.com, the site shows video of a bathrobed guy using amusingly appropriate fruits and vegetables to show how the razor can help consumers. Visitors can also try their hand at shaving a small topiary into shapes that make the product’s use clear. A link also shows users where they can buy the razor, including retail stores and Amazon.com.
Another Well microsite, www.whenitfeelsright.com, was done for Paterno Wines International to promote a Greek white wine called Boutari Moschofilero. The site picked up on the Greek theme by promoting women to “goddesses” and offering premiums such as a night out with 10 friends, recipes that would go with the wine, and an interactive “Boutari Dating Guide” built entirely around an encounter with Mr. Wrong.
One big virtue of microsites is that they can be adjusted quickly and on the fly to suit a marketer’s needs. The Well used this to advantage when ineffective media buys by a third party resulted in traffic counts that didn’t meet Paterno’s initial expectations.
“We looked at the metrics and said ‘We need to make a change right now,’” Hanekamp says. “We fundamentally changed the site in four hours, went out to blogs and took other steps to enable viral marketing, and wound up getting nearly triple the results we needed for our client.”
Microsites are also much easier to optimize for a specific keyword or phrase, so that over time you come to “own” that phrase in natural search. A student exchange program called People to People was having trouble getting search visibility (and thus enrollments) for its Student Ambassador initiative. In fact, PTP was having similar trouble with its own site, falling way down in search results below “People” magazine, “Teen People,” and so on.
Hanekamp and company built a self-contained site for the program, focused on the key phrase “student ambassadors” in the URL, title tags, headlines, body text, and file names. Now the site comes up first in a Google search on the phrase.
Hanekamp warns against trying to game the search engines with optimization tricks: “Google is much smarter than we are. Just make the microsite relevant to Google users, and Google will find it.”
Who can benefit from a microsite? Almost anybody, as long as the content is good — not necessarily funny, but entertaining — and if the site is focused and the marketing objectives clear, he adds.
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