We often get asked, especially by smaller companies, “Do we need a full website or can we just have some landing pages?” and this question, really goes deeper, it’s about the maturity of your business. And how do you want people to perceive your company?
We are going to go in the differences between a microsite, website, and landing pages, and what the benefits of each are.
The reason we are including microsites is that these possibly get overlooked more than they should. Traditionally, microsites are used for a single purpose where a few pages are needed.
In the past, we’ve used a combination of all three, and in some cases, a combination of all three for just one client. Each has its own specific job to do and has measurable goals associated with it.
Read on to find out more about how each of them works and how they can be implemented into your marketing strategy.
What Are Landing Pages?
A single-page web presence designed for a particular purpose, often lead generation.
Why We Use Landing Pages
We use landing pages when we need to keep focus on one specific goal. This can be lead generation via a data capture form, sharing specific information for a campaign, or even something as simple as signing up for a newsletter.
The key with landing pages is that they are quick to implement, lightweight, and don’t need to go through such rigorous sign-off procedures. This results in campaigns being rolled out much quicker than entire websites.
To make the implementation of landing pages quick and easy, there are several tools including Leadpages, Unbounce, and Carrd, whose primary purpose is to allow users to spin up landing pages quickly. Often, you will find your CRM has a version of landing pages built into it as well. These are important to explore to make sure that your approach is joined up.
Benefits of Landing Pages
- Push a specific offer or product to your visitors.
- Increase conversion rates with highly targeted content.
- Increase your search traffic with a landing page, or drive specific traffic via social, email, paid, or other channels.
- Quick to launch
- Very flexible
- Generate data and insights.
Note: When sending traffic to a landing page, if it’s not relevant, you will see low engagement rates and high bounce rates.
What’s a Microsite?
A microsite is a small collection of web pages on a particular topic, focused on a particular audience.
Why We Would Use a Microsite
Often, a landing page is more than sufficient for a campaign. But when a campaign needs more detail than a single page can support, we look at using a microsite. A microsite can reflect a completely different brand identity from the main website or be a stripped-down version of that site. It very much depends on the purpose of the microsite.
In the past, we’ve used microsites to launch sub-brands along with a range of products. In so doing, the microsite can be built independently of the main brand website and be pushed live on a specific date. This allows for multiple elements of a bigger campaign, all tied towards driving focused traffic towards this microsite.
Benefits of Microsites
- Highly focused content
- Quick to deploy
- Temporary purpose, so not necessary to optimise for organic search
- Can use a different visual identity
- Good for analytic data collection
Note: While these benefits are good for short-term projects, the downside is that they often stop traffic from going to the main website.
What’s a Website?
A full collection of pages with a structure aligned with your digital marketing strategy to support it. It’s your primary web presence, a shop window.
Why We Use Websites
What a website is should be obvious; they’ve been around since August 6th, 1991. But beyond saying we need one as part of our marketing, often they are not thought of as much more than a collection of brochure pages that could have been in print back in the 80s.
It is your shop window to the world. If you don’t have the right information on there, structured in the right way, and it’s not kept up to date, then a website can be a potential drawback in your marketing mix as opposed to your greatest asset.
Websites aren’t limited to communicating just one message. You can communicate multiple messages about multiple products through well-structured content and areas of your website.
While acting as your shop window, they’re also building awareness of you as a company, your products and services, and helping people to navigate through your marketing funnel. Ultimately, they help in qualifying themselves as a lead and parting with their personal or business information. This means that you can follow them up and take them through the rest of the process through to a sale conversion.
There is much more to be said about what a website is, but in this comparison between the three, we’ll leave the rest for another day.
Benefits of Websites
- They convey all your messaging from one source.
- They’re an evergreen asset.
- They provide you with your long-term overall greatest ROI.
- They are there for all parts of the awareness journey.
- They can even be your sales interface.
- Set up right, your website can be a portal for all customer/client interfacing.
The goal of your marketing project or campaign will depend on which front-facing web presence you wish to use. When we design a campaign, we define which presence is needed to make sure that the campaign works efficiently.
Everything from simple independent landing pages away from the main website, to landing pages within the main website just without navigation. Then we look at microsites for specific purposes, maybe for product launches or sub-brand launches. All the way through to strategic websites that are aligned with your overall business goals. The key is making sure that the right solution is used for the right type of campaign.
Not sure which presence you need for a campaign or for your business? Simple, ask us and we will direct you towards the right solution.
If you would rather have this run for you, our demand generation service is built for it.
