Microsites: The Latest and Greatest Ecommerce Tactic

Want to be original and spread your businesses brand? The answer is microsites.

A microsite is categorized as a website that is independent of the company’s main page, and is usually on its own domain. This can vary, but is usually something such as a product from a businesses catalogue that is placed on its own website so as to stand out. Microsites are a highly successful new marketing tactic that carry their own rules as well.

The main thing about microsites is you want them to be extremely simple. Less is more with microsites. Outline your product, tell something interesting about it, then lead the user to the ecommerce portal to purchase the product.

An example of a successful microsite is Doritos Ketchup Chip campaign. This campaign was a Canadian targeted microsite launch that showed the returning of a classic flavor of Doritos. For this campaign, the people behind Doritos advertising assembled the chips into the shape of a rose, for Valentine’s Day. The Ketchup chips were extremely successful, and even though the campaign is over, the website remains up, providing advertisement for years to come thanks to the ‘ketchup rose’ indexing on search engines.

How to establish success with your microsite:

Change one thing at a time and see how it reflects on your viewership. Since these sites are individualized from your company’s website, you can treat them as test grounds.
Collect product reviews and place them on microsites designated towards that specific kind of audience. You can create multiple different microsites for your product, and a way to make them a hit with people is to target them on a personal level. Creating a site and placing reviews of your product from a specific subset of people can be a way to reach your audience and have them connect with the reviewers.
Driving home the point about specific microsites for specific people, make sure to use different ideas/stories and different offers based on the people each microsite is selling to. Customizing your approach to your audience will lead to a much greater amount of people taking interest in it than you would think.