Bill Hanekamp is a huge fan of small Web sites.
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, the CEO of Chicago-based 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 these distinct, tightly focused Web destinations.
Because of that narrower focus, these small Web sites 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 through linking and pass-along.
And developing a separate microsite for campaigns can put marketers back in the corporate driver’s seat. “Your company’s main Web site is first and foremost a marketing tool,” says Hanekamp. “Ironically, since the beginning of the Internet, it has resided primarily in the IT department. That makes no sense: IT doesn’t get involved with television spots, for instance. But their involvement makes it difficult to make the home Web site 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.
Case in point: the corporate site for Philips USA, maker of consumer electronics ranging from TVs and medical equipment to coffee makers and electric toothbrushes. The main site reflects that 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 to use the Web to market a special electric razor designed for grooming men’s “personal areas”, they 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 the consumer. 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 purchase the razor, including retail stores and Amazon.com.
Another microsite, www.whenitfeelsright.com, was built by The Well 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 the marketer’s needs. The Well used this to advantage when ineffective media buys by a third party resulted in traffic counts that did not 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.” And Boutari’s case shipments for the second half of 2005 were up 128% year over year.
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 program. In fact, PTP was having trouble with its own site visibility, 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. He 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.”
As for who can benefit from a microsite, Hanekamp’s answer is straightforward: almost anybody, as long as the content is good—not necessarily funny but entertaining-- the site is focused and the marketing objectives are clear.
“Even companies of only six guys will have many different stakeholders in the corporate Web site, and that can prevent it from becoming the effective sales tool it can be,” he says. “A good microsite can be your most passionate sales rep, working 24 hours a day.”
