Gales Network • Brand building from the inside out

21 August 2007

Microsites

Big Ideas Topic: Microsites
The Big Idea behind microsites is their power to differentiate your brand online and improve its draw, efficiency and ability to communicate important information to customers. A microsite is a webpage or collection of webpages that focus on a particular product, new initiative or cause associated with your brand. Microsites generally reside “inside” your primary website, but are established under their own URL.

Big Ideas View:
Microsites are a terrific device to build brands and market products. For example, if you are a music label, directing potential or established fans to a particular artist’s brand is fundamental to the competitive quest for ears, eyes and dollars. For any enterprise, a dedicated microsite for a body of work, new product version, specific promotion or key event lets you provide a content rich environment, without complexity and without readjusting your main brand identity with every tactical move.

Isn’t a microsite just a website? Yes and no. It is a website that is directly accessible via a dedicated URL. However, it is nested in the context of a brand’s entire content field. So the specific information that the microsite communicates benefits from the context, functionality and traffic of the Brand’s website, without making a user search endlessly for the specific product information he seeks.

Several years ago, Time Warner created a Mega-site for their entire magazine portfolio. This was in the day of the “portal”, when the goal of most websites was centered on getting and keeping as many eyeballs as possible. TW reasoned that Pathfinder would be an attractive one-stop shop for all of their magazines and would meet the needs of every subscriber, regardless of interest.

Not so much.

Pathfinder was so massive, so content comprehensive and so Time Warner-centric that loyal and dedicated Money magazine subscribers had to wade through content from every TW publication, in order to find the information they sought. Had Pathfinder been set up as a collection of individual publication microsites, it would have been more user-friendly, more communication effective and a brand builder for each magazine, rather than an aggregator of eyeballs. Pathfinder was a multi-million dollar sinkhole that no longer exists.

For any size operation or personal brand, focus through microsites serves your customer and vastly improves sales potential. Microsites even offer a way to partner with others or affiliate with sponsors for a specific event or product introduction without giving them total access to the power of your entire Brand portfolio. The microsite concept is well applied to film, books, sports and virtually every other website devoted to consumer brands.

Think globally, Act, uh, micro-ly!

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The Big Ideas Report separates the real issues (Big Ideas) from the noise, so that it’s possible to move forward with confidence or simply converse intelligently with others. We identify issues that have a material impact on your business, define them succinctly and suggest a position, so you can get going. Part fact, part opinion, part alchemy, that’s The Big Ideas Report.