There was a time when microsites were nothing more than flashy, push-marketing pages, usually comprised entirely of videos built in Flash. Now, however, a new generation of microsites is on the upswing. These sites help your visitors cut out the information overload of full-fledged sites while providing new opportunities and techniques for agile marketing and conversion optimization.
The new style of microsite tends to be pure HTML and usually have no Flash at all, lending them to the best practices of SEO. You can have rich and detailed content, with graphic designs that are engaging without being overwhelming. You can provide access to other pages via a simple tab navigation, with each tab focusing on a specific subtopic. The new generation of microsites can provide all these features, without any of the troubles the past microsites used to have.
Microsites can help you serve up an optimized visitor experience. Your visitors are searching for good content and instant gratification, both of which microsites can provide with their extremely targeted focus. You should have an organized collection of subtopics that can guide your visitors to the information that they want. You can deliver deeper content in bite-sized chunks using sub-topics, making it easier for your visitors to consume.
Since microsites live outside the formal framework of your main website, they often are deployed quickly. This can make it easier for you to use your favorite A/B or multivariate-testing tool to experiment with different content variations, presentations and conversion offers.
The new generation of microsites can provide conversion optimization professionals with new opportunities for targeting strategies, at the same time leveraging the practices and tools used in larger sites.
