nextmuffin - digital marketing crumbs

The use of microsites in online marketing has come up more than a few times in the last couple of weeks at work. Mostly, to laud their demise as no-longer-excusable bits of extra creative work that both agencies and clients can be guilty of putting forward to meet their own internal agendas, and of little value to the intended audience.

This argument was further stoked up by a meeting we had with Eyeblaster last week, who presented their own chorus of ‘down with the microsite’, showcasing several examples of great microsite functionality built into expandable online ad units.

There’s undeniably a great deal of truth in all of this. We’ve all come across the microsite that is little more than a home online for the TV spot, with a few wallpapers and screensavers thrown in for good measure.

They can be a tick in the box for a client trying to put their campaign ‘online’, and a tidy bit of work for a creative agency that runs little risk of running into integration issues with client IT. They look good for the launch, help pay the agency wage bill, and then often get very little traffic for a few months, before someone compassionately pulls the plug on them.

There is great logic in pushing as much microsite content into your online advertising units as possible. Why try and force a user to click away from the site they are happily browsing to your microsite, when you can entertain and inform them with all your marketing messages within an interactive, expanding ad unit? The chances are, they won’t bother clicking and you will have lost that opportunity entirely.

So is that really it for the microsite? I say no. And so for marketeers out there who are wondering - ‘do I need a microsite?’, I’ve come up with a list of possible reasons why you might:

1) Space
It’s a simple idea, but an online ad (even an expandable one) is typically not a full screen experience. Can you deliver the full range of information you need to in the expanded ad unit space, even with navigation tabs? Often the answer will be yes, but in some cases you might need the whole screen.

2) Security
Would you add your credit card details into a banner ad? I wouldn’t, and I work in the industry. When it comes to transactions, or even most personal data e.g. address, I think most users will still for now prefer to enter details on an official website, and if this is a single product website, its basically a microsite.

3) Updates
Do you need to constantly add new content to your online campaign? If so, constant updates by a creative agency would prove costly. What you really need is a CMS service into your microsite, and that’s likely to take more tech development work than a campaign based banner ad is going to justify.

4) Volume of Content & Functionality
A few tabs with some limited content options is probably the most you can expect someone who is interacting with an online ad to navigate. Much more than this, and you are likely to be filling that space on the page with too much navigation and functional fields, and leaving less space to deliver key messages.

5) External Data Integration
Does your online campaign need to integrate with other third party data? Some of this might be possible to integrate into an online ad unit, but some of it might be dependent on a level of technical integration that might not be compatible with the adserving environment your online ads are delivered in.

6) Longevity
How long does your microsite need to support your product? A few months is probably hard to justify the investment, but for long-term product microsites like cars, a microsite could service a model of car for 1 to 2 years until an update on the model is released.

For a great rant on this subject
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/18514.asp

See some Eyeblaster examples here
http://creativezone.eyeblaster.com

And a fun microsite that might make you believe in microsites again (if it can get enough people to buy tostitos)
http://nolaf.org/

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