Add 'microsite' to your 2008 to-do list

One of our goals in 2008 is to encourage clients to rethink their web landing pages. As media planners, we focus on the front end of advertising -- reaching specific demographic groups most likely to want your product, for example, men age 35-44 who are weekend warriors likely to blow out a knee and need orthopedics, or the women in their lives who guide the majority of healthcare decisions.

We don't build web pages and so have no vested interest in saying this: But let's face it. Your web site probably needs work.

The challenge with advertising, especially advertising online, is that you can lead a prospective patient or customer to your web site -- but what happens when they get there? Many web sites are ill-structured to convert a visitor to a qualified "lead." And web sites are not always easy to modify. Smaller businesses don't revamp web sites often, and large bureaucracies often find changes mired in Steering Committee or IT meetings.

The quickest solution is to build a microsite, such as the bariatrics site above. This concept is simple -- build a small, nimble subset of your brand, focus it around a specific customer or patient need, and launch quickly. Microsites have several benefits:

+ You can typically complete the entire project within 6-8 weeks
+ You avoid nasty internal debates over how to improve the current vast main site
+ It extends your reach on the internet, creating more "points of entry" for customers
+ You can rapidly add a visible lead form -- to collect the visitor's name, email, phone and ZIP -- to build a prospect database
+ You can show your boss, hey, look, we actually did something this year (Admit it. That would feel good.)

Some marketing executives shy away from this concept, certain that their master web site is enough. This isn't the case. If you pull a report of the first pages visitors hit within your web site, you'll find the majority are landing deep inside -- because most web users start at Google, and Google's search engine throws them past your home page into the innards.

A microsite replicates what people want when using the internet -- finding information rapidly about what they are searching for. Worth considering in 2008. Plus, it makes internet and media planners like us much happier when the leads we deliver to your web site find a simple way to give you information, so you can turn them into customers.