Learn the Pros and Cons of Landing Pages and Microsites and an Easy Way to Build Them for Optimal Performance
When you’re creating a marketing campaign and want to drive people to a customized section of your website, should you build a landing page or microsite? Both act as lead generators to drive conversions but go about it in slightly different ways.
In this article, we will explain the key differences between microsites and landing pages, discuss the pros and cons of each, and help you decide which one will help accomplish your marketing goals.
What Is a Microsite?
A microsite is a highly focused mini-website providing visitors with additional information about a specific campaign or event. It features branded content and can either be its own distinctive campaign-specific URL or a subdomain of your site.
Microsites often have multiple pages and may have different navigation from the main site so that visitors aren’t distracted by content not associated with the campaign. It may also have different formats and designs from the company’s main website.
Microsites are typically used for brand awareness, top-of-funnel campaigns, new product promotions, targeting specific buyer personas, and positioning your organization as authoritative and trustworthy.
Pros and Cons of Microsites
With a microsite, you can provide a more immersive experience for a target audience, allowing them to explore a specific topic. By providing greater depth about a specific product, service, or subject, microsites typically lead to longer and deeper engagement from visitors.
There are downsides to microsites, however. First, you have to build them. Rather than creating a landing page, a microsite takes time to build out. You may have to create additional designs, buy additional domain names, and develop interactive elements. In some cases, you might be working on a different content management system, which might necessitate additional training.
If branding isn’t clear or if a microsite isn’t consistent with the primary website appearance, it can create confusion or make visitors think it’s a different company that is selling the particular product or service.
Because microsites are often temporary marketing tools, they are not a highly valuable search engine optimization technique. Microsites gain most of their traffic from digital marketing strategies like social media promotion, paid ads, and email marketing campaigns. If the content you are building out is for long-term purposes, it may be better suited on the main domain, where it can contribute to SEO and drive organic traffic to your existing website.
Pros of a Microsite:
- Great for awareness and brand recognition
- Generates longer, deeper engagement
- Allows for more memorable URLs
Cons of a Microsite:
- Can take time and money to develop
- May require more maintenance
- Not designed for immediate conversions
- Can create confusion for the parent website
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is typically an individual web page on your main domain that is designed to encourage conversions. Most landing pages focus on a single element, driving visitors to achieve a specific goal, such as buy now, sign up for a free trial, or register for a webinar.
Landing pages generally do not include navigation — even internally — because the goal is to keep visitors focused on your goal. They are simple in design, so as not to distract from the message. Landing pages want you to quickly absorb information and decide on the spot.
Landing pages are built to encourage users to act.
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Pros and Cons of Landing Pages
Landing pages are much easier to set up and manage. Because they live on your actual website, you do not need to create subdomains or worry about buying a separate domain. Landing pages are a single page, which means less content to produce. They typically get straight to the point, explaining essential elements and providing a compelling reason to act.
Because they’re designed for a specific purpose, it’s much easier to craft and hone your message. It’s also a lot easier to track performance on a landing page than on a microsite. You can figure out exactly how many people visited your landing page and converted. Because they are part of your existing website, you can also use the same reporting tools for metrics for tracking.
Like microsites, the majority of traffic to a landing page comes from paid ads, social media promotion, or email marketing campaigns. But because landing pages live on the main domain, they can also help contribute to the existing website's SEO.
Since landing pages are easy to create, you can more quickly create multiple versions and run A/B tests for optimization.
One drawback to landing pages is that you’re not showcasing other products or services, or encouraging a deep dive into your brand. If a visitor clicks off of your landing page, they may not search for your full website or find out more about your other offerings.
Landing pages also have high bounce rates, as much as 70% to 90%. If you don’t engage visitors quickly, they bounce.
Pros of a Landing Page
- Simple and inexpensive to create with little maintenance
- Can be developed and deployed very quickly
- Designed for one task: conversions
- Easy to determine ROI
Cons of a Landing Page
- Not as engaging as microsites
- Presents limited information
- Does not provide options for visitors to engage further
- Requires expertise to create a compelling call to action (CTA) that converts
When Should I Use a Landing Page vs. a Microsite?
So, should you create landing pages or microsites? If you’re looking for conversions, landing pages are the way to go. They are focused and every element is designed to drive a visitor to act now. If you are more focused on brand awareness, education, and engagement, consider a microsite.
Want to really supercharge your account-based marketing efforts? Imagine if every visitor was able to get a landing page or microsite personalized specifically for them. You could target every prospect at the right stage of their buying journey and produce custom content based on their past engagement.
It sounds great, but also complex and time-consuming. With Folloze, however, it’s simple to build out landing pages and microsites to create deep personalization at scale. Folloze lets sales and marketing teams work together to build engaging buyer journeys in less than 30 minutes, without coding. Dynamic content engines interact with your buyer personas, profiles, and prospect data to display the right content at the right time.
This creates a more personalized, 1:1 conversation that creates more engagement and more conversions. By leveraging personalization at every touchpoint, including your landing pages and microsites, you can optimize conversions and outcomes with up to 10X greater engagement with Folloze.
Building Microsites
Using Folloze, you can build interactive microsites for yourself or your channel partners.
Folloze allows B2B marketers to launch sophisticated and highly personalized microsites that engage visitors at the right stage of their buying journey. Without any coding or website development knowledge needed, marketing can create campaigns in Folloze. Sales teams can edit or approve campaigns.
When a demand generation campaign is launched, the microsite will work with the Folloze Buyer Experience platform to create a personalized microsite that aligns with specific prospect behavior and individual sales team members. While you develop one microsite, each potential customer will see a customized site as part of your account-based marketing and buyer experience strategy for a more personalized approach.
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Because every touchpoint is monitored and measured, you get a fuller picture of total engagement and intent.
Building Landing Pages
Folloze lets you quickly develop robust landing pages with dynamic content that is automatically personalized for visitors. Our research shows that personalization to present the right offer and CTA at the right time in the buying journey can increase campaign conversions by as much as 25%.
The setup is fast and simple, allowing anyone to build customized landing pages in minutes. This allows you to create multiple landing pages to target different products or services. Studies show that companies with 10-15 landing pages can increase conversions by more than 50% versus business sites that have less than 10. Companies that have more than 40 landing pages average conversion rates that are 5X other sites.
With real-time A/B testing, you can optimize content, messaging, and campaigns continuously.
When you leverage your existing data with buyer behavior and buyer intent data you can guide them through a more personal journey and create campaigns at an enterprise scale.
Control the Sales Cycle
In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace where B2B buyers control the entire sales cycle, you need every tool at your disposal to leverage sales opportunities. From building awareness and demand to generating qualified leads and closing deals, landing pages and microsites are part of a comprehensive end-to-end intelligent sales orchestration strategy.
To learn more about how Folloze can supercharge your landing pages and microsites and help grow your business, contact Folloze today to request a demo.
