What is a microsite

A microsite is a self-contained mini website that is often used to promote an individual product or service or to provide information at an event. Microsites often act as a compliment to a company’s main website. If you’re a company with multiple brands and a large variety of products within those brands, then you may want to target specific audiences for each product or brand. A microsite helps you target the customers for that specific product.

A website usually provides overall information about a company or brand but a microsite can drill down into the details and give you the nitty-gritty on a product. They provide more in-depth content about that particular product or service.

Think of microsites as product-led pages and websites as a company-led pages. On a homepage, the product information is more sales-oriented while on a microsite, the information is more user-oriented. A product microsite is often used on a long-term basis while microsites for campaigns or events are usually short-term projects. Many microsites link back to the main homepage to provide a seamless link between the two.

What’s the difference between a landing page and a microsite?

Landing pages are single web pages within a company’s website. They need to work within the framework of that web page’s content management system.

Microsites are more like mini-websites with sub-pages and offer more in-depth information and content. It’s a more immersive experience. Microsites often operate under another platform allowing creators more design opportunities to market or communicate a specific product, service or event. Large brands are sometimes limited in design opportunities by the web content management system (CMS) they are using, but if they create a microsite, then they are free to do something a bit different.

A microsite isn't restricted to one page either but can include several sub-pages giving you more freedom to provide your audience with exactly the information they need. This is perhaps the biggest difference between landing pages and microsites. WIth a landing page, you need to get everything on to that one page. With a microsite, you can use sub-pages to provide more information than you could fit on a landing page.

Why should I use a microsite?

As stated above, microsites are useful when:

• You want to provide detailed product information including everything from installation instructions, safety information, user manuals and where to buy spare parts or accessories. One landing page won't do the job here and adding all this information to a regular homepage is too much. Microsites make it easy for your end-user to get the right information at the right time.
• When your current CMS won't do the job you're looking for. This could be for a campaign or specific event and you need to 'go outside the box' a bit
• When you're using QR-codes that lead to relevant content and you need a way of managing them so that you have everything in one place. A microsite builder that's linked with QR-codes can work very well. Check out how the Kolla microsite platform works