How to build a product microsite

What Is a Product Microsite?

Simply put, it is a set of interconnected web pages that talk about your product. It is a subset of your main website. You can have microsites dedicated to different needs such as:

• Promote a product or service outside your main website
• Educate viewers about the product or service
• Drive registrations to the gated content about the product
• Drive registrations for your event
• Run a quiz or contest…
• Boost search engine optimization efforts for your main site or other microsites

A product microsite or product microsites can be the cornerstone of your inbound strategy. To be successful, it should be well-thought-out and exhaustive in terms of coverage. Aim to educate your target buyer on why buy and why buy from you. If well-executed, it can help reduce the time inside sales and sales spend on lead qualification and product demos. Let’s look at some successful microsite examples.

A Product Microsite Example:

https://farmersmarket.chipotle.com/ versus the main website https://chipotle.com/

The main website is packed with information, which you may need or not need initially. The order page is central to the website but has a ton of products that you can order. No issue if you quickly know what you want and how to navigate the complex site.

The microsite is simple in its digital marketing messaging and navigation. Two menu items, a simple main message, and a list of farmers that are part of the farmer's market.

Whereas the main web page is clearly very transactional, the microsite is building trust and has a clear appeal. The brand recognition on the microsite is strong and distinct and is certainly appealing to an audience that is looking for healthy food straight from the source. The microsite is educational and with embedded videos entertaining as well.

A Product Sales Page Example:

A sales page is a landing page designed to convert your target audience and website visitors into actual paying customers. They do this by including page elements and a digital marketing strategy that persuades visitors to take action.

When you write a sales page, your elements can be anything from social media buttons, social proof, and persuasive content marketing to explanation videos and customer testimonials.

However, the goal remains the same: to get visitors to purchase your products or services.

An interesting example of a sales landing page is https://stopfightingfood.com/ and the more comprehensive https://master.stopfightingfood.com/

The main site is definitely in the form of a sales landing page, whereas the Master page is still in the form of a page, but should have been structured as a microsite. The Master page is too long, and not structured to allow easy navigation and understanding of why this is different from the main site. But it is overall a good example of where sales landing pages and product microsites overlap.

Let’s look at how a product microsite is different from a product sales page. Here are some key differences:

A sales page or sales landing page has one objective, convert the visitor or target audience to a buyer of the product or service. It is short by definition and follows the branding of the main website. It is targeted at a single audience.

A microsite has a broader objective -- it surely has the objective of converting a viewer into a customer, but microsite marketing can become educational and entertaining as well. It can contain a quiz, a contest, or other online marketing tools that can lead to purchasing after having taken the quiz or the contest.

An example can be found on the main website of htpps://ooyes.love

It incentivizes viewers to take the quiz before actually purchasing the products. The quiz is nicely embedded into a microsite: https://quiz.ooyes.love/.

Even if the site does not directly benefit from the quiz commercially, at least you get valuable zero-party and first-party data out of the quiz. With this data, you can cross-market and cross-sell to these quizzers, and the data you collect will be extremely valuable in a post cookie world that is rapidly coming to all of the Internet.

Why Bother With a Product Microsite?

Is it for everyone? No. What are some triggers to see if a product microsite is right for your company? See if any of these situations resonate with you:

• You want to talk to multiple buyer personas and create several types of buyer's journey or focused content.
• You are not getting enough inbound leads.
• Your target customers don’t understand your specific message or your product and its value.
• Your sales face the same objections from prospects, time and again.
• You have several products but you want to put the spotlight on Product B.
• You want to create a time-sensitive marketing campaign.
• You need a specific product or service to stand out more on the search engines.
• You want to push out niche content.

If you face one or more of these commonly-found marketing quandaries, a product microsite might be just your thing. A product microsite will help you:

• Increase awareness about your product category and your product
• Improve organic discoverability
• Educate buyers so sales can spend less time selling

Besides that, in today’s situation when customers are not always ready to buy, this is a great long-term investment to educate buyers on their problems and why you are the best solution in town.

Some Microsite Prerequisites

A microsite is a big lift, involving not just the entire marketing team but even sales. Be ready for the long haul. It will take a quarter or two to complete, as it requires thorough research, rigorous planning, and diligent execution.

For an effective microsite that converts casual leads into active prospects you need:

• Thorough customer research and insights
• Spot-on product positioning
• Credible information and an authoritative point of view
• Attractive, contemporary design
• A plan for content updates on a 6-monthly or 12-monthly cycle
• Meticulous performance measurement

You want to be absolutely sure you need a product microsite before you embark on this high-visibility project.

Know Your Product Deeply Before You Get Started

If you are new to product marketing or new to the company, I would not recommend you build a product microsite right off the bat. You want to be sure you know your product, market, customers, and competitors.

You should know:

• Why do your customers buy you over your competitors?
• What value and benefits do customers get from your product.
• Key buyer personas and what they care about.
• Your product and company’s strengths.
• Your competitors’ weaknesses.

If you know your customers well, the microsite’s structure and messaging will easily come to you.

Crucial Sections to Make Your Product Microsite a Killer

1. Pages by Persona and/or Key Benefits and/or Verticals:

Deciding how to organize your microsite and divide your pages can be the most difficult part. Do you want to divide them by buyer persona, key benefits, or by verticals? You might want to choose a combination of these as well depending on who you want to target.

Don’t be afraid to spend time on this. Only then will it resonate with your target audience/s. You want to get this absolutely right. A change mid-way will mean a lot of disruption for everyone involved from content writers to designers.

2. FAQ Section

Remember, even buyers typically look for answers with a Google search. And when they do, your site will come up. With a well-researched FAQ, sales can spend less time answering questions. Plus, it’s great for SEO.

Create an FAQ section with questions and objections your sales repeatedly face such as those around benefits, integration, reporting, pricing etc. Work with sales closely to develop it and get it spot on. Make sure sales uses it to answer queries, and enlist their help to maintain it.

3. Customer Stories

Hopefully, you have a rich library of customer case studies before you start work on your product microsite. Otherwise, that can be a separate project by itself, from targeting and outreach to execution.

Work with sales and customer success to develop a library of customer case studies on your happy customers. Go after recognizable logos, your target verticals, and customers who have been with you for over a year. Case studies are also a great way to make your customers feel special.

Use customer case studies, video testimonials, customer quotes, and photographs across your microsite to make your customer stories come alive. When a customer says something about you, it carries a lot more weight than when you say it about yourself.

4. Product Collateral

When was the last time you went to a company’s product page and you just couldn’t put a finger on what it is they do? I see it way too often for my liking. You can’t keep your product and your category a mystery if you want people to buy from you. You got to shout it out from the rooftops.

Showcase your key product collateral, such as:

• Demo videos
• Product tours
• Brochures
• Feature sheets
• Plenty of attractive screenshots
• Product whitepapers

Keep the majority of your product collateral ungated so people can freely learn about it. The more that buyers know about your product, the fewer time sales will need to educate them.

6. A Collection of CTAs

Don’t leave your microsite visitors hanging. At the bottom of every page, give visitors something to deepen the engagement, something to download and remember you by. You can gate many of these assets and rake in the form fills.

Don’t just give visitors your content, give them unbiased market research reports from reputed research firms. In addition to your Click to Action (or CTA) buttons offering free trials and product tours, create a comprehensive list of all downloadable and trackable content such as:

• Whitepapers
• Ebooks
• Infographics
• Webinar recordings
• Analyst reports

Many of these may already exist in different parts of your website or in shared folders. If they are dated, refresh them with a fresh coat of paint. Consolidate all relevant assets and bring them under the microsite umbrella. It will create a much more effective customer education experience, and will likely improve your SEO along the way.

Some takeaways

A product microsite used to be a weighty project which took a quarter or two to complete from planning to execution. It does not need to be that way, especially with products and services on the market like WebriQ Studio. WebriQ Studio powers microsites with audience-specific content and with content that is delivered to your customers just when they need it.

In a microsite, the UX is in the detail. With less information to distract users on a microsite, companies can provide more detail on each product and its reason for being.

Some sites are overcrowded and this seriously affects the navigation of the site. This makes it difficult to complete the action users came to achieve lowering conversions.

A microsite solves the issue by offloading product categories from the primary website, to another more streamlined and specific site. The more targeted the site, the more likely people are to be engaged by it.

With a clear understanding of a smaller user group, call to action and content can be tailored to increase interaction and user experience satisfaction. Creating a microsite for one product can allow you to become a specialist in that domain.

Having a stronger position in one market can then strengthen the entire brand allowing for more risk without damaging alternative brand extensions.

As long as you check one or two of the objectives underneath, you can start building

• Educate an audience
• Encourage an audience to action, f.ex. Submit your resume
• Entertain an audience
• Equip an audience with tools

And you can get up and running in one or two weeks, as opposed to one or two quarters. The components-based architecture of WebriQ Studio gives you the ability to start small, i.e the equivalent of a sales product page that evolves into a full-blown microsite that is at least educational and contains enough incentives for the viewer to take action.

To make your product microsite a killer over time, make it more exhaustive, highlighting key benefits to key buyer personas. Add in plenty of rich content which deepens the engagement with your audience. Answer their questions with an FAQ section. Be human and tell customer stories. Give them unbiased opinions with third-party analyst reports.