Social media, blogger outreach, and online advertising are all great ideas, but every idea you come up with always sends web traffic back to your boring corporate website. The website that has grown year after year and that is now a big ball of information that leaves you uninspired.
Your company is launching a new product this summer. As a marketer, you want to make a huge splash and not just a toe-dipping announcement. You’re killing yourself brainstorming ways to garnish the attention you need so that this launch is a success and your product is well received by the media, bloggers, and potential buyers.
You look at your corporate website with sadness, knowing, no matter what you do, is just won’t create the excitement and attention you need for a successful product launch.
What is a Microsite?
A microsite is a small group of pages that is designed as a separate web asset for an existing corporate website. A microsite can be housed on a unique URL (www.domainname.com) or on a subdomain (microsite.maindomain.com).
The goal of any microsite is to segregate itself from the main corporate website, thus providing a separate web experience for visitors. WordPress, and all of it’s open source goodness, offers a great solution for creating corporate microsites.
Why is WordPress Ideal for Microsites?
- Flexibility
- Rapid deployment
- Feature rich
- Content easily added or edited by marketing personnel
- Easily integrates with social media
- Does not consume internal resources
- Inexpensive to maintain
Why Would a Marketer Want a Corporate Microsite?
While there are a host of uses for WordPress microsites, some of the common utilizations include:
- New product launches
- Direct marketing campaigns
- Pay per click campaigns
- Competitions or contests
- Market research
- Seasonal promotions
- Event or conference promotion
- Recruitment
- Employee outreach
Stop Stressing and Start Digging into WordPress
When it’s time for your next event, product launch, or contest promotion – consider a WordPress microsite to help you stand apart from the competition. With WordPress you don’t need to worry about internal resource constraints, budgets, and timing. You just need to focus on your marketing message.
Some Excellent Examples of Effective Microsites
While not all of these examples are WordPress websites (a large number of these are WordPress websites) , they all show just how effective microsites can be in luring in visitors, creating a connection, and reinforcing branding.
Keywords:
Due to their similar names, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are often confused for each other. The main difference between the two is that WordPress.org hosts and creates the WordPress software, while WordPress.com provides freemium hosting using the WordPress software. WordPress the software is able to be self hosted or hosted with assistance on any website or server, while WordPress.com is simply one such provider for WordPress software hosting.
WordPress.com has several content stipulations due to how the platform works. For example, content hosted on their service isn’t able to be copyrighted with an All Rights Reserved license, otherwise content hosted on WordPress.com would not be able to be shown by the hoster. Advertising is also limited on WordPress.com, whereas self hosted websites using WordPress from WordPress.org don’t have such limitations. Themes and plugins are similarly limited, with some requiring specific hosting plans to be used on WordPress.com.
WordPress.com provides many services which would otherwise require hand tuning, like hosting of WordPress, as well as security updates and server maintenance.
