How Microsites Can Power Your Social Media Campaigns

A great way to engage and immerse your consumers in your campaign, Microsites have been around for quite a long time. With the advent of social networking and Facebook apps establishing its dominance, people believed that microsites will be replaced by social media platforms.

The detractors were proved wrong and microsites are today at the centre of every big social media campaign. Take for example, HomeShop18's Land of Luck contest. It has a beautifully designed microsite which is spearheading the entire campaign.

Following are some of the important benefits of having a microsite for your social media campaign:

1. Highly Focussed: A microsite is highly focussed towards the campaign and provides no extraneous distraction to the user. The sole aim of the microsite is to ensure high participation resulting into more conversions and better branding.
2. More Freedom: Instead of being bounded by Facebook and its rules, microsite allows you to explore many opportunities. You can add the codes of your choice without worrying if they are compatible with Facebook's structure or not. It's your property, so you get to make all the rules.
3. Better Branding: Hosting your content on 3rd party dilutes your brand. But having a microsite that is an extension of your brand gives your branding a boost. Like how HomeShop18's Land of Luck is hosted on a subdomain: landofluck.homeshop18.com

But having a campaign running on a microsite is not enough. You need to have a good strategy to back it up and ensure that it succeeds. It needs the vital push to get rolling and reach the potential of going viral.

So how do you get the most of your microsite for your social media campaign? Read on:

Make it Interesting

Any campaign that is not interesting, is bound to fail. Your campaign should be engrossing enough to drive the attention of the user from his/her daily life and engage with your content. The Land of Luck campaign does a good job at it with it's highly immersing gameplay. And not only are they engaging, they are very rich in graphics too.

Your campaign should have enough meat for the users to stick with it for a long time.

Promote it Well

Ensure that your campaign is promoted in every possible way. Don't just focus on one channel and leave any stone unturned. Make sure that your entire machinery is geared towards marketing your campaign and the microsite.

The Land Of Luck application was well promoted across all of Homeshop18’s Social Media platforms.  They also ran various Contests related to it on their Pinterest  i.e (Pin Your lucky Charms) and Twitter (Quiz about #LandOfLuck) accounts. The essence here is to go full throttle and do everything there is to be done to ensure the campaign's success.

Have Alternatives

The Land of Luck campaign microsite is ably supported by its Facebook application as well. Thus ensuring that the campaign establishes its presence on  multiple platforms in order to get maximum participation. Remember, your campaign is bigger than your microsite and you must make it possible for your participants to interact with you in every possible way.

Robust Technology

If you're hosting the content on your microsite, then the technology has to be up to the mark. You can't allow any downtime to happen as it might affect your campaign performance severely. Your code structure and graphics should be nicely integrated and must be compatible for all the different OS platforms and browsers out there.

To conclude, I would say that Microsites are here to stay and I don't think they are going to be replaced anytime soon.

Have you ever ran any campaign using a microsite or alternately, participated in one? What do you think about them? Share it with us in the comments below.

Image by jurvetson