Perfect Microsites in No Time

We live in an attention economy. Some have already recognized this, others have not. Either way, it doesn’t take away from the fact that attention is only getting scarcer, while companies and organizations need user attention to survive. Whether it’s to sell our goods, provide our services, or simply get the word out there. When it comes to marketing, you must treat your audiences’ attention as a highly valuable resource. Your marketing messages need to get your point across both succinctly and clearly.

An ideal way to boost your standing in the attention economy is by harnessing the power of microsites: the 2.0 version of a landing page. They deliver additional navigation options and enhanced possibilities to interact with your users.

This shift to the better suited, personalized content seen in microsites does not come by surprise; to that in-the-know. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and with an audience with an attention span of less than the length of the memory of a goldfish, marketers must be creative. Instead of long texts or books trends are leaning toward new ways to transfer one of the oldest human mediums: stories. This seems to be happening everywhere - mostly in the form of videos and snackable content.

Observing a Shift: The Rise of Microsites

Microsites may be increasing in popularity now but like too many technological advancements, their introduction came after a series of adaptations over the years.

• 1992: CERN, the first website went live and it was 100% text-based, with dark blue links as the only color.
• 1993: The Landing Page was born, launched by MTV. It took forever to load.
• 1994: Javascript and Flash brought more interaction and colors to the internet.
• 2003: WordPress launched with ~2000 blogs. A lot of longer text sites and large amounts of information followed.
• 2014: By this point, many websites are now using call-to-action buttons and every company is expected to have a website providing information on history, products, and other key materials.
• 2019: Instead of website builders or CMS, marketers look into page builders and offer targeted and personalized information, using microsites.

Less Content but More Pages?

Companies with 30 or more landing pages or microsites generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10. (Source: HubSpot) This makes total sense if you realize that placing multiple offers on your microsite can decrease conversions by up to 266% (Source: BLULEADZ).

Effective microsites or landing pages are like effective storefronts, you don’t show your crowded warehouse but instead; curated products that match the desire of your audience. Less is more! As a rule of thumb, you should have one offer per page. Multiple offers can kill conversions, keep that in mind and build a new microsite or landing page for each campaign and offer. For this amount of microsites and landing pages, you must have a simple system at hand that supports fast and easy creation. Picturepark is such a system and if you already use it as your Digital Asset Management; for managing all your digital content; you can now also access all your corporate communication material for your new microsites.

Is There a Perfect Landing Page Structure?

The perfect microsite may contain multiple landing pages with a headline, some text, images, or videos, and a call-to-action button, maybe with some additional information. The style depends on the campaign and audience which you are targeting; therefore there is only a perfect microsite for a specific audience and not a universal one (it would be nice though!)

On neilpatel.com you can find the anatomy of what he thinks makes the perfect landing page, including writing tips and color recommendations: https://neilpatel.com/blog/landing-page-design-infographic

Using Picturepark, you can create this perfect microsite or landing page structure for your audience in no time.

Thanks to the agile content modeling approach in Picturepark you can add additional content blocks anytime you see a need or remove existing ones e.g. show links to other special offers.

A structure like this can then be used to prepare the publication environment for your landing pages and microsites. You can leverage the Picturepark Press Portal SDK, to see a live sample of such a publication environment. In Picturepark you can then choose your publishing location (the correct structure) and see your page live in seconds. Once the final publication environment is in place you just create and publish multiple landing pages in no time; never touching the SDK code again.

A trigger in Picturepark can push additional information to your microsite including tracking codes or focus keywords for SEO.

Build Multiple Landing Pages in No Time

With a structure and microsite in place, you can create landing pages en masse in no time. Adding visuals directly from the Picturepark DAM is as easy as ever. No need to copy files between systems or lose time searching for content in different folders and repositories.

You can format any text using Markdown Syntax, as you wouldn’t want to have your texts without any highlighting. Markdown is a well-known and established lightweight markup language, with an easy to follow formatting syntax. Markdown lets you mark text as headlines, bold, italic, or underline. It also supports lists and links or images inside your text.

The following examples of landing pages all use the same structure (Headline, Key Visual, Text, Button, and additional information), while you are free to create as many different landing page structures as you want. The management of these pages in Picturepark is similar to managing your images, videos, and documents. You can search for the headline and text, add restrictions for unpublished content, and see the layout of your targeted landing page.

One landing page displayed in Picturepark for a Thanksgiving cooking event and the corresponding landing page after it has been published.

Another landing page created in Picturepark for your Christmas songbook with a playlist and the corresponding landing page after publication.

All the pages are created as Virtual Items in Picturepark, file-less content. Everything is managed in one system, with no switching tabs in the browser, no uploading, downloading, or copying around.

The creation of one page can be done in less than five minutes. That will allow you to create the 30 pages for optimal lead conversion in 2.5 hours. Until the end of your workday, you can invest your precious time in planning the next campaigns or get a toffee nut latte and enjoy yourself.