Top 4 Reasons Why Microsites Are Revolutionizing PPC Marketing

The past few years have seen a significant evolution in PPC marketing, with more brands starting to use Microsites to serve as the new destination for traffic from their PPC campaigns. Instead of sending prospects to the brand's main website or a landing page within the main website, more companies are creating dedicated microsites that serve only one purpose: to capture traffic from PPC campaigns and convert those prospects to take whatever specific action is the goal of the campaign. Microsites are giving brands a new level of flexibility, targeting, user engagement, and successful conversion in PPC marketing.

Below are the top 4 reasons why your brand's next PPC campaign strategy should include microsites:

1. Microsites work better than landing pages.

The idea of having a dedicated place to direct inbound traffic from a PPC campaign is nothing new - but instead of a landing page that is part of the company's main website, Microsites offer an added degree of focus and flexibility. With a Microsite, your brand team has the freedom to design the Microsite to look and feel totally different from the rest of your main site. You can focus the content on precisely the needs of users who are coming to the Microsite, without worrying that they might get confused, lost in the larger site's navigation, or distracted by the surrounding content of your main site. With microsites, you can talk to the audience in a focused and highly relevant manner to give them exactly what they need.

2. Microsites deliver big results for brand building and conversions.

Microsites are narrowly focused on the needs of the user - each microsite has only one goal: addressing the immediate problem on the prospect's mind. As such, microsites tend to achieve better results for engagement, brand building and conversions. Microsites can be designed to quickly and concisely spell out the key information, make the case for why the user should take the next step in the sales process (whether it's to sign up for a newsletter, get a free download, or make a purchase), and then clearly show the user how to tap a button or click to take the next call to action. Microsites are a simple, elegant "conversion machine" to boost your sales results.

3. Microsites are better than landing pages at building trust with customers.

Consumers today tend to be distrustful of advertising. If they click on a PPC ad the link takes them to a cluttered, cumbersome landing page that takes a long time to load and is full of pop-ups, users are likely to get frustrated and immediately lose trust for the brand. Microsites tend to offer a much simpler, cleaner user experience that delivers relevant information quickly - and this has the side effect of building trust with buyers. With a microsite, you can cut to the chase and speak directly to the concerns of your PPC inbound traffic: you know that they already saw your PPC ad and decided to click on it, so your microsite can skip past the usual boilerplate and immediately pick up the conversation where the customer left off by clicking your ad. The nature of PPC campaign microsites is ideally suited to having a focused, efficient sales conversation - you know what your customer wants, and your microsite can immediately go deeper into showing the customer why your product or service is the right answer to their problem.

4. Microsites make it easy to build distinct campaigns.

As their name implies, "microsites" tend to be smaller and simpler than typical websites - and that means that they are faster and cheaper to build. Since microsites tend to have simple designs, limited features and not a lot of navigational complexity, they are also ideal for mobile devices and they load very quickly. Microsites are also ideal for creating multiple templates that can be used across multiple campaigns and A/B tested for multiple objectives and metrics. You can quickly create multiple versions of the same microsite and test it with different audiences, or test different stages of the sales process. Microsites are remarkably versatile, and can give you an experimental sales conversion test laboratory that exists separately from your main site.

For your next PPC campaign, use microsites to make sure that users who respond to your PPC ads are getting directed to the most relevant, useful and actionable information to address their needs. Microsites are the new standard and ideal best practice to speak to a highly targeted audience, track campaigns, launch new products, test new markets, and quickly generate leads and build brand awareness. Each microsite has a single purpose, but microsites can serve a broad array of purposes to help your brand grow.

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