Your corporate website is an excellent vehicle for promoting your company’s services and products, but when it comes to lead generation, microsites are a much better bet.

Here’s an analogy: Your corporate website is a city that needs to have broad appeal. Sure, people visit certain areas for specific reasons, like people who go to the restaurant district or theater district, or check out a museum exhibit or sporting event. Maybe they’ll wander around a bit, but there’s no guarantee. Moreover, just because they visit doesn’t mean that you collect any information about them, nor give you an opportunity to ensure they return.

In contrast, a microsite has no such constraints. It’s more like a special event, and can be promoted in a much more targeted way to a highly defined audience—and can therefore drive leads through participation, interaction, and conversion rates.

These are a few of the reasons a microsite excels at lead generation:

Distinctive look. A microsite has some flexibility within your brand standards, even if the tone of the content is the same and overall look maintains some of the organizational fonts, colors, and themes. Since you’re not trying to be “all things to all people,” it is comparatively easy to collect leads by directing visitors where you want them to go and what you want them to do.

Direct pitch. Along the same lines, you can employ more direct lead generation tactics that would seem a bit too much of a “hard sell” for a corporate website. The people that land on your microsite have already self-selected themselves as interested at some level. If you have an enticing offer and call to action, you’re much more likely to capture a lead.

SEO advantages. Because you’re building a microsite from scratch, you can be highly targeted about the domain name and keywords used and move up quickly in search engine rankings—without being bogged down by the search terms or SEO strategies dictated by the “mothership.”

Easy to measure. Similarly, you can have an entirely separate analytics site—meaning you improve your ability to see what’s working and what isn’t, without having to wade through irrelevant data, and being able to make on-the-fly tweaks.

You can experiment. Whereas a corporate website isn’t likely to change very often (unless you have the world’s most flexible IT department), it’s very easy to do A-B-C versioning and test responses while collecting leads.

The key, of course, is to use corporate websites and microsites for the purposes to which they’re best suited. And, if you want to know more about how microsites are distinct from landing pages—even though they’re often lumped into the same category—read my post, “How to Tell the Difference Between a Landing Page and a Microsite.”

In your experience, what are some of the other advantages of microsites vs. corporate websites when it comes to lead generation? Are there times when you prefer to collect leads through the primary corporate website?

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About Eileen Burick

Eileen Burick and her expert team at Burick Communication Design (BCD) are passionate about combining creative aesthetic, strategic communication skills and cutting edge technologies to accomplish your key business objectives. Whether you’re a CMO or marketing leader who wants to launch a digital makeover, redefine your brand’s value, generate/nurture leads for sales, or make your online marketing more effective with targeted campaigns, BCD can transform your message with WOW-factor to drive results. Follow me on Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn