When do microsites make sense?

This is a preview of the type of strategy articles I publish for Superpath Pro members. These articles are mostly bits of advice I offer our customers, anonymized so that more folks can benefit from it. Members also get our courses, office hours and monthly networking calls. And you can learn all about it here: https://lnkd.in/g5BBVvA

---

I was on a call with a founder last week and he told me he was considering launching a microsite. The company had a blog that they used for product updates and company news. He wanted to create a new site, probably on a dedicated domain, to house all educational content. The microsite would be “Sponsored by” or “Powered by” the company.

Here is what I told him: most of the microsites I’ve come across have died a slow, quiet death. Yes, there are counterexamples, but as a general rule, I’m not a fan of microsites. I’ll explain why and because I want to be fair, will also offer a few pros. 

The Downsides of Microsites

A lot of microsites are creative diversions. They are new and shiny and a pleasant distraction from the hard and not-so-fun work required to build a great content presence on your primary site. Here are a few of the biggest issues with microsites.

• Microsites = microconversions. By nature, microsites are detached from the product, meaning you are probably going to have to drive readers towards newsletters, social channels, courses, etc. These are little, tiny wins. It’s hard enough to convert readers when they are on your site, why make it harder? Most microsites make an effort to be distinctly different from the mothership. I believe it’s best to build as much equity in a single brand and single domain.
• Content surrounded by ads is the business model killing media. Product-agnostic content that is "powered by" your company is similar to slapping ads on any old article. SaaS, e-commerce and services are far better business models. Lean into the advantages rather than copying the model of an industry in crisis. If you do launch a microsite, don’t be coy about your product/service—make it front and center.
• Do you really have the resources to manage two sites? The reason most microsites don’t make it is because they are hard to resource. Unless you are over-resourced—and I’ve never once seen this happen—keep a narrow focus on your main site. A microsite is more work to maintain than you might realize. There is content creation of course, but also social channels, email lists, Wordpress installs, style guides, editorial calendars, etc. You double the amount of administrative work on your plate. 
• Missed opportunities for your domain authority. You get my theme here. If you’re going to invest in content, don’t spread yourself so thin. If the content is relevant enough to be created at all, it’s relevant enough to live on your blog, resource center, tutorials section, etc. If nothing else, consider your domain authority. Building content somewhere else, means you’re building links and authority that could be pointing to your main site. For SEO purposes alone, microsites tend to be not the best use of time.

The Upsides of Microsites

You can obviously see that I’m opinionated here, but I also want to present both sides of this question. Microsites can and do make sense in some cases.

• You can present a single, very clear concept. This is where microsites thrive. Your own blog is likely a mish-mash of product updates, SEO content, thought leadership and other things. A microsite should deliver a single type of content, with a concept so clear and compelling that readers can’t help but get hooked. 
• Communities and microsites can work nicely together. Community is all the rage right now and it can make a lot of sense to build a microsite to house content, events, a podcast, etc. for a community. Let me tell you firsthand, however, that community-building is really hard. If you, for example, have a customer support product, you might consider sponsoring a group like Support Driven rather than trying to create something similar from scratch. And if you have a product for content folks, let's talk! ??
• Run a pilot. For really large and/or well-funded companies, I could imagine using a microsite to pilot a new type of content. I haven’t actually seen this done, or if I have, i wasn’t aware of it, but it could work. The challenge is here that migrating content from one domain to another is a pain.
• Engineering as marketing. This is distinctly different from a content-focused microsite but I wanted to call it out because there are so many great examples. We did this at Animalz (revive.animalz.co), Shopify has a bunch (like hatchful.shopify.com), dev agency Platform has a project cost calculator (calculator.plat4m.com). Sites like this benefit from content to help drive traffic, but likely don’t need ongoing content like a normal blog would.

Microsite examples:

To illustrate some of the points above, here are a few examples:

• Increment by Stripe. Stripe is an outlier and this publication is an outlier too. It’s really good and I bet it’d be a ton of fun to work on, but don’t apply a $100b company’s strategy to your own without really thinking through the why and the how.
• ReallyGoodUX by Appcues. This is a much more reasonable approach. Appcues collects examples of good UX and publishes screenshots. They offer some lightweight commentary and make it pretty clear that Appcues can help you achieve the same great UX. If you’re researching in-app upsell prompts, this could be quite useful. Most of all, I like that it’s easy to maintain—the folks at Appcues are researching cool UX examples all the time. Why not repurpose the byproduct of that work?
• Asana Academy - I only kind of understand why this lives on a subdomain, but I’m not 100% sold it’s necessary. It’s an “academy”—this is pretty common for self-serve SaaS tools—and this site does have an “academic” feel to it. Asana is telling the reader that this is educational content...maybe that makes them feel more comfortable? Like they won’t be sold to? They are, of course, but it’s a slightly different experience than on the blog. I do appreciate that they use a CMS (https://www.skilljar.com/) that is made specifically for course creation, but I'd rather run this on asana.com/academy even if it means sticking with the existing CMS.
• Clearbit Connect - This is a free (and really good) Chrome extension that helps you find people’s email addresses. It's engineering as marketing and I think it's a perfect use of a microsite. There is some content on this page, but only enough to clearly explain the problem that it solves and talk about some related topics (almost certainly for SEO purposes).

If you think I’m wrong, I want to know! I’d love to see some examples of really effective microsites. Email me or leave a link in the comments below.