5 Tips to Leverage Microsites for Holiday Marketing
As the holiday season approaches, consumers can feel overwhelmed by their personal and professional to-do lists. End-of-year activities demand careful attention, such as choosing the perfect gifts for loved ones, managing a calendar filled with seasonal social engagements, and planning for the business year ahead.
At a time that may be critical to your company’s bottom line, how can you reach buyers effectively when their holiday plates are already so full?
The key to launching your next holiday campaign—or any campaign operating within a defined time frame—may be the marketing power of microsites. As smaller websites that supplement your organization’s flagship site, they stand alone and offer audiences a separate experience focused on a single theme or concept.
The holiday magic of Squarespace Enterprise microsites
Maybe you’re promoting a discount on certain products or services, or pushing limited-edition holiday versions of your best-sellers. Maybe you’re hosting special events for your employees or customers to show appreciation for their loyalty in the past year. Or perhaps you want to highlight how your brand supports seasonal charity efforts, like donating meals to food banks or hosting gift drives for children in need.
Any of those concepts—and countless similar ones—are ideal topics for microsites, where you can devote as much content as needed to explore their depth. By dedicating a website to relevant messaging, you can keep audiences focused on the subject at hand without unrelated content competing for their attention.
Your company’s main website is likely filled with links, banners, messages, and call-to-actions that guide visitors through the consumer journey. This may not leave much room for adding specialized content around one of your organization’s newer or seasonal initiatives, especially if they’re experimental in nature.
Having limited space to showcase seasonal promotions can make it challenging for marketers to prove the value of such projects or generate support for them within a large organization. Plus, competing messaging on your website may distract from the short-term initiatives you’re trying to promote.
Without a dedicated online home to tell the story of your campaign, it’s harder to convert customers. Fortunately, Squarespace Enterprise helps your team create brand-affiliated microsites quickly with no technical knowledge necessary. Here are five tips for leveraging microsites to promote your next holiday initiative.
5 tips for leveraging microsites during the holidays
1. Curate an experience
Create a multimedia experience for consumers around your seasonal project by publishing promotional photos, videos, and blogs. If you’re hosting a holiday event, including image carousels and looping background video from previous years’ events can captivate audiences and make them feel excited to attend your upcoming celebration. A Squarespace Enterprise subscription includes unlimited video storage, so you can upload all the videos you need to create a compelling experience for your microsite visitors.
If you don’t have any past video clips or images at your disposal, you can use your microsite to document the planning process step-by-step. Crafting a “behind the scenes” or “making of” story can inspire just as much excitement and intrigue in invitees. You can even tease content in future microsite updates to encourage viewers to keep visiting.
2. Keep branding consistent
One issue microsite creators may encounter is matching its style and appearance with other branded content, like their company’s flagship website or previously published blogs. With Squarespace Enterprise, however, this doesn’t have to be a concern—you can duplicate an existing website on your dashboard to create an editable template for swapping out content.
If you don’t have a current Squarespace website to use as a model for microsites, you can create a custom template just for your company—simply build a new Enterprise template and share it with colleagues so they can start with the right framework. This simplifies microsite building and makes it possible to launch multiple site versions for different projects without too much time and effort.
3. Make it interactive
Encourage direct consumer feedback on your microsite by enabling blog comments and form submissions. These can be valuable tools for collecting holiday event RSVPs or market-testing concepts for new holiday products or employee gift ideas.
4. Drive sales
Separating seasonal holiday products or services from your company’s standard offerings can create a positive sense of urgency and desirability. Microsites are a perfect way to help customers browse holiday collections that are distinct from the products they see every day. Squarespace’s e-commerce features empower you to show off special product catalogs and enable buyers to make purchases with customized checkout options.
5. Stay secure
Creating internal microsites for your team’s exclusive access can be a great way to commemorate significant work milestones. For example, you can document the collaborative efforts behind a product launch from concept to completion, along with triumphs over any stumbling blocks. You can also display photos and videos from your team’s holiday parties, offsites, retreats, and other bonding events throughout the year—memories that you might not want to publish on social media for privacy reasons. Not only can these internal microsites boost employee morale, but they also provide reflection opportunities for growth and progress.
Squarespace Enterprise’s single sign-on (SSO) integrations work with your existing SSO provider to limit microsite access to your company, so you won’t have to worry about viewers outside your team accessing sensitive information. Plus, Squarespace Enterprise gives your team the confidence of SOC 2 certification, so they know your microsite platform complies with the highest security standards available.
Providing a distinct consumer experience that’s unique from your typical marketing platforms can boost your holiday campaigns and increase audience engagement with them. A well-designed microsite might be just the dose of marketing magic your brand needs this holiday season.
