One of the classic questions, when building a Microsite for marketing purposes, is this: how much effort should you put into building the microsite? Or said differently, how close-to-perfect should the microsites be (since the closer to perfect it is, the more effort is required)?

The answer is, like so many of the first-level answers in life is this: it depends.

But it depends on what?

Let’s look into and see some of the factors, and only you can determine which ones, if any, do or don’t apply to you.

The first is: how core is a microsite to your marketing strategy? Rule of thumb: the more core it is, the closer to perfect it should be.

The second is: how sophisticated is the target audience for your microsite? The amount of attention to detail and perfection and obsessiveness should be in proportion to their sophistication. Take the case where your target market is very unsophisticated–then, you don’t really need a particular before or intensive site. I once even created one-page, one-image landing pages targeting very very unsophisticated people (where the call-to-action was a phone number on the image) and it was wildly successful! So, for an unsophisticated target market, the microsite can be on the simpler side, which is both easier and cheaper. But let’s say the target market is very sophisticated. Then a simple site that looks and feels like a lot of other simple sites just won’t cut it.

The third factor for how much energy you should put into your microsite is this: how high-value is the target market? The more high-value, the more closer-to-perfect it makes sense to make it, because it will be more convincing to them. And with a high-value target, we really want to convince them!

The fourth microsite sophistication factor depends on what you want to do with the leads that come in from each microsite. Do you want to present them as different entities? Do you want to befriend them and build a network? Do you not even care because it is for SEO purposes only? Or perhaps you don’t care because it is for credibility purposes?

Note what’s not on the list: market size. Sometimes big markets demand perfection due to competitive pressures; but sometimes tiny markets are so high value that it’s worth it.

There are many more factors, and I’ll come back and update this list later. Most probably :)

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