A campaign microsite: when it beats a landing page and when it is overkill

Build a microsite when one launch must answer three or more kinds of buyer, and you will send each a different link. Build a landing page when there is one offer and one kind of reader. A microsite costs more. It takes more to make, to keep correct and to take down. One page that carries the argument is simpler, and a visitor does not have to choose a path.

Three questions that decide it

Answer these on paper before anyone opens a design tool.

1. How many different people will click? Count readers, not job titles. A retailer who stocks your product, a distributor who wants territory and a school that buys in bulk ask different questions. Two readers with the same question are one reader.
2. Do they arrive from different places? If the retailer comes from a trade WhatsApp group and the school from a printed letter, each can have its own link. If all three come from one Instagram advert, they land on a page that cannot know which one they are.
3. Will the content change on different dates? A launch with a trade preview, a consumer date and an institutional tender window needs pages that open and close separately. A single page cannot do that without becoming confusing.

Three yeses: microsite. Two: a landing page with a short section for the second reader, or a microsite if both readers are large. One: a landing page. No yes at all: you do not need either, and a service page on your main site will do the work.

What a microsite looks like on paper

Sketch it as a list before building anything. A launch with three readers might map like this.

Notice that the start page is optional. If every link you send is already aimed at a reader, skip it. A door page that nobody needs is waste.

A hosiery maker in Ludhiana

An invented example. A Ludhiana maker of thermal innerwear is launching a winter range. The owner asks an agency for "a campaign page". Then the sales head points out that the range goes to three buyers. Shopkeepers in Jalandhar and Amritsar want margin and a small first lot. Wholesalers in other states want territory. A few uniform and institutional buyers want a size chart and a bulk rate.

The first draft puts all three on one long page. The shopkeeper scrolls past territory rules that do not apply, the wholesaler cannot find whether their state is covered, and the enquiry form asks for everyone's details at once. The sales team gets calls that begin with "I could not see my question".

The better version is a three-page microsite with a start page that simply asks "Are you a retailer, a wholesaler or a bulk buyer?". Each page has its own WhatsApp button, and the message that button opens carries the page name, so the sales head knows which page produced the enquiry. The shopkeeper page is short and the wholesaler page carries a state list. Same product, same photographs, three answers. The cost is real: the three pages take longer to write than one, and in the first month the wholesaler page needs its state list corrected twice because two territories were already promised.

When a microsite is overkill

• One offer, one reader. A clinic running a single procedure camp needs a landing page. See how to design a campaign landing page for that.
• A campaign that lasts days. Pages built for a three-day sale have no time to be improved. Use one page and put the effort into the advert.
• No one to keep it correct. Every page is a promise about price, stock or dates. If nobody owns the updates, a stale page can quote a price you no longer honour.
• The main website is already strong. With one clear page per product and per buyer, a campaign is a new set of links to those pages.

There is also a middle case. If the second and third readers are small, give each a section lower on the same landing page, with a jump link at the top. That is cheaper than a microsite and keeps one address to track. A microsite also fails when the three readers are really one, so the count in the first question is the one to be honest about.

What to settle before any build

Write these down. The owner, the sales head and whoever answers the phone should all agree to them.

• The single shared enquiry route and who answers it.
• The end date and what happens to each page afterwards: redirect or retire.
• Where each page lives. On your own domain, as a subfolder, is the safer default. The comparison of a website and a landing page covers why.
• How each enquiry is labelled by page, so you can tell which door worked.

Put one person's name against each page as its keeper. When the winter range sells out in one size, that person changes the size chart the same day, because a buyer who orders from an old page and is told it is not available does not return. Ask each keeper to look at their page on a phone before the launch, with the WhatsApp button tapped once, so the first real message is not also the first test.

Sketch the page map before you brief anyone

Take a sheet of paper and write the readers of your next launch down the left side. If you get to three with different questions and different links, plan a microsite. If you stop at one, plan a page. Either way it sits inside your wider marketing, and the build is covered under campaign microsite development. If you are unsure which side you are on, tell us what you need.