Campaign or partner-specific niche-oriented sites can be more effective at driving conversions than corporate or brand sites. CrownPeak Technology's VP of  marketing and product strategy explains how to pull them off.

During the Super Bowl this year, I was struck not by the game (ho hum) or the half time show (better than ever and no wardrobe malfunctions), but by the sheer number of advertisers that were finally "getting it" and guiding me to their websites to play off their commercials.

I know this sounds like "duh, isn't everyone," but in fact very few marketers have been doing this. According to a study by Reprise Media, at last year's big game the only advertiser to audibly mention its website was Blockbuster. This year, though, everything was about the web, video and user-generated content.

There are two trends here that really interest me. The first is simply the sheer focus on getting users to go to the web. This isn't any big surprise for us digital marketers, as we are being asked to justify our marketing spend and the web is a sure way to measure our effectiveness. 

But the second trend is really interesting, and speaks more to how the web is becoming much more a "platform" for marketing than a vehicle to drive visibility to a corporate website. These new sites are campaign-specific. They can even be "spot" specific.

More than ever, the trend is toward more, smaller websites designed to leverage an experience for the consumer and to drive a specific conversion. Certainly this trend is evidenced by the new types of corporate blogs that seem to pop up all over the place. But even more distinct now are the new designs, content platforms and even brand extensions.

For the Super Bowl advertisers, microsites worked in varying degrees. On the positive side, Chevy advertised a contest prior to the big game inviting users to submit ads that would run during the Super Bowl. The company set up a blog-like website at chevycollegead.com and received what it called an "overwhelming response."

On the negative side, Snickers set up afterthekiss.com featuring the aftermath of two mechanics that found themselves on the wrong side of, well... let's just leave it there. After an overwhelmingly negative response (or is all publicity good publicity?) the candy company decided to take the site down.

The important point is that both are excellent examples of the importance of employing an easy to use and flexible set of website management tools. 

It's not about sites any longer
As the drive for boosting ROI through the web is focused on what kind of reach we can get, websites become less about overarching brand vehicles to which we publish gigantic, ever-disparate HTML pages, and much more like a platform that we leverage to drive specific campaign-oriented content in varying formats. 

Take the Chevy campaign microsite for example; that website utilizes YouTube video to show off the video, Technorati tags to appeal to the bloggers and an extraordinarily simple design geared to let users get to the content quickly and effectively. Chevy's marketers made it easy for them to publish content, and they made it easy for consumers to add to the site and build the site. In essence, they created a user-generated marketing campaign.

And on the other side of the coin, having the tools to immediately and effectively "retire" a site that doesn't perform well, like Snickers, is a powerful way to maintain control over a brand.

The key is that these microsites can drive conversions that sometimes a corporate site cannot. They also provide a way to distance yourself from the corporate brand and test a concept or a campaign without having the risk of using the corporate URL. 

Another side of this is, of course, catering specifically to your customers and partners. So, for example, publishing customer-specific extranets for your largest customers or designing unique microsites that take advantage of a partnership-specific solution are extraordinarily effective ways to provide for effective, targeted content, without breaking the bank or re-architecting your entire infrastructure.

As you look to expand beyond your corporate website, and launch campaign-specific resources centers or campaign-based microsites, look to add these kinds of capabilities to your website management toolkit:

• Consider technology solutions that enable you to act extraordinarily quickly (within a week or less) to a great idea or opportunity to launch a microsite. Your technology should never be in the way of launching new sites.
  
• Consider website management solutions that allow you to integrate with other Web 2.0 applications. For example, can you publish a video on YouTube and easily integrate that into the homepage of your site? Can you schedule this video to change every day?
  
• Consider a Web Content Management system that can really be the hub of your online marketing efforts. Consider a CMS that can simultaneously publish HTML content along with your RSS feeds and integrate your content into an email campaign management system. Make sure your CMS can directly import content generated from the users of your website.   
  
• Consider email campaign management systems that can do more than just send email, but can also enable you to create customized demographics and filters, and that can integrate search results or other types of dynamic content directly into the body of the email. 
  
• Consider adding the ability to accept open-ended content from your website users. Ask questions that allow them to communicate with you.
  
• Consider adding the ability for customers to rate content and add comments to content in order to let the users determine the value (or lack thereof) of the content.

If Web 2.0 is teaching us anything, it's that producing niche-oriented sites that are campaign or partner-specific is becoming easier, not more difficult. As we all start trying to creatively think about how to differentiate ourselves and become more effective, it can sometimes help to have the ability to publish and market "outside of our corporate box." Just make sure you're ready with your tools in case you need to act quickly, either because you're so overwhelmingly successful, or because you… well… get the "kiss of death"… 

Rob Rose is vice president marketing and product strategy for CrownPeak Technology. Read full bio.