Between a landing page and a microsite

MediaPost’s Online Media Daily just ran a commentary of ours, What’s Between Landing Pages, Microsites? It sums up our observation that, for the most part, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the types of landing experiences that marketers deliver when respondents click on online ads.

Landing pages look and behave today about the same as they did 5 years ago. They’ve become cliché. However, this presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to differentiate with more creative post-click marketing — landing experiences that are more than a plain old landing page, but less than a full-blown microsite.

On one extreme you have plain old landing pages, on the other you have expensive, high-production microsites.

Generally, as the sophistication and quality of the experience you provide increases, the cost and complexity rises as well. Now, many marketers can’t afford to build high-end microsites for their plethora of Long Tail campaigns. But dull, cheap, and shallow landing pages aren’t particularly effective. The right balance is found by moving up the curve with intermediate landing experiences that are better than competitors’ plain old landing pages, without going overboard into microsite cost structures.

What’s in between the two? A (largely untapped) world of highly imaginative possibilities.

Comments

[marketing jobs]

I don't think choosing one is a wise idea because I I feel both Landing page and microsites is important as marketers will have a need to use both microsites and landing pages somewhere along the way.