Well over 90% of Americans use the internet today, which means having a digital presence is critical. Enterprise websites are your digital welcome mat and serve many purposes with multiple audiences. They’re tools for patient acquisition and engagement, staff recruitment and retention, and promoting brand identity. With the importance of the site to the organization, so much visibility, and so many stakeholders, enterprise websites aren’t very nimble. But there’s another digital solution for marketers, microsites.

Microsites aren’t part of the same infrastructure as the broader website. They tend to serve very distinct purposes, target particular audiences, and drive specific actions. And because they’re not intended to be the totality of an organization’s web presence, they also offer a lot of flexibility. They allow for much faster movement and more control over the content and alignment with the intended audience. However fast-moving or targeted they may be, it’s always important to maintain a patient-centric lens.

Curated, multidimensional user experiences

Marketers want to give the audience a clear path to the desired action. On enterprise sites, there’s a lot for users to navigate through and discover, and plenty of room for distraction! Microsites can provide a curated, multidimensional user experience related to a particular service line or procedure. The user is immersed in content relevant to their area of interest and driven toward a specific action.

Flexible and agile development

Marketers have to contend with development launch cycles and strict brand and editorial guidelines when working on core websites. Most executive leadership teams have a strong perspective on how the enterprise website appears in the market. However, there may be more flexibility on a microsite with a limited purpose. Still, maintaining brand identity, even on a separate site, is an important part of creating a consistent digital experience.

Performance marketing is all about iterative testing and stacking repeated incremental gains to achieve outstanding results. It’s a game of compounding percentages. Microsites offer nimbleness and flexibility to make changes quickly without being bogged down by core website development cycles. They can also help boost SEO performance. Core sites cover a wide range of topics, so the range of SEO keywords is similarly wide. Microsites, as standalone entities centered on specific topics, enable marketers to create highly targeted content and optimize for niche keywords. This focused approach enhances SEO performance by improving relevance, boosting keyword rankings, and driving more qualified traffic to the site.

Technical and tactical performance metrics

From a marketing perspective, website performance fundamentally depends on two key metrics: the volume of traffic and its conversion rate. However, a deeper analysis reveals several nested KPIs under these broad categories.

• Traffic: Marketers can track metrics like cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), and engagement rates to gauge the quality and efficiency of their paid campaigns.
• Conversion rate: Metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and user journey insights provide valuable data on how effectively the website guides visitors toward desired actions.

Additionally, assessing how the site performs in organic search results is helpful. Metrics like search engine rankings, click-through rates (CTR), and domain authority can uncover opportunities to improve discoverability and attract higher-quality traffic.

Every team should also look at overall site performance, the speed and number of errors, for example. These are issues of technical hygiene, and they’re important components that promote positive user experiences. And it’s useful to understand the patterns of users as they progress through a page or the microsite overall. That allows for site optimization and helps maximize the conversion rate.   

Connected to a larger patient experience

Too often when building microsites, marketers get caught up in driving a particular action rather than thinking with patient centricity. Microsites are attractive because they target a specific topic for a specific audience and purpose. But they still exist in the larger digital ecosystem of the organization. Every touchpoint should make sense in the context of all other touchpoints the organization will have during the patient journey.

When building a site, marketers should start by asking what the patient would want to see before they took the action the site is designed to promote. Yes, the content should include words that resonate with SEO algorithms and help boost ranking, but marketing performance is secondary to the fact that the site needs to tell the right story. It needs to qualify the patient, to promote understanding, and build trust.

Balance between quality and quantity

Many organizations do a good job of getting people to fill out a particular form without considering what is best for the user. A low-friction form may generate a lot of form fills, but they may not be qualified in the right way. They may not be patients who will ultimately have a good experience with the organization. Consider a person who isn’t a candidate for a drug promoted on a microsite but fills out a low-friction form. They don’t have the right expectations for what comes next, and that’s not the best introduction to the organization.

There’s a balance between creating the amount of friction needed to qualify patients appropriately and moving enough of them through the funnel. The goal is not just to drive conversions, but to drive conversions from patients who will benefit from the service and will drive profitable growth for the organization.

Consider this real-world example

An online pharmacy wanted a microsite with a form that was easy to fill out and an option to call directly from the site navigation bar. The site was meant to be a place to transfer existing prescriptions, not a mechanism for getting a new one, but the marketing copy didn’t really make the distinction clear, so while it got a lot of traffic, it wasn’t a good patient experience.

The idea was that patients without prescriptions could call and be directed to a provider who could see them and write one if appropriate. Not all callers understood that the medication required a prescription, and others weren’t interested in being referred. From that point, it wasn’t possible to determine if they ultimately called a provider. And worse, many left feeling frustrated and misinformed.

Making the call button contingent on form answers would help ensure that callers are qualified. Fewer people would get access to the call button, but the people who don’t aren’t the target audience anyway.

The number one goal is the patient experience

Microsites are a great way to maximize flexibility while minimizing lead times if they fit in the organization’s digital strategy. Curated content related to specific needs that drives a particular action can be an excellent way to start the patient journey. But remember, patient privacy and data security are significant concerns for both enterprise sites and microsites.  The best practice is to consult with internal teams to make sure the site is compliant in every way possible.