Topic Microsite Development

To generate market awareness and leads, many clients are asking us what they can do besides publishing a white paper.  They complain that a compelling white paper can take time to develop – sometimes months.  Once published, they can become quickly outdated.  What’s more, they often reach prospects too early in their buying process – when they have barely begun to explore a business issue and how to solve it.  When that happens, even if the prospect reads the paper, he often discards or misplaces it. The opportunity to capture the prospect’s interest is lost.

Today’s limitations of white papers are substantial – especially when prospects can find dozens of white papers on a topic in seconds after typing a few words into a search engine.  What can marketers do?  Increasingly, we are telling our clients to create a “topic microsite.” 

A topic microsite is a website devoted to educating and engaging a target audience on an issue of interest to them, through a variety of content that a firm updates continually.  Rather than just a single white paper, a topic microsite includes:

• Blog posts by a firm’s topic experts – bite-sized pieces of expertise that can be developed much faster than a white paper.
• A constantly updated news aggregation feature that summarizes important press articles written on the topic and provides links to them.  This carefully chosen set of articles saves your audience from having to scour the Web to find the important articles they should be reading.  And your summaries of these articles and why they are important give you another chance to demonstrate your expertise on the topic.
• Audience participation features such as surveys and polls, discussion forums organized by subtopics, and the ability to comment on your blog posts.
• And, yes, articles you publish on the issue at hand.  There will always be a need to develop and publish compelling points of view on an issue.

Generic Microsite Landing Page

The advantages of a topic microsite are numerous:

• Faster time to market: You can get your expertise in front of prospects rapidly – even within one month – by first blogging on your topic and creating the news aggregation feature.  You don’t have to wait till you publish your white paper before you start showing off your expertise to prospective customers.
• Deeper audience engagement: A prospective client who is not ready to read a long white paper but is interested in a topic can begin by reading your blog posts and news summaries.  After bookmarking your topic microsite, they can keep returning to your site to get more extensive content throughout their buying process.  No more white papers that hit a prospect at the wrong time.
• More and higher-quality leads: A topic microsite enables a firm to demonstrate far greater expertise on an issue than it can in a single white paper.  In addition, by becoming the “go-to” website on a certain topic over time, a topic microsite builds a larger audience.  All of this means that you will have a greater number of prospects who will be far more interested in your services and products than the readers of just one white paper.

If you would like to get a point of view to market quickly and generate high-quality leads, please read the articles in this section and contact us if you would like to discuss how we could help.