A while back, I was talking with Jim Miller from Sales Bloom who recommended I check out this presentation by Kevin Indig.
Microsites 2.0, by Kevin Indig, is the idea that content hubs can take a searcher all the way from top to bottom of funnel without them having to leave the site.
And it's actually incredibly effective when you look at the numbers.
For example, Kevin shares a series of case studies of companies who did this:
- Nerdwallet IRA guide – 9 pages, 910 referring domains, 2420 queries in the top 10
- Atlassian Agile Coach guide – 113 pages, 1.4K referring domains, 7000 queries in top 10
The benefit really kicks in at the point where you gain enough topical depth around by subject to not just cover the bases for search in a tokenistic way.
Instead this approach is so sweet because it can be used to drive conversions even from top of funnel searchers.
Use different content types to move along the customer journey
There are several ways that this all comes together as an idea. Besides the UX of these pages (back and forth buttons, dedicated ‘next step’ CTAs), the win comes in aligning content to the user journey.
Kevin recommends a framework of five steps:
- Problems
- Solutions
- How to
- Comparison
- Conversion
Let's take that and apply it to a HR management SaaS:
- Problems – High employee churn
- Solutions – Incentivise employees, establishing option schemes, better culture
- How to – how to better incentivise employees, how to establish a share pool, how to improve culture
- Comparison – Best employee perks programmes, Top share pool structures, Best employee feedback frameworks
- Conversion – Manage your perks programme with our software, create a share pool with us, collect feedback with our integrated employee tool
The application of the whole concept is, however, more nuanced depending on your industry and market segment as well as the competitor's you're playing against.
For example, going after 'best employee perks programmes' alone is going to do so little for your conversions unless you're also combining that with meaningful improvement of the format versus the other search results and building for the other stages of the funnel.
Regardless, the beauty of the microsite 2.0 approach is that even with fairly poor execution, you'll find that you start to rank (maybe not well) for a wide variety of terms because it is tough to not go into some depth if you're following the concept of whole funnel content hubs.