How to Use Webinar Content to Fuel Long Term Microsites

This blog was originally posted on jdsupra.com. Shared with author’s permission.

Are your archived webinars gathering dust on your website? Breathe new life – and new viewers – into your expertise and insight by building a resource hub that engages with your audience whenever they need content most.

Microsites devoted to specific issues, industries, and even specific clients allow you to feature your firm’s guidance and perspective on the issues most relevant to the people you are trying to reach. They let you extend the scope and value of webinars and other content that your audience may not otherwise be able to find on your website.

Equally important, they provide you with a rich set of analytics and data that you can use to discover new opportunities, fine-tune your webinar and marketing programs, and optimize your content for SEO.

Here are three ways our clients are using ON24’s Engagement Hub – a drag and drop technology that provides a simple, out-of-the-box solution to create robust resource centers – to put their archived thought leadership back to work:

1. Add Value for Significant Clients

Organize past webinars and other content around the issues you regularly feature – the subjects that keep your best clients up at night, like cybersecurity or anti-corruption programs or managing employees (maybe even all three!) – to make it easy for viewers to access and appreciate your thought leadership.

…your top clients get comprehensive analysis and valuable insight on the specific matters they face every day

Online direct trading and investing company TD.com is doing this. They created an engagement hub to house their full suite webinars designed to educate and inform investors on a broad range of topics ranging from current global interest rate trends to tax reporting and more.

With a focused microsite, your top clients get comprehensive analysis and valuable insight on the specific matters they face every day. And you get detailed data on their viewing and reading habits, data you can use to guide future content marketing efforts (or, for that matter, in-person meetings): the issues of most concern to your audience, how much time and attention they devote to certain topics, the paths they follow to get to the information they need, and more.

2. Establish Leadership in New Service Lines and Niche Markets

Resource hubs that feature tailored content on niche or emerging hot-topic issues, like artificial intelligence in health care or the obstacles facing entrepreneurs in the emerging cannabis industry, provide an effective foundation for launching a new service line or expanding your reputation with traditional audiences. What’s more, because you don’t have to incorporate the site into your existing website, you can quickly build and publish resource centers as opportunities arise.

Global law firm Morgan Lewis is doing this particularly well with their Labor & Employment NOW hub that contains videos the firms has created to address employment and labor issues, like the NLRB’s “applicable law” provisions, workplace investigations, and employment arbitration.

Viewer analytics will tell you how well the issues resonate with your target audience, what’s relevant, what’s not, and what your next webinar should cover. What’s more, because viewers register for the site to access content, the portal functions as an effective lead generation and engagement tool to help you establish and nurture new connections.

3. Showcase Industry Skills and Expertise

Portals that bring together webinars and other content you’ve created to help clients respond to the challenges and concerns of specific industries and sectors – manufacturing, real estate, or food service, for example – let you repurpose content for new audiences while reminding existing connections of the depth and breadth of your experience and the solutions offered by your team.

One company that’s using Engagement Hub to showcase their expertise in IT workflows and cloud computing is ServiceNow. Their microsite contains the on-demand webinars their audience needs to understand business-critical technology issues, manage their people and processes, and improve results using technology solutions.

You can focus the content narrowly or broadly – for example, to target middle-market power generators active in emerging markets or retailers across the United States. You can do a deep dive on a single issue, like digital transformation in the publishing sector, or build a comprehensive resource for industry participants. Most importantly, you can easily modify the site to respond to viewer interest and current developments, quickly bring archived webinars back to the home screen, highlight popular content, and more, to customize your resource hub to the needs and interests of your audience.