When it comes to Continuing Education, it’s incredibly helpful to offer healthcare professionals multiple opportunities to fulfill their credit requirements. Staying on top of trends, maintaining a knowledge base, and fulfilling professional obligations are constant concerns on top of demanding day-to-day schedules. Providing healthcare professionals with a variety of options that they can access according to their needs, situation, and individual CE requirements makes training more relevant, useful, and impactful.

Offering continuing education through a Learning Management System (LMS) is definitely a great option, but a multifaceted approach toward CE can help you build customer loyalty. Microsites are a relatively new eLearning trend that supports continuing education credit offerings. In this article, we’ll explore Microsites in detail.

What are Microsites?

Microsites are an individual webpage or group of webpages that act as a separate entity and cover a single topic. They can be situated as a domain or part of another subdomain. “Microsite” tends to mean the same thing as “communication platform” or “independent campaign.” Put most simply, a microsite is associated with a brand but has its own URL.

What are microsites used for? In marketing, they’re often utilized for the purpose of a single campaign, to target a specific customer base, or as a content offering that covers a single topic.

Microsites have a specific focus, which gives them certain marketing advantages, like SEO-rich writing that makes use of keyword clusters, targeted design and content to a single demographic, and a single, powerful call-to-action. In a world of highly distractible customers, this sort of segmented, directed, mobile-friendly content can be a huge advantage. And because microsites are so highly targeted, they can introduce more leads to your site by leveraging audiences that wouldn’t otherwise be familiar with your brand.

In short, microsites build engagement and brand loyalty by providing highly interactive, shareable, singular experiences. However, microsites can also prove themselves to be valuable by providing important information on a convenient platform.

What about using microsites to share information?

In the healthcare world, the benefits of microsites go beyond marketing tools. The targeted nature of microsites lends itself to a streamlined, concise presentation of information; therefore, they are a great way to display subject matter expertise. With the help of a microsite, you can decide on the type of healthcare professional you’d like to target, identify what sort of information is most valuable to their continuing education credit needs, and provide all the required content in a convenient format. Microsites can support and bolster continuing education requirements by providing customers with information to scaffold their coursework.

This kind of specialized presentation of knowledge does more than provide an important service to customers and potential customers – it fosters a sense of credibility. Showing deep, specialized knowledge of a topic helps position your organization as full of subject matter experts – providers of content that healthcare professionals can rely on as they pursue ongoing education. And in terms of continuing education, you won’t just be showcasing expertise; you’ll be tailoring the information to be relevant to obtaining credits, maintaining professional licensure, and staying on top of evolving fields. This combination can make you a “go-to” education provider for allied health care professionals. The more that they rely on your content, the more they’ll visit your sites and become familiar with your brand!

4 unique ways to leverage microsites for healthcare professionals

Here are 4 ways to use microsites to target healthcare professionals seeking continuing education credits.

1) Present collections of related material

Gathering all the information that healthcare professionals need to know in one place is a great service. It saves your customers the need to hunt information down on their own and provides a context for which the information will be useful. Examples of this kind of arrangement include groups of journal articles, courses, and relevant websites.

2) Create a hub of specialized content

If you organize a microsite around a specific topic, you can keep it updated with all kinds of information that relates to what people need to know. An example of this kind of organization is Energy Realities, which is a collaboration between diverse groups like MIT, National Geographic, and Statoil. The site unites a variety of information around energy demand and is continually updated with cutting-edge knowledge and news. A similar approach can be taken towards organizing content around a specific healthcare profession, a topic within that profession, or set of continuing education requirements for a specific license or organization. Aggregating all of that information saves healthcare professionals time, which means this kind of microsite could quickly become a frequently-visited resource for the people it targets.

3) Address major industry changes or trends

It can be incredibly hard for healthcare professionals to keep up in their respective fields. When developments happen, a busy month can mean they’re completely out of the loop. A timely microsite focused on providing the latest information on a change or trend would be a valuable resource to these professionals. You could provide summarized updates, articles, and other relevant information in one easily-referenced location.

4) Even more convenience

A continuing education LMS has the convenience of being location-independent and completely flexible around healthcare professionals’ schedules. However, a microsite has the potential to be even more convenient due to the fact it presents the most relevant and timely information in a single portal. Instead of hunting through a site for requirements, or searching through a course for the specific subject matter, you can provide your customers with targeted content for their specific situation – accessible anywhere they have Internet.

Microsites are a valuable tool in your arsenal

In short, microsites have some distinct advantages for you and your customers, and as a major part of a diversity of offerings for continuing education, they can be an invaluable tool to offer your customers more support. They’re specialized, easily referenced, self-explanatory, and incredibly convenient, allowing healthcare professionals to access the information they need when they need it. On top of that, a well-made microsite helps you prove your expertise, which means you’ll become a reliable resource to your audience – building up their brand loyalty and creating new customers.