Market-Gap Microsite Pipeline
A recruitment pipeline: show a target brand its regional footprint, your market's gap, and the anchor-demand proof that the catchment is real.
The building blocks
- A template map + guide (edit only a clearly marked BRAND DATA section of the HTML).
- One worked example folder to clone from.
- Trade-area source data (foot-traffic reports, visit counts).
- A target note per brand.
Design rules (hard-won — never break)
- No straight-line distance rings. They never match road-mile labels and discredit the map. Show distance as connecting lines + a sidebar instead.
- Road miles + drive times everywhere, never straight-line distance.
- Keep a constant anchor (e.g. a major retailer) across brands — it's the proof the catchment is real. Only the brand's locations and projection change per pitch.
- The map must show region-wide location density so the gap is visually obvious — a zoomed-in map that hides the pattern misses the point.
- Verify pin alignment and the anchor cross-reference data before showing anyone.
- Keep the map a single static HTML file (no framework/build) so it drops into any microsite.
- A star icon marks your target location.
Pipeline steps
- Ingest the brand's trade-area report(s) → extract locations, visit counts, catchment data.
- Clone the template to a new brand folder; fill the BRAND DATA section per the guide.
- Verify the map locally (serve over HTTP, not file://) — check rules 1–7.
- Write/update the PRD and the brand target note.
- Build the microsite from the reference template: your branding, hero, a catchment explainer section, and the embedded gap map.
- Package per the
ship-siteskill (folder + zip; host drop = folder, not zip). - File everything back into your knowledge base and update the outreach tracker with the new target's status.
Outreach step (often forgotten)
The microsites exist to power a cold-outreach campaign. After a site ships, offer the outreach emails / broker contact list for this brand — that phase gets left dangling otherwise.