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Medical and pharmaceutical brands manage multiple and complex portfolios. Each product comes with its claims, market approvals, disclaimers, and regulatory frameworks. Content must pass through legal, medical, and regulatory (MLR) review. Every change must be versioned, timestamped, and audit-ready.
As portfolios expand, shared content systems become harder to maintain. Publishing slows down. Review cycles overlap. Ownership becomes unclear. Microsites address this by assigning each product its own publishing space, review structure, and compliance boundary.
For organizations operating across multiple markets and indications, microsites are a practical, scalable model for regulated publishing.
Content, compliance, and the risks
Different medical products follow different rules. Some products need a prescription, while others can be bought over the counter. Each type has its own rules. Products are also approved at different times in different countries. A product might be ready for launch in one country but still waiting for approval in another. What you’re allowed to say about a product often depends on where it’s being sold.
This means the content has to be customised for each country, not just in language, but also in who the message is for, like patients or healthcare professionals.
Adding to that, the review process is different for each market. It usually involves several teams, including medical, legal, regulatory, and safety (PV) experts, and each team has its role in approving the content.
Regulatory frameworks such as FDA 21 CFR Part 11, the EU Pharmacovigilance Directive, and the ABPI Code of Practice govern how content must be reviewed. When these requirements are managed through a shared CMS without clear boundaries, the risk increases. Promotional material may be shown to the wrong audience. Outdated claims may remain live. Audit logs can become harder to interpret when tracking unrelated products, regions, or approval flows within a shared CMS.
Shared CMS setups break under regulatory pressure
Enterprise CMS platforms can technically support multiple products within a shared system. But the complexity of it increases with scale. As the number of products, regions, and teams grows, so does the friction.
Common issues include:
- Global queues blocking region-specific updates
- Shared components triggering unintended review across products
- No clear separation between promotional and regulatory content
- Audit histories that require manual filtering
- Changes in one product trigger a compliance review for others
In our experience, microsites help to reduce these points of failure. Each product is governed independently. Review cycles are focused. Updates are not delayed by unrelated releases.
More on individual product microsites
Microsites allow each product to operate within a clearly defined environment. This enables regulatory workflows and reduces operational complexity.
1. Review cycles scoped to the product
Medical, legal, and regulatory teams work in focused review tracks. Microsites reduce overlapping cycles by isolating review tracks to specific products, limiting cross-dependencies where possible.
2. Market- and audience-specific access
Microsites allow content to be routed by geography, language, and user type. Healthcare professional content stays gated. Country-specific versions are easy to manage.
3. Version control and audit trails
Each product site maintains its log of changes, approvals, and published content. Regulatory teams can trace review history without filtering through unrelated materials.
4. Campaign velocity
Teams can launch product campaigns, respond to PV updates, and roll out localised assets without cross-team dependencies. Microsites help implement safety-related content updates faster by isolating product-specific workflows, essential for meeting regulatory deadlines for safety communications or black box warnings
5. Scoped permissions
User roles are assigned per site. Different market teams gain clarity on what they can manage, review, or approve, reducing errors and bottlenecks.
This model aligns with how publishing is managed and enforced in regulated environments.
Case study
We partnered with a pharmaceutical company that manages a large portfolio of both consumer-facing and prescription products, spread across multiple regional markets.
One of their top-performing medical product was published within a shared CMS, alongside several unrelated products. Over time, this setup became a bottleneck and introduced risks to compliance and publishing speed.
During the discovery period, several issues became clear. Content for healthcare professionals and the general public was combined without a clean separation, raising concerns about regulatory compliance and audience targeting.
Even small content changes required technical support, which slowed down routine updates. Approval workflows varied between teams, and there was no reliable version history to track. The legacy structure of the site contributed to slow performance.
To address these challenges, we rebuilt the product site as a dedicated microsite.
This new setup enables the creation of product and market-specific editorial workflows that align with medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) processes. We introduced audience-specific routing so patients and HCPs would see only the content intended for them.
A new component-based design system was created, making it easier to update and reuse components consistently.
We introduced scoped user roles for editorial, legal, and regulatory teams. Each group had clear responsibilities and permissions, reducing confusion and delays during the review process.
The result was a self-contained, compliant publishing environment. Teams now update content faster, reviews are more focused, and the publishing process no longer depends on unrelated product timelines.
The new system mirrors the way regulated content is managed internally and gives teams the flexibility to work at their own pace while staying fully aligned with compliance standards.
Designed for regulated publishing at scale
Microsites work across product categories, regulatory environments, and regions. They support country-specific claims, parallel campaign launches, product-level audit logs, timely pharmacovigilance (PV) updates, and versioned releases tied to local approvals.
Importantly, microsites do not operate in isolation. They integrate easily with your enterprise stack. Microsites can connect to existing systems such as:
- Your DAM (Digital Asset Management) for storing and reusing approved elements.
- CRM platforms for managing customer and HCP engagement
- Single sign-on (SSO) tools for secure access and role management
- Analytics platforms and tag managers for tracking site performance and behaviour
This allows you to maintain brand-level control while giving product teams the flexibility to publish quickly and accurately.
Microsites also support local market ownership. Country teams can manage their versions of a product site while global teams retain oversight of branding and approved claims.
This also simplifies the handling of language, legal, and regulatory differences. Rollouts can be staggered, with one country going live at a time, based on local readiness and market approval.
Shared enterprise CMS platforms still have a place. They can support brand identity, central user access, and global asset libraries. But when it comes to regulated publishing, microsites provide the structure and independence needed to reduce delays, avoid compliance issues, and scale effectively across teams and regions.
Conclusion
The publishing system affects launch timing, regulatory response, review capacity, and cost. When product lines expand, the gaps in shared platforms become harder to manage. Teams wait on each other. Review cycles overlap. Visibility into what’s live and approved becomes harder to maintain.
From our experience developing microsites for medical content, this approach supports scale by allowing each product to run on its track while staying aligned with brand principles and identity. It improves workflow clarity, reduces cross-product risk, and makes regulatory review and launch faster and more controlled across markets.
Wherever a product is launched, the process remains fast, consistent, and compliant, with the site meeting regulatory and market expectations from day one.
