How to Use a Knowledge Base as a Marketing Tool to Drive Business

What is a knowledge base and how can you create and use one as an effective marketing tool to drive more business through your website? Find out in this post.

 

How to Use a Knowledge Base

Photo by Tim van der Kuip on Unsplash

 

A solid knowledge base will tell your customers, industry, and search engines that you’re an authority in your field. It is also handy when it comes to sales enablement.

 

However, sometimes, having a well-built knowledge base isn’t enough. You can have all these how-to guides and tutorials, but if your customers can’t find them, all your efforts will eventually go down the drain. 

 

This guide will help you build a comprehensive knowledge base for your product:

 

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a library of information about particular products and services. Examples include how-to guides, frequently asked questions, and troubleshooting instructions. 

 

What it does is that it allows customers to look for answers and solve problems on their own. Doing so makes it easy for them to find solutions without asking for help. 

 

Moreover, a tool such as a knowledge base can help you and can be helpful in:

 

  • Offering convenience to customers by allowing them to access help anytime and anywhere.
  • Providing a quick resolution for customer issues. With a knowledge base, your customers don’t have to wait for representatives to act on their requests.
  • Placing customers in the driving seat. A knowledge base allows customers control over when and how they can access the necessary answers and solutions.

 

However, making your customers self-reliant isn’t the only advantage a knowledge base can provide. When used well, it can be an excellent marketing tool.

 

Here are the ways that you can use your knowledge base as a marketing tool to help your business:

 

1. Optimizing your content for SEO

There’s no doubt that SEO is crucial for knowledge management because it’s vital for your site. One of the best ways to get more site visitors is by organizing your content to rank well on search results. If you can quickly find the knowledge base of your company in Google, it’s more likely that you’ll be drawing in customers and prospects.

Keep in mind that Google ranks content that offers real value to readers. So, it would be best if you used this as an advantage in every piece of content you write. SEO isn’t easy and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Make sure that you follow the guidelines set by Google.

 

2. Provide quality content

This isn’t often a direct way to use a knowledge base as a marketing tool. But if you don’t fulfill this step, then using a knowledge base as a form of marketing tool almost becomes an impossible feat.

 

It would be best if you focused on creating great content most of the time. In the same way, you also have to ensure the most valuable and optimized content to enhance the performance of your knowledge base

 

3. Implement excellent customer support

As an entrepreneur, you might know that customer retention is far more critical than securing new prospects for your business, especially if you run a monthly payment system.

Ideally, your customer service department should go above and beyond your call of duty. The same thing should apply to your knowledge base.

 

4. Optimize the structure of your knowledge base

Similarly, if you want a thriving knowledge base that will bring in plenty of site visitors and grow your company online, then it needs to have some structure. 

 

When people visit a knowledge base, they usually seek well-thought-out and informative articles. But the thing is, writing excellent articles isn’t enough. It would be best if you still thought of a way to navigate your knowledge base to find those articles. 

 

You can arrange your knowledge base content according to its purpose or topic. Ideally, your posts would deal with a similar issue and should be grouped. That way, visitors can easily find them. 

 

You can also place suggestions on search engines so visitors can find solutions to the most common problems on the first try. 

 

5. Popularize your knowledge base

As you would for a blog, you must attract people to your knowledge base. 

 

One of the best ways to succeed is to get your marketing and social media teams in the process. They can promote your knowledge base by: 

 

  • Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter inform customers about the knowledge base. 
  • Placing relevant knowledge base links on social media posts regularly
  • Allowing followers to share knowledge base articles with their own networks
  • Utilizing relevant hashtags to draw more people in with your knowledge base content
  • A solid knowledge management strategy

 

6. Link your knowledge base content

You must consider this step as some “internal linking” in SEO. After you have an excellent knowledge base content optimized via SEO practices, it’s time for you to link everywhere. 

 

Ideally, you want your customers (and even your team!) o be able to get your knowledge base content from various sources. 

7. Promote the content

Go with the 80/20 rule. You should spend 80% marketing your content and only 20% creating it. 

 

Why? You can spend all your time creating unique content and optimizing it with the best SEO strategies. But if you’re not using your knowledge base to promote your content, everything will go down the drain. 

 

8. Use facts to drive sales

In a traditional setting, knowledge bases are used internally by businesses. But since you regularly get usage analytics from interactions within your knowledge base, you can use that to actively transform and market your products in the most effective way possible. 

 

You can also use the gaps in your knowledge base to identify the content you need to write. For instance, in your email marketing strategy. Using robust search analytics, you can monitor queries that return few or no results. Also, those that have low clickthrough rates. 

 

Over to You

 

So there you have it. A knowledge base and a knowledge base management strategy are critical aspects of your business. You can use the information from it and send it back to your customers. 

 

That way, you can enhance the overall customer experience. You can then use it for more marketing opportunities that are highly targeted and precise. Good luck!