Every business needs a reliable knowledge base for clients, employees, and customers and an on-going sales generation method. While most enterprises have both separately, it’s possible to combine a knowledge base with lead generation. Doing so isn’t only cost-efficient, it also attracts a steady stream of organic traffic.
In inbound marketing (Attract-Convert-Close-Delight), this method is referred to as “using pillar pages and cluster topics.” It works for both B2B and B2C businesses that require in-depth tutorials or educational information on various concepts and operational instructions.
Start with a specific section of your public site dedicated to pillar pages.
What Is a “Pillar Page”?
According to Hubspot’s Knowledge base, “A pillar page is a comprehensive resource page that covers a core topic in depth and links to high-quality content created for the supporting subtopics.”
In a nutshell, a “pillar page” is a dedicated resource or knowledge base page, which links to various resources. These resources are subpages, which are linked internally within the site and specifically created based on cluster topics that support the main topic.
Note that the pillar pages contain educational knowledge that is free to read online, which is typical for public knowledge bases. However, a pillar page might also serve as a landing page that offers PDF files of a compilation of the sub-pages/cluster pages for safekeeping in exchange for an email address.
In the marketing funnel, the free informational and educational pages belong to the top part of the funnel that attracts visitors with their educational content. Once they’ve reviewed valuable materials and were impressed, they likely want to keep the information in a handy PDF format. This is when that they need to sign up for the download, which is recognised as “marketing qualified lead” stage.
Notice the difference between “download this free ebook when you subscribe to our newsletter” with “the open knowledge base for all to read” tactic.
In the former, you can’t really distinguish between visitors who are only curious and visitors who are already impressed and ready to buy. In the later, when you use a public knowledge base that is presented as a pillar landing page, you have the opportunity to extract visitors’ information who are more ready to buy, because they’ve read the content beforehand.
It’s only a myth that you “should only share valuable content” within a gate. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge base pillar pages provide better lead quality. Visitors will find the ungated content both valuable and worthy to keep. And when they’re ready to download, they’d provide their email address.
How Do You Design the Pillar Pages for Lead Generation Purpose by Utilising a Public Knowledge Base?
The answer is: Don’t do it. Don’t strategise for lead generation, but design the most comprehensive knowledge base for visitors and customers.
Let your sincerity to help shines through the pages. This way, they will appreciate the objectivity, and the value provided free of charge.
Depending on your budget, time, and human resources, try to keep both knowledge bases – for visitors and customers – separate as each targets a different audience. Use specific personas, which can be more than two. For each persona, create a separate pillar page uniquely designed for them.
By “persona,” it refers to fictional, generalised characters that encompass various needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns among real and potential customers. Persona is much more detailed and specific than demographics. If your content is based on demographics, most likely you’d miss 70% of the audience.
Demographics merely focus on age, gender, race, income bracket, education, and other “big picture” variables. Personas, however, focus on more detailed variables, in addition to the demographics: hobby, passion, likes, dislikes, pain points, challenges, personality types, motivations, inspirations, behaviours, and others.
Develop pillar pages and internally-linked cluster pages with specific personas related to your business and products.
If you’re a B2B company that offers business development SaaS, distinguish the different personas among your targetted businesses. For instance, if your business targets retailers, the pain points are different from domain hosting providers’.
You can create knowledge base pillar pages from scratch with your favourite CMS or use knowledge base management software, which allows you to create groups pages, sub-pages, and cluster pages with ease with almost zero learning curve. The key is how you design the page, which should be easy to navigate and takes visitors to the subpages while remaining integrated.
Takeaways
Today, knowledge base information can be intelligently designed and developed to attract organic traffic with the inbound methodology. As long as the personas are clear and the educational or instructional information is structured as “pillar pages” and “cluster topics,” businesses can expect to generate more high-quality leads organically.
For more ideas on how to build content for lead generation for your website check out these recent Marketing.com.au articles:
Jennifer Xue is an award-winning author, technical writer, and inbound marketing writer based in Northern California. She has published more than 2,500+ articles and 100+ knowledgebase ebooks/report. She is the author of White Paper Writing for Business (BookBoon, 2016) and a Forbes columnist since 2012.
