What Tools Do You Need For An Online Comprehensive Knowledge Base?

Creating truly informative and useful content is still the answer.The difference is that you need to really become strategic about your informative content creation.

You need to have goals and you need to get organized.

One efficient way to achieve both is to build your content strategy around one ever-growing content asset, i.e. the knowledge base.

There are several important benefits of building a comprehensive knowledge base:

1. You turn your site into THE destination: There’s no reason for your current and potential customers to look for answers elsewhere
2. You get your site to rank for long-tail and informational queries (bringing well qualified leads)
3. You position your brand as the knowledge hub which builds trust and loyalty, etc.

On top of all, building one ultimate resource is the powerful motivation for you and your team to keep working on your site content. And motivation is everything.

1. Start with Question Research

Question research is the most effective way to understand your niche and your audience. It helps you understand what sort of struggles your target customers are facing and how to best serve them.Fundamentally, there are two types of questions you want to address in your knowledge base:

Product-focused
Brand-focused

1.1 Product-Focused Questions

Product-focused questions are all those issues that your product or your service helps solve. These help in attracting leads to your site, especially those who are at the research phase of their buying journey. They have questions and they may be happy to discover your product as an answer.Keyword research tools will help you find lots of questions around your target query or queries. These include:

Featured Snippet Plus (paid, with a free trial):

Featured Snippet+ Tool (Disclaimer: The tool is being developed by the company I work for) uses Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes to find questions that show up for a variety of queries your (or your competitor’s) site currently ranks for:

Buzzsumo Question Analyzer (paid, with a free trial)

Buzzsumo uses its own index of forums and Q&A databases to find which questions are being asked around the web:

The best thing about Buzzsumo is that it uses semantic analysis to research questions around related topics, not just your target query verbatim:

Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is a semantic analysis and content optimization tool that has a handy “Content Ideas Section”. Simply enter your target query and Text Optimizer will generate a list of popular questions to cover:

[You can export the whole resport to send to your content team]

AnswerThePublic (freemium)

Answer The Public generates questions from Google Suggest results. You don’t need to register an account to use it. Simply type your target query in the search box and browse the results.

The tool will visualize the questions into a neat mindmap based on the question word. You can also download all the results into a CSV file:

Twitter Questions

Twitter supports a question operator allowing you to find what people are publicly asking on Twitter: Simply type [keyword ?] in Twitter search box. Do keep the space between your target keyword and the question mark.

Now, use the same operator inside Cyfe to have these search results collected and archived for you to act upon:

[Cyfe dashboards can be exported and shared which makes it a great collaboration tool your whole team can use and delegate tasks]

1.2 Brand-Focused Questions

Brand-focused questions are those people ask about your (or your competitor’s) brand. Monitoring and answering these questions is useful on many fronts, including:

1. Learn to avoid your competitor’s mistakes
2. Make your product better by implementing users’ feedback
3. Control your branded SERPs by providing all the answers on your own site
4. Turn unhappy customers into brand advocates by promptly helping them

To research brand-focused queries, you can use the same tools. You do need to treat them with more care because you want your customers to find all the answers from you instead of turning to third parties. This way you’ll be able to control the sentiment and avoid losing leads.

Navigational questions can be further categorized into:

• ROPO questions (“research online, purchase online / offline”). People who search for these questions already know what they want to buy. They just need to know where to buy it from.
• High-intent questions. These leads are already willing to buy from you. They just need to land on your site to follow the sales funnel
• Competitive research questions. These queries compare your brand to one of your competitors.
• Navigational questions. These people need help navigating your (or your competitor’s) site

2. Organize Questions and Topics

Running the tools is cool but how to make sense of all the data? Getting organized is key to any successful strategy.

Furthermore, there are multiple actions you may want to perform with many of those questions, including:

• Creating new content answering each one
• Editing existing content for it to rank for the related queries
• Alerting your sales and social marketing teams for them to know the answers as well as be able to quickly point leads to where these questions are answered
• Notifying your product development team of possible bugs to fix or ideas what to add to the current offering.

In a nutshell, here are a few ideas on what you may want to do with various questions you come across during your research:

Starting a Google Spreadsheet to organize questions into basic groups as well as take note of further action is a good idea here. Here are a few good templates for you to use.

3. Get Your Content Created

Here we come down to the fundamental part of this strategy. You may already have writers that handle content creation for your site. If you don’t (or if you are interested in exploring more options which is never a bad idea), here are a few ideas for you:

3.1 Hire (or Collaborate with) Influencers

There are two solid benefits of working with niche influencers on creating a better knowledge base:

1. Niche experts will make your content more authoritative and trustworthy
2. Influencers may bring in their audience to your site by sharing (and maybe even linking to) content they have co-authored

There are multiple possible forms of content collaboration you can apply here. You may reach out to influencers for expert quotes, hire them as expert writers, interview them, etc. The best approach is to experiment with as many tactics as you can here as you never know what is going to work best.

Buzzsumo to Find Influencers

To find influencers to work with, use Buzzsumo to find interviews and guest posts on any topic. You can filter results to see only most recent content on any topic. The idea is, if that expert recently accepted an invitation to contribute on this topic, chances are he/she will be interested in working with you too:

Bizswipe for Building Partnerships

Another possible tool to use here is a new app called BizSwipe that connects businesses that are looking to build relationships and find partners and collaborators. Use BizSwipe to discover businesses based on a variety of criteria and reach out:

[Building connections through content co-creation is the easiest – and a free – way to discover unexpected business opportunities and mutual benefits]

3.2 Hire Writers from Narrato.io

Another newer but very promising platform connecting brands to expert authors is Narrato.io that uses artificial intelligence to match writers to those who need content. The site offers free plagiarism check and unlimited revisions – both of these work great for productive content outsourcing.

4. Come up with More Ways to Answer Questions

Content marketing is more diverse these days than just a few short years ago, and there are few good reasons for that:

1. Competition is going stronger: Brands are coming up with more and more ways to attract and engage audience. To remain competitive you need to create diverse content assets, including interactive content, visual content and more.
2. Google organic positions are not as valuable these days as they used to be. There is much more to Google visibility than organic rankings. There are images, videos and quick answers stealing searchers’ attention. If you need to create solid SERP visibility, you need to create more content formats to show up in more Google’s search elements, beyond organic listings.

To give you a few ideas on what types of content can be applied to creating your on-site knowledge graph, here are a few options:

4.1 Webinars

Webinar marketing offers great opportunities including effective lead generation and community building. Recorded webinars can also create additional bonus material for your knowledge brand.

You can also use webinars as part of your collaborative content creation strategy: Engage those niche influencers by inviting them to host your webinar and share incoming leads.

ClickMeeting allows you to easily host webinars with no technical knowledge required. It offers lots of neat features including customized invitations, custom branding, Youtube and Facebook streaming and more. There’s also an on-demand webinar feature allowing you to record webinars to re-use inside your knowledge base:

4.2 Flowcharts

Flowcharts make great instructional content that is also easy to share across multiple available channels (for example, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) It’s one of those content formats that can help you drive traffic, not just engage it.

You can easily create beautiful flowcharts with Venngage or Visme: Simply pick a template and edit using your instructions.

4.3 Video Step-by-Step Instructions

I love creating step-by-step mini-videos showing instructions because they can be easily re-purposed on multiple channels as well as make it easier to explain how to do anything. On top of all, that’s the easiest asset to create.

With tools like this Slideshow Maker, it takes minutes to create quick, yet useful and well-branded videos. All it takes is picking a template and editing it any time you need a new instruction.

5. Create a Marketing Schedule

There’s one thing I came to understand about content marketing strategy: Unless it’s scheduled, it’s never happening.

I get really religious about putting my content assets into a schedule. I actually create my schedule months ahead. It’s the only way to get so much done.

The easiest way to create a content marketing editorial calendar is ContentCal, a omni-channel marketing app that includes “Campaigns” feature.

1. Schedule campaigns months and years (for recurring campaigns) ahead
2. Create campaign briefs listing goals, additional assets, ideas, influencers to include, etc.

The beauty of ContentCal’s campaign brief is that you can get as detailed (or as brief) as you want to be. You can also invite managers to contribute to your campaign briefs to make it more detailed.

Your team will be notified of the approaching campaigns by seeing a campaign ribbon across the calendar. Clicking the ribbon takes you to the campaign brief. This way your whole team is informed of what’s coming and how to prepare:

6. Optimize for Conversions

Becoming “the destination” is a good long-term goal behind creating and maintaining a knowledge base. However business decision makers are obviously after more tangible results.

Therefore it is important to come up with various ways to get those visits convert into actual customers.

You are likely to already have some in-content conversion optimization strategy in place. Your blog probably has some sort of optin forms integrating helping its readers to stay tuned for updates and special offers from you.

To save time, I won’t go into basics here. But here are couple of fresh ideas for you to try:

6.1 Re-engage Your Knowledge Base Readers

Those people who discovered your brand through landing on one of your knowledge graph pages may be unwilling to buy from you. But if for some reason they choose to come back, you need to be ready to give them exactly what they want.

That’s where setting up ongoing retargeting campaigns makes so much sense. If your site visitor came to your site to research how to get started hiking, there’s little to no point in advertising swimming gear to them. But of you remind them of your hiking products, the engagement may get through the roof.

Finteza is the analytics platform that will help you set up retargeting ads on your site based on a multitude of criteria, including visiting specific pages on your site or enrolling for your upcoming webinar.

You do need to have Finteza running on your site for some time before it accumulates enough data on your site past visitors.

6.2 Use Smart Content Recommendation Engine

Traditional optin forms are getting old. Web users are getting increasing weary of yet another freebie they will get in exchange for their email address.

Email marketing is still a strong channel but it needs more creativity and innovation than a few years ago.

Alter is a smart content recommendation engine that can get your collect more leads from your knowledge base. It is based on artificial intelligence which means it is monitoring your site visitors on a continuous basis to learn how to best engage them: