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If you’re anything like me, then you probably have a few favorite websites that you visit on the regular. Whether it’s to get the latest insights on the best sales enablement tools, get tips on How to create a one pager for sales, or to keep in tune with some marketing inspiration.
These pages and sites provide valuable information that visitors want to access when they are browsing. Moving beyond just a simple blog, resource centers on your marketing site serve as the gateway to all the great content you’re serving up.
A resource center is there to help your visitors to educate themselves about your products or services and find value in your case studies, guides, templates, and much more. There’s absolutely no limit to what type of content you provide within your resources center as long as it’s valuable to your visitors.
It enables customers and prospects to easily find the information they seek. It encourages discovery of content. When prospects look on your resource page for one product line or in a particular market segment, they build awareness of additional products and services. It increases “stickiness” of your website. It’s the single place for your best content. It makes it easy to share your links and recommend your content to others.
So how do you make an amazing website resources page? You focus on making it valuable for your buyers!
That’s the main reason why you should have a well organized resources page – to enable your buyers to navigate and self-serve through your collections of content.
After all, buyers prefer to educate themselves about the product before initiating the buying process.
It’s reason enough for marketers to shift to a better collection of resources for their website with a buyer-centric approach. The end goal is helping them to self-serve great content that exists to help them buy.
Below, we will give you the insights on how we created the Content Camel Resources Center to enable our buyer’s journey towards a successful conversion.
When you’re creating the content library for your website, you will come across a couple of things that are pretty common with the majority of resource centers. These are:
Looking below at Cvent’s Resource Library, you’ll notice they grouped their resources into types & platforms only. Chorus does pretty much the same thing.
But Salesloft, Outreach, and Hubspot include topic and in some cases role to make the content actually relevant.
So while filtering by content type may help a few visitors, really, your buyer isn’t going to find that ‘type’ filter helpful in making their decision any faster.
It’s not a buyer-friendly approach, instead, they are putting the buyer through a needless process of filtering down the content and skimming through an inexhaustible amount of information before they can find what they were looking for.
Zendesk also uses a similar approach as they grouped all their content into different types.
You probably don’t need an analogy, but I can’t help it 🤗
Imagine walking into a library to find information on marketing best practices… and being forced to first decide if you want to pick up a magazine, watch a video, or track something down in a pile of books 😜
Initially, you might also take a similar approach when you are creating your resources page, and that’s OK:
These are three small steps you will need to begin with, but remember that you’re trying to help potential buyers most of all.
When you’re creating content with a buyer-centric approach, your resources center should also be aligned with the same approach. Your resources center should be there for your buyers to find out more about your products or services offerings.
Done well, it will simplify your buyer’s journey and shorten your sales cycle.
That’s the kind of approach we took with our own resource center here: Content Camel’s Resources Center!
So, most resource centers are focused on “types” of content; ebooks, webinars, videos, etc.
A better way to do it is to focus on the “topics” that prospects and customers care about. Visitors are likely more interested in Topic X or Topic Y than digging through types to find the content covering the topic they are interested in.
For own own resources page, we thought about the type of visitors (marketers, sales leaders) that would be coming to the page and what they’d want to accomplish (get templates, learn tips, discover strategies, see a product demo) and grouped the content along those lines.
This approach is also great for SEO.
It not only helps build out content hubs, but also helps link those to each other.
Now that’s what we call an amazing website resources page 🎉
Below, we put together some more details on how to build the best resource page possible.
You can start by researching your competitors – what are they up to with content and keywords and where they are failing their buyers with content gaps?
We’ve found that most of our competitors are focused on creating content hubs for their resources without a buyer-centric approach. As we discussed earlier about Cvent and Zendesk, Highspot is also focused on grouping content by media types (Blog, Ebooks, webinars, etc) for their resources center.
This is something we found to be ineffective for buyers. They are searching for solutions to their pain points, they are looking to evaluate solutions, they want comparisons, or they want industry information. The content-type approach doesn’t help with any of that.
It’s similar to another competitor of ours: Uberflip.
While Uberflip has carried along with the rest of them by incorporating media types and a filtered search for their resources, they also created a featured content library on the main page that catches the eye immediately and caters a bit more to the buyer-centric approach.
Our internal research showed there aren’t many sites that enable buyers to find information on their own and feature content that directly addresses their pain points (what they are actually looking to accomplish).
Even if they do, the intent is lost somewhere in the filters and navigation.
That’s where and how we found our leverage (give people what they want)!
Who do you want visiting your resources center? Why do you want them there? It’s crucial that you understand who your target audience is when you’re creating your resources center.
When you know who your target audience is, you can effectively layout all your content and provide valuable information to address their needs. You can even anticipate their pain points and needs.
We wanted our buyers to reach our resources center to self-serve great content, shortening the sales cycle and enabling the buyer to make their decision fast.
If you want your buyers to reach your resources center, you better hit them with the right content that speaks to them or more appropriately addresses their pain points.
If you’re still mapping out what resonates with your audience, you can begin with our marketing persona template to start the message testing process. Everything you map out for your personas can be translated into how you organize content on your resource pages 👍
Another consideration that is absolutely essential to creating a successful website resources page is effective content organization strategy.
In the best case, you are essentially creating playbooks or content journeys that visitors can run through to experience your content. We think about this in terms of what finding your leverage and finding your audience uncovered. It’s the detail behind who your audience is and what they are looking for.
Then, take them on that journey aligned with their stage of the funnel based on their intent. Thinking about it this way highlights a conversion-oriented approach and also highlights where you might actually have content gaps.
The following are categories we selected to best represent and organize our content:
And this represents just a beginning for us – our first version of a resource page. We also created a card view at the bottom of the page that contains links to other resources that already exist on the website. These can prove to be valuable for the buyers who’s ready to take their next step in their buying decision.
In a similar way, Content Camel’s Sales Content Management Tool helps you organize your content into topics, categories, but for use by the sales and marketing teams. As you move beyond the deployment of your resource center, it’s something to consider enabling your teams with, so they can really maximize the impact of all your content.
While we don’t feature it yet own our own resources page, it’s always a good idea to be thinking about fast, medium, and slow conversion points. For us, as a B2B SaaS software solution, that could look like:
So when mapping out your buyer’s journey and landing them on your resources page - think about the conversion points that make sense for your prospects and customers. What’s the right content offer at each stage?
When you’re creating an amazing website resources center, you should focus on converting that resources page into an integrated resources hub of all your high value sales content. It should serve as a hub of all your winning sales content and cater to all your inbound marketing efforts.
It should be able to address the key pain points of your buyers and provide an interconnected content hub for your products and services.
That’s what we did.
If you have one or more product offerings, you can create resource hubs for each of your products and tie them together with a central resources center. It can help the buyer to navigate through the right type of content if they are searching for a particular product or service.
Once you have your resources center showcasing all of your winning sales content, it can support your inbound and outbound marketing efforts. Instead of just leveraging the typical PDFs, ebooks, and one-pagers, you can send your prospects down the path to the resource pages that make sense for them. This gives both marketing and sales meaningful tools to deploy during the sales process instead of scattered assets all across your site.
As we mentioned earlier above, we created the Content Camel Resources Center based on what our buyers are looking for. We were fully committed to enabling our buyers to self-serve great content and influence their own buying decisions. It’s the kind of shift that marketers are making in their efforts to make their content truly resourceful.
It’s our process and buyer-centric approach that really enabled us to successfully create Content Camel’s resources page. As we continue to measure and adapt – and think about fast, medium, and slow conversion opportunities – we’ll be evolving the pages and the resources offered.
Let us know how you use this approach in your own work!
Learn how you can organize, share, and track content today.
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.