Tip 3
Your Website's Tech Resource Center and Blog
Technology buyers and customers can be some of the savviest consumers in the world. When it comes to evaluating new technology products or services, rest-assured they are doing their homework.
They’ll be reading white papers, product comparisons, and chatting on industry message boards to ensure they make the right investment in a technology that matches their business or personal needs.
So, why not make it easy for them to do most of that legwork from your website?
That’s precisely what a great Resource Center can help accomplish, educating and informing your future (and often current) customers on a regular basis. But a resource hub has to be done correctly, as the majority of resource sections on websites are not targeted properly towards specific users and prospects.
Here are some types of content that you should consider incorporating into your resource center, depending on your product, service, and/or target customer:
Articles + Lists
Solving your target audiences challenges and pains is a great way to attract visitors through search optimization. Google is often used to find solutions and creating relevant, valuable content to satisfy that need is a key strategy.
Case Studies
Before becoming customers themselves, prospects want to know how your company has already positively impacted similar customers. Case studies are a great way of showing the nuts and bolts of how your technology works with customers.
Formulate case studies for different industries, business sizes, and customer types so that any kind of sales prospect feels like there is a success story they can relate to.
Whitepapers
When done correctly, whitepapers can be a great way of positioning your company as a thought leader within a specific industry or area of technology. Whitepapers should be based on concepts, challenges, or issues that are critical to your core customer base.
They should be educational, highly informative, provide unique value and insights, and (most importantly) be unbiased and non-promotional.
Webinars & Tutorials
To establish themselves even further as thought leaders, many technology companies conduct free webinars or post video tutorials within their resource center. Webinars can be especially useful because it’s a real-time, interactive way for potential customers to engage with subject matter experts within your company.
These webinars can then be archived, spliced, or edited for future consumption in your resource center.
Infographics
While whitepapers and case studies are great resources, not everyone has time to dig deeply into those topics on a daily basis. Infographics are a great way to engage top of the sales funnel prospects in a short, fun and interesting way.
Infographics often present key facts, industry statistics, or product overviews in a format that can easily be digested in a matter of minutes.
Industry News, Reviews & Reports
Showcasing a wide range of industry information can help make your site an authority for a topic. Just a few examples are industry news, product reviews, trend reports, conference schedules, and much more.
Including this type of information will help increase search ranking and solidify that your company has a pulse on the industry.
Product Feature Releases
For technology and software companies, releasing information about new features for software or equipment is valuable to your audience. Existing customers can stay up-to-date on changes while new customers can get a sense of the pace of evolution.
No matter which types of resources you decide to provide to your audience, you’ll also want to account for the fact that your library will grow rather quickly over time.
Make sure you constantly adjust and adapt your resource center layout to include things like advanced search, organization by content or industry type, and above-the-fold featured content of your latest (or most relevant) resources.
New Relic uses infographics for both fun cultural topics, as well as technology deep dives