A company’s PR is the relationship it has with the public. To do that, companies engage in various efforts and endeavours. For example, companies hold events, issue press releases, and interact with customers directly to shape the way people perceive them.
Good PR means good business
One way to strengthen public relations efforts is to share and publish information regarding the company and its products in a publicly accessible space. By sharing information about itself, the company can show transparency and improve customer engagement. To do that, knowledge bases can be used.
In this post, we’re going to guide you on how you can create a knowledge base that aids in your company’s PR efforts.
Understanding Knowledge Bases
But first, a little bit about knowledge bases.
An online knowledge base is essentially a website, or a part of a website, dedicated solely to the purpose of carrying informational data. There are different types of knowledge bases, such as external, internal, and personal.
Internal knowledge bases are used to share information within an organization. They are often used to document and share onboarding guidelines among new employees. For customer support and PR, external knowledge bases are used. They are the type of knowledge bases that are available to the public and accessible to everyone.
Knowledge bases, or help centers, have features that allow users to search through all the published articles. They also have tagging and categorization features that allow the articles to be neatly organized.
How to Create an External Knowledge Base to Boost Your Company’s PR Efforts
Now that we’re done looking at the basics, let’s move on to discuss how you can create a knowledge base for your company’s PR efforts:
1) Choose and decide the audience that you’re going to cater to
The first thing that you need to do when creating a knowledge base for PR is decide who you want to cater to. Are you going to cater to existing customers to encourage word of mouth or to cater to non-converted leads?
The purpose of your knowledge base decides the type of information that you’ll later need to cover. You could, of course, cater to every type of audience, but that level of diversity in the content can demand a lot of effort and upkeep.
2) Plan the type of content that you’ll cover
Next up, you have to decide the types of content that you’ll cover in the knowledge base. There are different forms of content that you can publish on the knowledge base, including:
- Press releases: Announcements regarding the company and its developments. These help to develop transparency, which is valued by the customers and results in better PR.
- Company overview and key messages: Articles detailing the vision and mission of the company, along with its business policies. This type of information helps the public understand how a company works and what they are looking to ultimately achieve. It creates transparency and trust.
- FAQs and guides: FAQs and guides can help your customers understand how to use the products and services offered by your company. These can help improve customer satisfaction and induce positive word-of-mouth marketing.
- Testimonials and success stories: You can share articles describing the experiences that your customers have had with your products/services. This can cause leads and newer customers to trust your offerings and their outcomes.
- Case studies: You can also publish case studies on your knowledge base that provide informational insights surrounding the problems that your offerings seek to resolve. The case studies can go into detail about why the offerings were provided in the first place, how effective they are, and how important they are for everyone to try.
While it’s tempting to include all these content types, keep in mind that each one requires a separate strategy, maintenance plan, and performance tracking. If your team has the resources to manage it all without sacrificing quality, go for it. Otherwise, you can start with the types that align most with your current PR goals.
3) Select the right knowledge base platform
The next step on the agenda is to pick a good knowledge base platform. Using the platform, you’ll be able to design and create the knowledge base, and equip it with the elements that make it worth using.
How can you pick a good knowledge base platform? First, you have to learn what makes a knowledge base platform good or bad.
Here are some indications that a KB software is worth using:
- Accessibility: Ideally, a KB software should be free to use so that it is not a strain on your company. However, even with paid options, it is best to go with the most cost-effective ones.
- Content creation features: A KB software should provide a decent number of options that you can use to create content for your PR articles. For example, the software should have a native text editor that can be used to format and style the text. There should be AI-assisted content generation features to help save time and effort.
- Analytics and engagement metrics: The knowledge base system that you’re using should show you statistics regarding the performance of your knowledge base and its articles. This can help you make improvements to the latter.
- Feedback options: With feedback options, you can enable comments on the articles so that readers can leave their thoughts. This can help you gather insightful information about the articles and how you can improve them.
There are quite a few tools on the internet that have all of these qualities. We personally recommend using Helpjuice, a comprehensive online knowledge base platform that offers all of the aforementioned features and more.
4) Optimize your knowledge base for SEO
By optimizing your knowledge base for SEO, you can hit two birds with one stone.
The primary benefit of the knowledge base is to educate and edify the people coming to find out about your company. In most situations, they can find out about your company via other marketing materials. The knowledge base can then serve the function of driving the leads down the sales funnel.
However, if you optimize the articles in your knowledge base for SEO, it can become a marketing machine in itself. SEO is one of the key techniques of content marketing. It can help expose your website organically to users on the internet and work as an effective lead magnet.
Here are some things that you can do to make your knowledge base SEO-friendly:
- Use clear, keyword-rich titles that match what users are searching for.
- Write concise, informative meta descriptions to boost click-through rates.
- Structure content with headings (H1, H2, H3) for easy scanning and indexing.
- Incorporate relevant keywords naturally throughout the article.
- Add internal links to related articles to keep users engaged.
- Optimize images with descriptive alt text and proper file names.
- Ensure your content is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.
- Regularly update articles to keep information fresh and relevant.
- Create readable URLs that reflect the topic of the article.
- Use schema markup to help search engines understand your content.
- Encourage user engagement through comments or feedback sections.
- Monitor performance with SEO tools and adjust based on data.
5) Check and update your content on a regular basis
We mentioned this above as a step to make your knowledge base SEO-friendly. However, even if you’re not going for the SEO route, checking and updating your content is an important step.
By checking and updating your content on a regular basis, you can ensure that all the information is correct and up-to-date. If there is anything new to be added to the content, you can do so during the updating process.
Your customers won’t be misled, nor will they be given the wrong information.
6) Analyze the statistics and engagement metrics
Analyzing the statistics and engagement metrics of your knowledge base is an important task. It helps you get insights into the performance of your knowledge base and the various articles published on it. You can see which articles in the knowledge base are getting attention and which ones aren’t.
The articles that aren’t getting enough traction may have certain problems. Once you can pinpoint which articles they are, you can then check them in detail and fix any issues that they contain.
Conversely, if you see an article on your knowledge base that is doing exceptionally well, you can study it to see what you did differently. You can apply a similar writing and publishing strategy in your other articles so that they can also perform the same way.
There are different metrics that you see in the analytics section of a knowledge base platform. For example, you can check:
- Page Views: The total number of times an article or page is accessed.
- Unique Visitors: The number of distinct users who have viewed your content.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who leave after viewing just one page.
- Average Time on Page: The average amount of time users spend on an article.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of users who click on a link or call-to-action within the article.
- Article Ratings: User-submitted scores indicating how helpful they found the content.
7) Promote the knowledge base for maximum exposure
Your knowledge base won’t be a true PR asset if people don’t know about it. It is important to promote the knowledge base so that people can visit it and learn all about your brand.
You can do this easily by using your existing marketing channels. If you have an online presence elsewhere, you can advertise your knowledge base on it as a solution to your customers’ problems.
From your existing platforms, you will be able to drive people to the knowledge base to take them further down the sales funnel, where they can become valued customers.
Wrapping Up
A knowledge base can be a lot of things. It can be your customer support protocol, an SEO asset, and also a PR device. In the post above, we’ve discussed how you can create a knowledge base that serves to strengthen your public relations efforts. If you follow all of the various steps that we’ve mentioned, you don’t have to worry about going wrong.
