The Learning Centre is the natural evolution, a level-up of the company blog. Blogs provide a steady pace of inbound marketing fuel and helpful content that users enjoy reading. But scrolling page after page actually reduces the use of the total archive for your customers, clients, and leads. This led to categories and tags; easy ways for readers to sort and find the articles that are most useful to them. Well-organised blogs then grew into something new and transformative - the modern Learning Centre.
What is a Learning Centre?
A Learning Centre is the hub for all your website information. A learning centre is a one-stop hub that includes more than just blog posts and knowledge base articles; it can also include videos, presentations, podcasts, webinars, image galleries, online lessons, and a wealth of other content types. It can become the ultimate resource for clients as they prepare and use your services as well as a wealth of relevant, well-mapped, and keyword-rich pages for SEO and SERP ranking.
In simplest terms, a learning centre is an organised structure of content designed to help readers explore and understand your company's area of expertise. A custom designer-builder of homes might create a home-design resource centre with frequently asked questions, style guides, blueprint tools, costing calculators, and DIY videos. An accounting firm might make an easy-to-read guide on tax law and an encyclopedia of tax return exemptions.
How Content Builds Trust
Why build a learning centre? The answer is simple: valuable content builds trust. The relationship starts with a Google search and a search result. Your lead clicks your page, titled in a useful and directive answer to their question. The information on the page is not just an answer, it's a detailed guide or lesson on the subject being researched. If your learning centre navigation bar lays out other adjacent topics and parent categories, you might become this lead's last stop on Google as they learn everything else through your detailed and useful learning centre.
When a lead can trust your information, they learn to trust your brand. After all, your experts must know what they are about when your information is accurate and every guide or tip is good advice. They will start to associate your brand (and blog-page branding) with trustworthy expertise.
Educated Customers are Good Customers
Learning centres also create informed customers. By doing the research, informed customers know what they are asking for without needing the basics explained. They know the name of their favourite style. They've taken a few measurements and know the sizes they need during your first consultation. Informed customers are also more aware of their options. They might shop from a guide's list of supplies or want to try a few varieties of product that they've read about in your resource centre.
Informed clients require less personal guidance through the buyer funnel because they have guided themselves through the information and research phase using your brand's own expert content.
Informed Customers Close Faster
Because informed customers have helped themselves down the conversion funnel, they are also faster to close. Consider a client who has already compared your service packages and decided which features they care about most. They might come to you, ready to close, instead of wanting to be sold or guided to the right decision. From camping supplies to business insurance, clients who can read up and become educated about their buying decision will be closer to closing as soon as they come into contact with the sales team.
Armed with online information, an educated customer can even adapt and make decisions more quickly. Instead of reading information over the phone, you might link or reference pages that a client can read for themselves. In this way, a learning centre can streamline both closing sales decision-making and order-building using a centre-supported customer service approach.
Educated Customers Respond to Great Deals
A customer who understands your industry will know a good deal when they see one. This means that an educated customer is more likely to respond to your well-designed deals and offers when they realise a great bargain. Customers who are familiar with your learning material may realise when the deal you are offering is a unique opportunity for great value, while others may not see the difference between special sales and seasonal discounts.
Your educated customers are more likely to watch their inboxes closely for great opportunities whenever they are in the market for your goods or services. They will see when you are offering real value and may choose to buy - or advise friends and family to take the opportunity as well.
Building Content in the Learning Centre Model
While learning centres may have grown from the blog design, why stop at articles? When building a learning centre, you can enrich the value for visitors with a diversity of educational content. Videos, podcasts, and webinars help to inform people who learn differently, through visuals or audio processing. You may provide useful guides and diagrams to help clients understand the more complex elements of your business, or you might draft lessons and include fun quizzes so readers can test their knowledge to become micro-experts in each sub-topic.
Learning centres often provide useful tools, apps, and calculators to help leads estimate costs or get ideas for their service. You can fold in your blogs and vidoes, but also develop new content with the central premise of creating educational experiences for your clients, leads, and audience.
Building a Learning Centre for Your Business
Are you ready to transform your blog strategy into an immersive and rewarding learning centre? Provide your returning clients and first-time readers alike to explore everything they need to know regarding your niche. Provide guides, histories, expert insights, and an organised framework to help your readers find any topic they need. From transforming your blog into building a whole new content strategy inspired by the learning centre experience, this evolution is a powerful website design choice for any brand.
DigiKat is ready to build your brand a learning centre to transform how content becomes value to your online readers. Contact us today to begin your learning centre development.
