Essentially, Knowledge Base is HubSpot’s built-in FAQ feature. While it’s mainly designed to be used by clients and prospects, we’ve actually heard of firms using it to host their own internal documents - a substitute for putting documents on intranet systems, which are notoriously ‘clunky’.

If you use HubSpot Service Hub, you could take advantage of its helpful Knowledge Base feature to improve your online offering.

Knowledge base comes as part of HubSpot’s Service Hub, a customer service software that is well adapted to the needs of the modern consumer. By setting up HubSpot’s Knowledge Base, your clients will be able to find the answer to their questions straight away.

This feature is also handy throughout the lead conversion process.

You can use this information to do something called ‘lead nurturing’, a process of sending prospects information that can help them solve their problem, with the goal of building trust and a strong relationship as they travel down your sales pipeline. It’s generally easier to convert a nurtured lead into a client as they will be much more receptive to your firm’s service.

Think of your leads as seeds and helpful content as water and nutrients. Using it to nurture your leads is going to give you a better chance of growing your leads into beautiful, fruitful clients, clients that could yield more clients in the future through referrals.

A Knowledge Base can set you apart in the modern world

It’s an unfortunate truth that modern consumers have lost some of the fortitude that was commonplace amongst older generations. The modern, digital world is far more instantaneous than it once was.

We live in an era where prospects and clients increasingly expect instant service. Chat bots, one-click online check outs and automated responses have meant that people have lost the patience to wait around when approaching a company about a good or service online.

Modern consumers want rapid answers from companies and have increasingly high expectations of brands and how they can help. They are accustomed to dealing with the likes of Amazon - companies that have the capacity to provide a frictionless online service. Many now demand this kind of service across the net.

While face to face interaction of course remains a cornerstone of some professional services businesses, sometimes clients and prospects want minimal human interaction, especially when searching for a piece of information.

The statistics reflect this trend. A whopping 40% of modern customers say that they would rather service themselves than have to interact with someone. What’s more, 40% of customers expect online assistance in 5 minutes or less and 31% want help instantly.

The same trend is true for information bases; 91% of customers say they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs.

So, this kind of self-service needs to be wrapped in an easy-to-use, accessible solution. Knowledge Base provides just that. Your clients and prospects can easily access information on your site without having to contact your staff, something that some clients and prospects would consider a friction point.

If you develop a comprehensive Knowledge Base, you automatically have an advantage over most of your competition who probably don’t have a comparable information hub on their site.

It offers a convenient way for prospects and clients to get answers to their questions. When they find the answer, you’ve just established yourself as an expert in the subject area they wanted to know more about.

85% of a prospect’s relationship with a firm occurs without human interaction. This means any information about your service offering on your site can help guide a prospect towards becoming a client.

There’s another reason to establish a Knowledge Base; it can really help your SEO.

Search engines favour websites which have extensive information around a particular topic area. So, a website with a well linked Knowledge Base will likely show higher on a search engine results page than one that doesn’t.

This means that prospects will have a better chance of finding your website when they search for a relevant term.

Creating a Knowledge Base

Getting started with Knowledge Base is simple. Here are a couple of pointers:

Planning and structuring your Knowledge Base

Before writing any posts, you need to plan and structure your Knowledge Base.

Think about who your knowledge base is for. Would you like to target it to prospects, clients or both?

We’ve even heard of some firms using it to host an internal resource library. While this might not be the most obvious use for a Knowledge Base, you could use it to host internal documents online.

HubSpot’s Service Hub allows you to set permission levels for each Knowledge Base article using the lists that you’ve built in the HubSpot CRM. This means you can control who can see different Knowledge Base articles.

We mentioned earlier about using it to host internal documents. If you want an article to only be visible to employees, you can mark it as private.

We recommend that you always tag articles, making it easier to sift through them at a later date. If you choose to use the system to host internal pages, we’d recommend that you create a relevant tag, for instance: “internal - marketing”.

Creating Knowledge Base articles

Knowledge Base articles follow a pretty rigid structure, which makes them quite easy to write. They should be shorter and more targeted than a blog post.

Each article has a title, optional subtitle and an answer. While the title matters most to searchability, the subtitle can also help if you include the right keywords. Think of it as how a meta description can help a webpage’s performance on Google.

Try to put yourself in your clients’ and prospects’ shoes when writing. Keeping your audience in mind is essential; consider the obstacles and pain points your audience experiences and write answers that will help.

You should also try to be consistent in your style when you write your articles. For instance, if you use certain acronyms in one article, you should use them throughout. This will improve searchability and make your brand seem more consistent to prospects and clients.

The article editor is easy to use - there are clearly displayed tables, anchors and callouts. It’s very similar to the blog editing feature in CMS Hub, so you shouldn’t find it too confusing to write and edit posts especially if you’ve already uploaded blogs on HubSpot.

Knowledge Base is just one feature of HubSpot’s comprehensive marketing software that can help grow your business. If you’d like to know more about how you could use HubSpot to take your sales and marketing to the next level, please get in touch. We love talking about all things HubSpot.