The Vision of a Learning Center
Written by Marcus Sheridan • Reviewed by Laura Meyer
July 14, 2022
When you’re trying to make They Ask, You Answer principles work for your business, you can’t leave it up to chance. You have to design your company around this—including your website.
Marketing pro, Marcus Sheridan, will show you how to put content on your website so that people can actually use it.
Create a learning center
When you start answering potential customers’ and recruits’ questions, don’t just slap content on your website. That’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. You need an actual place on the website to house the information.
That place is a learning center, or knowledge center if you’d rather call it that. Potential customers and recruits can go to the learning center to address their questions, worries, fears, and problems. Every piece of content you make should live there.
Make the learning center easy to find
You’ll obviously have to add the learning center to the navigation at the top of your website. However, it’s smart to give people more than one way to get there.
Marcus’ company—River Pools and Spas—has a section on their homepage advertising their learning center. It tells potential customers how many videos and articles are in the learning center. It also highlights a few pieces of content that answer customers’ biggest questions.
Do something similar on your website to help people find your learning center. When they dive in, they’ll think, “Wow! I’ve found all the information about this topic that I could ever want!”
Organize the learning center
Putting all your content in one easy-to-find spot gets you off to a great start. But if you just dump hundreds of pieces of content in one place, customers and recruits won't be able to find what they need. You know what happens next—they leave for a better, more organized website!
To help people quickly find what they need, split the learning center into easy-to-search sections. You can have sections for articles, videos, customer case studies, digital brochures, ebooks, webinars—any type of content you make. People should be able to say, “I want to read this” or “I want to watch that” and then do it.
Make a separate learning center for recruits
Recruits have different questions and concerns than customers, so you’ll need to make a separate learning center for them. It should be organized the same way. FYI, most recruits are asking about the industry, not your company. That’s why BuildWitt has a whole separate section in our learning hub called Dirt World that’s just for them. Keep that in mind as you create content for recruits.
What could possibly go wrong?
Marcus has seen lots of companies grow thanks to their learning centers and other ideas from his bestselling book, They Ask, They Answer. But not everyone makes it work. In his next lesson, Marcus talks about what could go wrong and how to prevent failure.
