Go-to-Market Daily

Resource Centers Are Dying

Written by Mark Kilens | 10/28/24 3:19 PM

I feel it, do you?

The disruption of resource centers is coming. 

Resource centers have blossomed over the last decade. This is in large part thanks to the inbound and content marketing movements. 

But resource centers have become a nuisance for buyers and customers. They're filled with forms and friction. They don't have any type of personalized experiences. It can be hard to find things. And they are disconnected from other parts of the buying journey, especially pre-purchase and post-purchase. 

Start thinking about transitioning your resource center to more of a membership experience. 

You can still have your content ungated, or even some of it gated on the website. But if you also provide a membership experience with the right benefits and positioning, you're giving people a more streamlined experience with more tangible value.

And the most obvious and clear-cut benefit for people who become members is that they can get all of your resources and content in one click. 

I predict we’ll see a massive transformation of websites over the next 5-10 years, and resource centers will be a big part of that.

Which leads me to my next point about Member-led Growth.

Member-led Growth is when you work to take all of the awareness, interest, and engagement that's happening as part of your Community-led motion, and turn it into direct relationships with your brand. 
 
How do you do that? By getting people to sign up for an experience that gives them access to all of your content, events, and even free products with one simple login. Seamless magic! :slightly_smiling_face:

B2C companies have been doing this for a long time. They try to get you to become a member when you’re first looking to purchase something, or even pre-purchase when you're browsing their products or content. That membership is then used for rewards, communication, re-targeting, and so on.

HubSpot and Drift did similar things with the creation of Academy and Insider.

Why is this a better experience for B2B buyers? Because the person can fill out a form once to get access to all of your valuable free offerings and benefits. No more form after form after form. 
 
And you get a direct line of communication to each member and can see what they're checking out. 

Best yet, you can use all of the intent signals they're giving you to personalize their experience a bit more. 

The goal? To get a member to show a level of intent or an explicit hand-raise where the next logical step is to connect them with someone on your sales team.

We've sort of created this experience with the TACK Network and TACK Insider. But it's not ideal. So we're making some changes soon that will streamline your relationship with TACK.