Content is a critical component to make sure customers are:
- Adopting your product or service
- Empowered for self-service
- Engaging with your company and their peers
- Moving along the customer journey successfully
The problem for many organizations is what content should you be focusing on?
Part of the answer is going to be determined by understanding the goals for your community, and then identifying the stages of the customer journey that need support.
Once you understand what you are working to accomplish, you can then begin to see what types of content to focus on.
Self-Service
If you are working to equip your customers to help themselves (and 67% of customers say this is what they want!), here are some content pieces to focus on:
- New Feature Alerts
- Q&A Threads
- Product Guides
- AMAs (Ask Me Anything)
These resources will be critical in helping customers understand your product, resolve any roadblocks, and be empowered to own their journey and engage with your product or service well.
Customer Success
- Use-Cases
- Newsletters
- Persona/Industry Benchmarking
- Tips & Tricks
- Product Awareness
- Templates and Playbooks
- Top Metrics
With a goal of ensuring customers are equipped to be successful, these content types help move beyond simply mastering your product or service into incorporating it into the DNA of their processes while looking at the bigger picture and demonstrating ROI.
Types of Content
There are so many content types out there, so we have included a list (and description) of those we have seen have a strong impact. As you are building out your content needs, you want to have a variety of both the type of content and the format for that content to allow your customers to find what they are looking for.
- Blogs: Lean on both internal and external experts to provide content. Your customers hold a wealth of direct knowledge about your product and often love to share what they have learned with others.
- How-to guides: Monitor frequently asked questions and issues in the community. Write guides addressing these common topics.
- Case studies: Reach out to active users who have shared success stories. Ask them for detailed interviews or permission to write a case study based on their experience.
- Industry insights: Analyze community discussions for trends and common challenges. Compile these insights into industry-focused blog posts.
- Whitepapers: Conduct surveys or polls within the community. Compile the results into detailed research reports.
- Ebooks and templates
- Guides: Aggregate how-to guides, tips, and best practices shared by users into a single, comprehensive ebook.
- Strategy playbooks: Compile user strategies and best practices into playbooks.
- Webinars (live or pre-recorded)
- Expert panels: Identify knowledgeable and active community members to participate in expert panel webinars.
- Product demos: Use feedback from community discussions to identify areas where users need more guidance. Create webinars focused on these areas.
- Training sessions: Track common training needs expressed by users and develop webinars to address them.
- Videos
- Tutorials: Create video tutorials based on step-by-step solutions shared in the community.
- Customer testimonials: Ask satisfied users to share their stories on video.
- Feature announcements: Gather user input on new features and create videos highlighting how these features address user needs.
- Podcasts: Interview internal teams or team members. Bring in industry experts. Call on customers to participate in panels.
- Interviews: Interview active community members who have interesting stories or insights to share.
- Weekly updates: Use community activity data to inform weekly update podcasts on trending topics.
- Deep dives: Identify complex discussions in the community and create podcast episodes that explore these topics in depth.
- Quizzes and Surveys: Focus on information that your teams would like to understand about your customers. Use quizzes as quick engagement tools that increase understanding of knowledge gaps.
- Needs assessment: Design quizzes based on common pain points discussed in the community.
- Knowledge check: Create quizzes to test knowledge on topics frequently covered in community discussions.
- Feedback surveys: Use the community to gather feedback on their experiences and preferences.
- Polls
- Feature prioritization: Conduct polls to see which features are most desired by the community.
- User preferences: Poll users about their preferences for content types, formats, and topics.
- Community interests: Regularly poll the community to gauge interest in various topics and adjust content strategy accordingly.
- Ask Me Anything (AMA)
- CEO AMA: Gather questions from the community in advance for a more structured AMA session.
- Product Manager AMA: Use feedback and feature requests from the community to inform the AMA topics.
- Customer Success AMA: Focus on common support questions and success stories from the community.
- User-Generated Content (UGC)
- Success stories: Encourage users to share their success stories and feature them in community posts.
- Tips and tricks: Highlight useful tips and tricks shared by users.
- Feature requests: Regularly compile and showcase user feature requests and feedback.
- FAQs
- Getting started: Use common questions from new users to create a comprehensive FAQ section.
- Technical support: Aggregate troubleshooting tips and solutions shared in the community.
- Discussions
- User forums: Facilitate general discussions and provide summaries or highlights of valuable threads.
- Feature feedback: Create discussion threads specifically for collecting feedback on new or existing features.
- Best practices: Encourage users to share their best practices and compile these into discussion summaries or highlight posts.
- Product Guides
- User manuals: Gather detailed user-contributed instructions and compile them into comprehensive manuals.
- Quick start guides: Identify common initial setup issues and compile quick start guides from user solutions.
- Advanced features: Highlight advanced tips and tricks shared by experienced users to create in-depth guides.
- Checklists
And don’t forget to check out what customers are searching for within the community too! That is often a valuable tool to understand content gaps.
