Content strategy guides the creation, management, and distribution of technical documentation and technical content. This strategy is critical for businesses communicating complex information, such as companies using a product-led growth strategy.
A well-defined technical content strategy ensures that product information is accurate, consistent, and accessible. Without a strategy, your company is throwing content at the customer in a disorganized way, leading to confusion. It’s not that your team is trying to confuse the customer, it’s the lack of a strategy and plan to identify the content your customers need.
For example, maybe you want to break into the international markets. Localizing the content may be too expensive right now, but you can support international customers working in a nonnative language. You could, as the best product led growth examples show us, reduce your writing levels to 5th grade. Not because nonnative speakers aren’t smart, but because writing at that level is much easier to understand.
The information goal in product led growth
Most strategy fails because no one thought about the high-level business goals the content needs to address. Identifying what the business problems are and how content is going to address those issues is key. This is critical in a product led growth environment because the sales people are not guiding the customer experience.
In a product led growth environment, supporting your customers to get to the “Ah-ha” moment quickly is the primary goal. This usually means a blend of in-app content and a rich content ecosystem, so the customer can learn the product on their own. The most expensive way for a customer to learn to use your product is by calling support or having a sales person teach them. And that’s not how a product-led growth strategy is supposed to work.
Identify the audience
The next step in developing a technical content strategy is understanding your target audience. Knowing who needs the information helps tailor it to meet their needs and preferences. Understanding the customer journey of product led growth in the product-use phase is critical to deliver the right information at the right point of need. What works for a Pendo guide won’t work for a knowledge base article, but these touchpoints are related.
Planning the technical content
Now that we have an understanding of who needs information, planning the creation process is essential. This includes determining the types of information needed, such as user manuals, FAQs, knowledge bases, troubleshooting guides, and instructional videos. Clear guidelines and terminology management for content creation, including tone and style, maintain consistency across all documents.
Successful product led growth examples show us that in-app guides work well to guide customers through the product. In-app guides can show the customer what the product does quickly, so the customer sees the value.
Regardless of what your strategy plan shows you the audience needs, planning helps you deliver the right content at the right time to the right audience.
Structured content in product led growth
Implementing structured content is another aspect of a technical content strategy. Structured content involves organizing information into reusable, modular components. These components can be easily updated and repurposed, often for multiple outputs, such as marketing materials or online learning. This approach enhances efficiency and consistency, ensuring that the information remains accurate and up-to-date. It also increases content development velocity in product led growth content.
Governance
Regular review and content updates are needed to keep the information relevant and useful. You need feedback mechanisms in place to gather input from users and stakeholder to inform continuous improvements. Many companies forget the governance aspect of a good content strategy. If you don’t know what’s working in product led growth, you can’t do more of that.
Contact us
We can help your company create a content strategy or run in person or virtual workshops for your team to create the strategy. We can also help you create the content after we build the strategy.