In previous blog posts, I’ve written about knowledge base content strategy for different levels of users. I’ve covered Naïve and Beginner users and Intermediate users. This post talks about the information needs of your expert users and how to account for them in your knowledge base strategy.
User definition chart
Let’s review the audiences and the content needs for each audience.
| Deliverable/ Audience | Concepts articles | Concepts videos | Online training | General How to articles (and videos) | Advanced How to articles (and videos) | Advanced content |
| Naïve (non-domain) customers | X | X | X | |||
| Beginner (domain) customers | X | X | X | |||
| Intermediate customers | X | X | ||||
| Expert customers | X | X |
You can think of these audiences as describing the audience journey to competency with your product.
Expert audience and knowledge base content strategy
The Expert audience is where a minority of your users live–the expert part of the audience journey. Think of the audience journey as a bell curve. 68% or so of your users get to and stay in the Intermediate (competent) audience, while only about 14% of your customers get to Expert.
The idea that more customers don’t get to Expert can be confusing. But the reality of your products is that most people don’t need to be expert in your product. And most people don’t spend their days hoping to get to Expert level in a product–they want to solve their problems well enough and then get on with their day. They have kids to get from child care and groceries to buy and meetings to attend and hobbies to pursue.
You need to account for these users in your knowledge base strategy.
Including Experts in your knowledge base content strategy
If you’re working in a product-led growth environment, you can generally ignore this audience in your content ecosystem.
That’s a controversial statement, but here’s my reasoning: This audience will figure stuff out. They’ll figure out how to do stuff even you didn’t think could be done in your product. And when they reach out to support, they typically know more than the Tier 1 support people. If fact, they often wind up in the Tier 3 before anyone actually understands the problem and solution they’re working.
So when you’re building your knowledge base strategy, ignore this audience. As these people call in, ask Support to create articles about what they call in and how the issue got solved. Then make those knowledge base articles available to the public for future Experts to use and refine. Build this plan into your technical content strategy.
Create the Advanced content naturally because it’s expensive content to create ahead of need. The user base is small and the level of domain experts to create that content is high. The cost of the staff to create this knowledge base content is big, and the user base is small. It’s not a good ROI to create ahead of time.
Templates for Expert users and advanced content
These articles and videos can be as small as this:
Problem statement
Solution, which can include procedure steps.
This is the only audience I consider FAQ-style content for in a knowledge base strategy, but I wouldn’t call them FAQs because the wrong audience would start reading them and get frustrated.
Call the section of the knowledge base Expert Tips and Tricks. Because the audience is labeled in the name of the section, Beginner and Intermediate users know this may not be information for them.
Other content ideas for experts in your knowledge base strategy
And lastly, because I believe that some content is evergreen, use this content as the basis for a series of webinars for marketing. Or put it together as an ebook people need to register to get. Use it to get marketing leads. Use this content in your technical content strategy to drive more marketing leads at the top of the funnel.
Well, that’s it for this topic for a while. Thoughts? Anything I forgot?
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