The 5 building blocks of an effective content strategy
Discover your priorities and build an effective strategy
Prioritization is often the most difficult aspect of building and implementing a content strategy. Getting aligned on what will drive your content, and why, drives how your education team invests their time and how effective they can be.
To tackle this challenge, I've identified the top 5 building blocks that you can use to create an effective content strategy.
Strategic priorities
Product roadmap
Customer feedback
User behavior
Content gaps
1. Strategic priorities
Ultimately, what’s most important for your organization should primarily inform your content strategy. Aside from the obvious benefit of staying aligned with business goals, it also more clearly helps to communicate the impact of a product education program when your KPIs rollup directly to what’s most important to your business.
Here are a few examples of how strategic priorities may influence your content strategy:
The table below shows a few examples of what you might emphasize in your content strategy based on your organization’s strategic priorities.
Here’s the kicker; these are most likely all strategic priorities for your business… so what do you do when you can’t do it all? Based on my experience, you have to filter your work down through multiple other layers (covered below) in order to hone in on a more targeted content strategy.
2. Product roadmap
The next building block of an education content strategy is your product roadmap.
What’s coming down the pipeline in terms of product updates and major launches? Are customers looking forward to new functionality that might be launched soon? Any major bugs that are being patched that need to be highlighted?
Depending on how frequently your product team releases changes, and how significant those changes are, will impact your content strategy.
For example, if you know that your company releases a major product changes every quarter, you can plan ahead to make sure you have the time, resources, and information to build content for those big releases. On the other hand, if your company is nimble and ships notable improvements weekly, you’ll need to free up the bandwidth to accommodate more frequent content updates to keep your customers informed and educated.
Here are a few aspects of product launches to consider:
Type: if it’s a bug fix, minor release, major release, etc.
Significance: how much will it affect the product
Frequency: how often are changes rolled out (daily, weekly, etc)
User experience: to what degree will the user experience be changed
Customer impact: how many customers will be impacted
With a close partnership with your product and engineering teams, you’ll be able to look ahead a few weeks, months, and quarters in order to adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Now, let's dive into my personal favorite building block – customer feedback.
3. Customer feedback
Customer feedback is by far my favorite building block, and your direct line to what's working, what's not, and what they need in the moment.
My absolute favorite thing to do is to read through feedback, make content or product changes based on that feedback, and then tell the customer what you changed. Giving customers this kind of response is a wonderful way to show them that their feedback is important and that it’s resulted in a positive change.
In my time leading content operations at Airtable, this was one of our top priorities; we built a simple automation to email customers with a direct link to the content we improved based on their feedback, and received many emails from customers who were happy to know that they were heard and that we actually took action on their feedback.
While it’s important to take action on customer feedback, that doesn’t exactly inform your broader content strategy. To do that, you need to identify common trends across a larger sample of your most recent feedback. This can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be — for example, there are inexpensive tools like Formless that use AI to analyze customer feedback forms, or more complex software like Idiomatic that analyze customer conversations to help you build a voice of the customer program.
Whatever tools and approach you use, make sure that you’re able to identify what your customers are saying and what they need in order to inform what content you prioritize.
4. User behavior
Measuring user behavior using quantitative data insights will help you better understand how customers are engaging with your content. You can measure what they’re searching for, clicking on, and where they’re dropping off (and so much more — I cover metrics in more detail in this post).
Here’s an example I’ve shared before:
If 80% of unique visitors use search, you’ll know that you need to:
Orient your landing page to highlight the search experience
Heavily prioritize content that addresses common searches
Measure search click-through rates, searches with no results, top trending searches, and more.
On the other hand, if a minority of customers utilize search, you might:
Focus more on making navigation more intuitive
Visually bucket content into easy-to-identify categories
Split up long-form content into shorter, more digestible articles
Understanding user behavior paints a bigger picture so you can adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Let’s wrap up with the last building block of an effective content strategy; content gaps.
5. Content gaps
Content gaps happen when your customers are looking for content that doesn’t yet exist. That sounds straightforward, but I want to emphasize that this is not just missing content in general — for example, not having a tutorial for an obscure part of your product.
You could spend all of your time trying to ensure your content 100% covers the breadth and depth of your product, and all potential customer questions… but (1) that’s never possible and (2) you won’t be making the most impact that you can.
Here are a few examples to make this more concrete:
I’m largely speaking to myself in writing this, because I tend towards wanting perfection. I want 100% coverage of a product in technical documentation. I want to anticipate every customer need and meet it in advance with content. But in reality this just isn’t possible, and moreover, it’s not the best use of your time.
Focusing on filling the content gaps that will meet customers where they currently are will create much more impact in the long run.
Building a foundation
I mentioned previously that each of these building blocks help to refine your content strategy. Your time and energy is scarce, and it’s so easy to be quickly pulled in multiple directions, so you have to make an investment to determine what content is going to make the most impact on your customers and for your business.
If you want help doing that, I’m here and happy to help.