How to design a Content flywheel for Technical Products
When teams/companies, especially those in their early stages, embark on their content journeys, they often immediately jump into brainstorming topics to write about in their blog and then figure out SEO keywords that will help then rank for those topics, or vice-versa.
They want to just publish something, churn some content because they don’t want to miss jumping on the content bandwagon.
While SEO, blogs, topics are all important aspects of any content strategy, and it will help you publish a boast-worthy number of blogs, but, jumping into creating content without a sense of the role it needs to play to achieve your product’s growth goals is like shooting an arrow in the dark.
However, if the foundation of your content strategy is rooted in the intersection between your product’s goals and your prospect’s/user’s needs, you have a measurable, and an iterate-able way of creating content that actually fuels your product’s goals.
This post attempts to show you how to deliberately choose what content to write to maximize the success of your product & business.
Disclaimer: This framework doesn’t attempt to be a guide on how to build an audience.
PS: This post doesn’t have a Table of Contents since Medium doesn’t support it. To make up for it, I’ve added an outline of the post below.
Post-outline
- Assumptions
- Defining characteristics of technical users
- What exactly is good content?
- Content flywheel to create useful content
- Conclusion
- Further reading
Assumptions
This framework will be useful for you if all of the following is true for you:
- You sell a technical product — something that requires software development skills.
- Your product is self-serve.
- Your users are software developers.
- You employ product-led growth (PLG) instead of sales-led growth (or are looking to move towards it)
- You employ the flywheel model for your product growth/strategy (or are looking to move towards it)
Just so we’re on the same page…
To make the most of this post, ensure that you understand PLG and flywheel approaches. If you’d like a refresher, I recommend reading:
- To understand PLG: https://www.productled.org/foundations/what-is-product-led-growth#Chap1
- To understand the flywheel approach: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/our-flywheel
- To understand how the flywheel approach is different from the traditional funnel approach https://evenbound.com/blog/sales-funnel-vs-flywheel
- To understand the product-led growth flywheel https://www.productled.org/foundations/the-product-led-growth-flywheel#Chap2
Defining characteristics of technical users
We must know the defining characteristics of who we are writing for before we conclude what type of content is most useful for them.
I) They find, evaluate, and adopt your product on their own, irrespective of what your marketing copy claims.
II) They’re used to the open-source way of transparent communication and receiving value before someone can extract any value from them.
What exactly is good content?
Good content is useful content. It empowers your prospects/users with precise and unbiased answers to their questions at every stage of their product journey so that they can achieve their goals.
It is more than good writing. Simple, understandable writing is not good content if it isn’t useful for the reader or if it is disregarded by them.
Content flywheel to create useful content
The rest of the post shows you a simple way to design a content flywheel in two steps:
- Determine the role of content for each stage of the PLG flywheel
- Choose content types that will be effective in succeeding in the defined role.
This content flywheel is designed to be in sync with the overall product goals, so the content and the PLG flywheels can connect to power each other.
Revisiting the product-led growth flywheel
The figure below shows the product-led growth flywheel.
Let’s redraw the above flywheel into a table, such that it maps the product’s growth goals to the relevant category of users who influence that goal.
We’ll continuously refer to the table in Fig 3 to remain focused on the target users for each goal.
The following 3 sections list effective content types for the 3 respective goals in the product-led growth flywheel.
Effective content types to increase activations
From Fig. 3, we know that increasing activation will require Evaluators to become Beginners.
Let’s look at what the Evaluators do to assess if you’re a fit before we can conclude on how to deliver value to them in this stage (rephrasing from here):
- They browse your website to determine whether you understand their problem and if you can offer them a clear path to solving it.
- Simultaneously, they evaluate other solutions including your competitors.
- They check for ease of use, core functionality, and features.
- They play around with your product through your trial or freemium offering to verify value themselves.
- They don’t care about the nuances of your product.
- They care only about your ability to solve their use-case but not about the wide range of use-cases you can handle.
So, the role of content for this goal is to communicate your product’s value to Evaluators.
Let’s look at the content types that will be effective for this goal.
I) Homepage
Visiting your website’s home page is one of the first steps in an evaluator’s decision-making process. In the words of Marcus Sheridan:
“The fundamental purpose of a homepage is to get the visitor to page 2. When a visitor goes to your ‘pricing’ page, or your ‘documentation’, we start to see a contextualized picture of this individual; a legitimate customer experience has occurred, and your relationship with her has begun.”
“Your goal with your homepage shouldn’t be to ‘teach’ visitors everything you want them to know. Your homepage is there to allow them to find exactly what they want as quickly as possible.”
This would translate to unambiguous answers to:
- What specific problem does your product solve?
- How do your core functionalities/features map to solutions to their problem?
- Why or how is your product is better at solving their problem than your competition?
- How secure is your product?
- How reliable is your product?
Note: This is a must-have before launch.
II) Product demo video
An evaluator who watches a product demo looks for two primary things (as applicable depending on your product):
- The product solving their problem for real, in action.
- The ease of use of the product.
Your goal with the demo video should be to help evaluators answer the above questions without having to work hard for it. So, ensure that your demo video is ungated.
Note: This is a must-have before launch.
III) Visual diagram of how your product works
Your goal with a visual diagram of how your product works is to help evaluators simply visualize what your product simplifies and how. It should make clear:
- Where your product sits in the Evaluator’s technical architecture or workflow.
- How your product will interact with other components in that workflow.
- Which part of their architecture or workflow does your product replace (if applicable).
Examples:
Note: This is a must-have before launch.
IV) Testimonials / User success stories
Testimonials and case studies that highlight the specific reasons for people sticking to your product can pacify evaluators’ apprehensions about your product, and also give them a taste of the value they can unlock using your product. They can then assuredly move towards investing more time in learning and trying your product.
Note: Must have as soon as possible.
V) Company opinion blogs
Quoting Sean Blanda:
“Opinion blogs should make clear what you stand for (brand), and it will attract like-minded people (community). Most startups create software and software can be pretty boring. But the reason the software is being created? Now that’s interesting.”
Examples
Note: It’s great to have before launch, or as soon as possible.
VI) Documentation
The final step in an Evaluator’s journey is when they use your product themselves. They trial or use your freemium to find if your product does what it claims before they decide to invest time in learning more deeply about it. So, they look towards your documentation to enable this.
The first step is for them to set up/install if you don’t have a cloud offering. In the case of the former, you need the Setup/Installation pages to be such that they can be followed to the word blindly — complete and accurate. If evaluators get stuck at this step, they’ll likely drop off.
Once set up, the next step for evaluators is to actually use the product.
One way is for you to leave it up to them to decide how they go about using the product to assess value. But there is another way that increases your chance of communicating value — the guided way. If you can hand-hold them to achieve a quick meaningful outcome via say a short new-user tutorial, they’re likely to realize your product’s value more quickly.
Note: Must-have before onboarding users.
To summarize:
PS: Competitor comparison posts are deliberately not listed here because it’s nearly impossible to be objective about yourself while comparing with a competitor, unless you’re a clear leader in the category. And, biased comparison posts are simply deceptive. Your readers get it.
Effective content types to increase adoption
From Fig. 3, we know that increasing adoption will require Beginners to feel confident that your product is the best solution to solve their problem so that they’re ready to fully integrate it into their workflows.
Let’s look at what the Beginners typically do to determine this (rephrasing from here):
- They try to use the product with real data in their current workflow and technical stack to receive tangible value.
- They’re eager to learn about additional benefits and use-cases, beyond what initially brought them to you.
- They’re likely to run into and evaluate edge cases and identify workarounds for small issues.
- They want to learn how to use your product in the right way.
- They’re still learning and are sensitive to blockers.
So, the role of content for this goal is to build Beginners’ trust in the product.
Let’s look at the content types that will be effective for this goal.
I) Documentation
Continuing from what they created quickly during the evaluation phase, Beginners will now repeatedly refer to your documentation to understand how to use your product effectively and correctly from the start.
To help them achieve their goals, you need to create and sharpen the following sections in your Documentation (in addition to what you already have in place for Evaluators):
- An understanding of the basic concepts /building blocks of your product
- Troubleshooting errors across all functionalities
- Roll-out/deployment recommendations/best practices
- Guidance on monitoring your product’s performance
When Beginners are able to build or solve complex use-cases using your product, triage errors on their own, it builds their confidence about your product being the solution for their needs.
Example:
- Main concepts section in https://reactjs.org/docs/
- Best practices https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/best-practices/
Note: This is a must-have before onboarding users.
II) Reliability metrics page
Your goal with this page should be to transparently inform about your product’s reliability metrics. This data is an important step towards building trust in you before a Beginner can take the leap to become a regular user, i.e. depend on your product for their regular workflows.
If you have few real users, post your stress testing numbers. If you’re in Beta, be transparent about it. Sometimes companies shy away from talking about this, hoping in vain that users aren’t wondering about this. But think about it, don’t you consider this before making a product part of your core workflows? So why won’t your users?
Being upfront about this shows character, and builds trust.
So, find a way to communicate whether you’re dependable and how dependable you are.
Note: It’s a great-to-have before onboarding users or asap.
III) How-it-works blog
Your goal with this blog is to share an understanding of the internals of your product and the technology. This knowledge helps users connect more deeply to your product, and builds trust.
Note: It’s a great-to-have as soon as possible.
IV) Use-case specific guides
The goal of these guides is to set your users up to extract more value from your product by helping them learn:
- Additional/new ways in which they can use your product to solve their real problems. This will inspire them to further explore your product.
- Form an intuition about how to use your product more effectively by not only listing the steps, i.e. the HOW, but also share the understanding of each step, i.e. the WHY.
Examples:
Note: Great to have some of these before you onboard users. And, post that this will always be a work in progress.
To summarize:
Effective content types to increase fans
From Fig. 3, we know that for Regulars to become your Champions, Regulars need to love your product — be emotionally connected to it.
Let’s look at what the Regulars use your product (rephrasing from here):
- They’re searching for new ways to obtain value from your product.
- They’re likely to have opinions about new directions for your product — integrations, use cases, feature.
- These users are eager to provide feedback and insights, and hence want to be heard.
- They enjoy exploring and using your advanced features.
The role of content for this goal is to nurture positive product sentiment with your Regulars.
Let’s look at the various content types that can be effective to achieve this goal.
I) Product updates
Your goal with sharing product updates is to remain positively connected with your Regulars by:
- Keeping them aware of product improvements, and helping them learn how they can use the new features to save time on existing tasks or solve new use-cases.
- Showing them that their feedback is being heard to make the product more useful for them.
Note: Publish them as and when you release significant improvements.
II) Deep dive product evolution blogs
Use long-form blogs to share your depth of product knowledge to connect more deeply with your users. You can talk about your product journey, learnings, philosophy, and decisions. For example, how a specific advanced feature came to fruition from ideation to go-live, or how you scaled your product to be used by x users or handle y requests.
Example:
Note: Publish as and when you have something worthwhile to share.
III) Advanced features guide
Similar to the use-case-specific guides, the goal of these guides is to set your users up to extract more value from your product.
And similar to your basic features guides, these will act as a reference — the one-stop place for when they try out and implement an advanced feature.
So, keep them accurate, comprehensive, and educational.
Example
- The advanced guide section in https://reactjs.org/docs/
Note: It’s a must-have before onboarding users.
To summarize:
Completing the content flywheel
Work with your fans/champions to craft their success stories which will be an effective content type for your Evaluators. And there’s your flywheel — Champions getting you more Evaluators!
Conclusion
The above framework creates a granular content-specific flywheel that feeds into your product-led growth flywheel somewhere around the evaluator stage.
While each company ends up using and adapting the flywheel in its own way, the most important takeaway is that content can and needs to do more than just build an audience for your blog. Especially for technical products, content has an enormous impact on the quality and duration of a user’s journey.
This framework should serve as a starting point to decide which type of content you need to (and do not need to) invest in creating now. And, the next step is then to actually create, edit, publish unbiased, precise content, objectively measure their performance, and iterate.
Further reading
- https://www.datadab.com/blog/developer-marketing/
- Danielle Morrill talks about essential content types: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-x3S_7z0ts
- https://www.devmarketingguide.com/
- https://openviewpartners.com/blog/how-stripe-built-a-sales-organization-to-successfully-sell-to-developers/#.YWRYamNN3HW
- https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/developer-blogs-editorial-planning-and-distribution/
- https://www.amazon.in/They-Ask-You-Answer-Revolutionary/dp/1119312973
About me: I consult technical companies on their content. Happy to chat with you about all things content. I’m at chhazedpriyanshu@gmail.com :)
