By Jenifer Schlotfeldt
Recently, my content team partnered with our development squad that focuses on product growth to work on one particular initiative to increase customer retention. An important aspect of the growth squad is to facilitate the buyer’s journey by focusing on the nurture path. The nurture path typically consists of different touchpoints where you reach out to your customer along their journey from exploring the offering to productively using your product, and ultimately advocating for it.
The content team began by ensuring that the right text was included in emails and in messages delivered within the application, but as we worked together, it was clear that we would be successful only if we had instructional materials to support that text. Those materials would help us to answer the questions we were asking ourselves about how to nurture clients with technical product content:
- What was the customer getting from these messages interrupting their product experience?
- Why would they want to read the emails being sent to them along their journey?
While these might seem like obvious questions, we know from experience that they are often not explicitly asked and answered when taking into consideration the end-to-end content experience.
The answer? What we called a learning plan. The job of the learning plan is to enable content teams to deliver a standard set of content assets that are available to help nurture the user along the path of their journey—or experience—with IBM and IBM Bluemix. We needed to ensure that we had the right content to pull the user into the experience. We wanted the user to be learning and applying their learnings to solve their own business problems. And, ultimately, we wanted the content to enable them to not only get started with our product but also become quickly productive with it.
The Philosophy Behind Our Approach
To further explain the learning plan, I first need to emphasize that I’ve been using the term content up to this point and not documentation. Many of the content teams at IBM have pushed to change the culture so that we’re looking at the end-to-end content journey. With that mindset, we want everyone working on that journey to understand that product documentation is just one piece of the whole content pie that makes a user successful in using a product. Gone are the days when an installation manual or administration guide is going to be the key to make a user successful. Now—especially in the cloud world—content impacts both buying and staying with a product. Whether it is the first automated email confirming the user’s account was created or the sample application that helps the user understand how to code, all of the content along the journey influences the customer acquisition and retention.
How can we—the folks traditionally working on the post-sales, technical product content—make the user more successful and want to embrace our products? Why do they want to pay money to develop and host their application in the cloud? The simple answer is by ensuring they are getting something valuable out of it. And in that, content plays a key role.
Defining Our Learning Plan
The content team began working with in-app messages and emails—that “nurture” content—which is clearly an important part of the learning plan because that is the messaging that will ultimately link to the instructional learning content. The heart of the learning plan, however, is ensuring that you have the right learning content defined for each of the touchpoints along your user’s journey.
Defining agreed-upon journey phases for your product can help you determine whether the right content is available to contribute to a successful outcome for each touchpoint. For example, if a user is in a phase of their journey where they are discovering or exploring, then providing content that helps the user learn why your product provides what they need can facilitate their success in moving on to the next journey phase. The goal of the customer is to solve their business problem as quickly and successfully as possible. We want our customers to not only embrace our product, but expand their implementation to gain more and more value from it—and eventually, perhaps even become a vocal advocate for it.
Deciding what content is required, where in the journey it will be needed, and in what format also helps in defining who should own creating the content, where it should be sourced, and where it should be published. With that in mind, let’s revisit the term content again. Remember that we’re including content in our user journey that might be created by a technical writer, a subject matter expert, a product manager, a marketing writer, or a support engineer. The important part is that we’re providing the right content for the right journey phase.
Then, for every content asset in the learning plan, there are guidelines to define the format for that content and what to include in it. By defining templates and guidance for each content asset, we ensure consistency.
Finally, analytics keep us honest about whether our content is working, accessible in the right place, or is of good quality.
After our content assets are defined, it makes it much easier to create our nurture messages. Now, not only can we define clear calls to action in the messages, but we can also ensure that there is quality content available for our users to learn from.
What We’ve Learned
The key things we’ve learned from approaching content design and development through this learning plan are:
- Collaboration across the various content creation teams and with other product-team functions (like offering management, sometimes known as “product management” outside IBM) is critical to delivering a consistent end-to-end content journey
- Alignment between the learning plan and touchpoints with customers ensures consistent messaging that provides high-value content
- The learning plan provides a framework to define what content is needed, which phase of the journey that content asset bests supports, identify if templates and guidelines are needed to ensure consistency, and who owns creating the content asset
- Measuring the impact ensures that we keep our content–and our users—on track for success
While we can’t share actual numbers, we have seen our registration and conversions rise since adopting this approach. Content fuels the client journey and a learning plan can help to enrich the user’s experience with the product by providing that “right content” to enable the customer to learn and succeed.
JENIFER SCHLOTFELDT is a Content Strategist at IBM. Jenifer leads a team of software engineers and content designers that own the IBM Bluemix Learn Experience. Not only is the team supporting continuous delivery of the IBM Bluemix Docs, but they also embrace DevOps and Design Thinking practices. She is also the coauthor of DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA.
