Editorial
The Gist
- Shift in marketing approach: Smart companies are reshaping go-to-market strategies around buyer self-service. Emphasis on making products easy to evaluate and buy through effective "product answers."
- Knowledge-based SEO: SEO landscape has shifted toward answer-based content. Unlocking and merchandising knowledge content aids product discovery.
- AI + knowledge: AI is transforming the buyer's journey with "conversational" research. Building a "product-brain" with valuable content from the knowledge base is crucial.
For many companies, especially those offering complex products and services, the buyer's journey is driven by product education. The days of the “briefcase on a plane” are long over.
According to a recent report from Gartner, merely 17% of the entire purchase journey involves sales engagement. Given that an average deal involves multiple suppliers, each sales representative typically has approximately 5% of a customer's total purchase time.
So what happens during the other 83% of the buyer's journey? Think of your sales process like a scavenger hunt. People traverse from websites to search engines, to bots, communities, social media, or seek advice from friends and colleagues, trying to find the information they need to make informed purchasing decisions.
We are seeing a full-on shift in buyer behavior to the point the majority of millennials now prefer a rep-free sales experience. Buyer’s want self-service for the same reasons that customers love self-service: it’s faster, easier and it works. As a brand, you need to provide trustworthy product information and insights to empower your buyers.
Smart companies are building their go-to-market around buyer self-service. It may come in the guise of different terms and acronyms from buyer enablement to product-led growth, but it all boils down to the same thing. Make your products easy to evaluate and buy. Deliver “product answers” that help buyers with evaluation and accelerate the sales cycle. Meet the customer where they are, from your website to bots to social and search channels. And always try to deliver an exceptional experience.
Sounds easy. But it’s the antithesis of how people are taught to market. In marketing, if you cannot measure it, it did not happen. We build funnels, not scavenger hunts. We produce content marketing, not product knowledge.
But relax. There are some very sound and practical ways to adapt your growth strategy around buyer self-service. And you probably have a treasure-trove of incredible content to draw on to add product answers and knowledge into your buyer's journey. It just happens to live on your support site, not your marketing .com.
Related Article: What B2B Buyers Want, and Ways to Align Your Customer Journeys
The Buyer's Journey: The Evolution of Knowledge and Product Answers
Knowledge content has come a long way in the past few years. It’s an area of innovation.
“Product Answers” have a new focus on the customer experience. From content design to portals to AI to headless CMS — knowledge is having something of a renaissance. It’s time for marketers to jump on board and start weaving self-service product answers into their customer journeys and digital experiences.
Aligning your product documentation with a product-led growth strategy can be a game-changer. Cross-pollinate your product docs, community, and knowledge with traditional marketing programs, and create easy avenues for prospects and customers to access product info.
On the flip side, amplify your support experiences with a new marketing emphasis on design and conversion to help retain customers and increase NRR and customer value.
A Real-World Example: Cisco WebEx Essentials
To illustrate the concept of delivering marketing experiences around your support and documentation, let's take a look at Cisco's WebEx Essentials site. Cisco doesn't stop at just providing product documentation. It goes the extra mile by building microsites that serve as gateways into its documentation, thereby helping customers discover new products and solutions.
This approach allows Cisco to engage customers effectively, providing them with a seamless journey from exploring documentation to discovering new offerings, all in one cohesive experience. It feels like marketing, but with the depth and gravity of product info and answers.
Knowledge-Based SEO
Another growth driver from product knowledge is search engine optimization.
SEO used to be about links, and links are still important. But the search giants have evolved. We now live in a fact-driven internet.
Google MUM (Multitask Unified Model) is an AI-based algorithm that responds to search queries with answers, not links. It rewards answer-based content over traditional marketing SEO optimized content.
About 50% of the search results now end without a click. With “zero-click” search results, users get their answers from the search engine, not the source site. In search answers provide valuable brand engagement, authority and awareness. But you need to structure your content to provide answers to get listed.
Your knowledge base is loaded with product answers ideally structured to win high answer-based search rankings. From FAQs, to KBs, guides and tutorials, you have deep answer-based content you can use for search.
If you are still gating your documentation behind passwords, stop. Ungate and merchandise your knowledge to drive brand and product discovery on search engine answers and longtail inbound SEO traffic.
AI + Knowledge
AI is eating the Internet. Your knowledge content is mana for AI indexes and tools. The buyer's journey of the near future will include AI-based “conversational” research on your website and other marketing channels.
You need to build a “product-brain” for marketing interactions. It starts with a deep well of product facts and answers from your knowledge base and docs. You can use this content to train the bot and fill it with useful product information.
Whether launching your first bot, or just ensuring that your viewpoints and product facts are feeding the large language models, your product knowledge has new value.
Related Article: What Is Conversational AI? More Than Just Chatbots
How to Get Started
To fully leverage your product documentation as a marketing tool, you need to break down the silos within your organization.
Just as the shift from marketing to revenue teams and sales alignment took place a few years ago, the integration of product management and technical documentation into a cohesive go-to-market strategy is paramount today.
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For a successful transition, follow these key steps:
- Merchandise support content: Make your product documentation more discoverable and user-friendly. Implement intelligent recommendations, employ an engaging tone of voice and ensure simplicity in conveying information. Layer your content at different elevations to appeal to customers across various stages of their journey, from prospects and newbies to champions and pros. The deeper the user journeys, the more complex and detailed the documentation should be.
- Build a reusable content structure: Upgrade your content models by using formats like DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). This will promote efficient content reuse, reduce redundancy and maintain consistency. It will also support an omnichannel, or multiformat delivery strategy across sites, in-app, mobile and print.
- Evaluate your content stack: Traditional Web CMS and Digital Experience Platforms struggle to manage knowledge and support content. Your CMS for product answers should support KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) workflows, where new articles originate from support cases in your help desk or CRM. It needs to manage and deliver XML-based content standards. And you need the flexibility of hybrid (headless plus templated) content delivery. You need a CMS built for product answers.
Wrapping It Up: the Untapped Marketing Asset
Product knowledge is an untapped marketing asset. Progressive marketing teams leverage a product answers strategy into demand and growth programs.
Whether building experience on top of support content, maximizing SEO reach and engagement, or building the conversational AI journeys of the future, the goals remain the same.
Be useful. Delight your user. And communicate your unique perspectives and solutions in ways that move and motivate the customer along their buyer's journey. Lean into product marketing. Expand your knowledge strategy to be a cornerstone of your overall go-to-market. There are no more silos. Just customers. Give them what they want.
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