“You need to learn to walk before you can run.” Understanding the basics of anything is vital to one’s success, whether that’s sifting through multiple cookbooks or perhaps walking through a product tour when using new MarTech. We all begin at the starting line.
When you master the 101 course, what happens next? Are you expected to figure out the more advanced topics on your own? Or should there be a 200 or even 300-level course that naturally comes next? For many companies, creating content that’s helpful for practitioners is quite the challenge...or so it was. Guilda Hilaire, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Salesforce, shared her expertise on creating a strong community of practitioners during her episode of the Real Marketers podcast. Let’s see what she had to say.
Why Create More Advanced Content?
No matter if you’re a marketing team of one or you’re a part of a rather large marketing department, you’re often faced with the difficult challenge of determining whether a project is worth your team’s time and resources.
Long story short: creating more advanced content for your users is 100% worth it.
Guilda explains creating more advanced content will consequently create better brand advocates. See there’s a domino effect here. With you creating more advanced content, it helps your end-user level-up their skills. With this added skill to their resume, it also advances their career trajectory (and who doesn’t want that?). According to Semrush, content marketing has an effectiveness of 32 percent when it comes to customer retention. If you provide value to your users (especially other marketers 😉 ) you have a customer for life.
Get Your Customers Involved
So your team has agreed to create more advanced content, how do you go about achieving this? Creating excellent (and valuable) content is no small feat. Plus, we all know your content has to be more compelling than Netflix or even TikTok now. Guilda recommends you go straight to the source - your customers.
As marketers we know we should be talking to our customers on a regular basis, but sometimes life gets in the way and we sacrifice items on our to-do list to survive. Chatting with practitioners of your product should not be one of the things you procrastinate on.
Guilda reminds us there are TONS of customers chomping at the bit to provide feedback and get involved in content creation. Plus, it’s a win-win. Asking your customers to get involved in content creation is affirmation that their voice matters. This marketing strategy has the possibility of creating more advanced content as well as fostering stronger customer relationships. After all, the newest trend in SaaS is community marketing. 🤝
Before You Launch….
Checks and balances are a good thing. Not everything we create will be error-free but we can strive for perfection! Just as we have a review process for typos and other grammatical errors in our content, we should have a similar process in place for reviewing the accuracy of our more advanced assets.
Listen to the full episode to hear even more tips on how to create a strong community of practitioners from Guilda Hilaire. Guilda explores additional ways to get your users involved in content creation and shares her advice when starting a community.
Meet with one of our experts to see how easy it is to centralize your product data, manage digital assets, and create digital product experiences. Trust us…you’re going to be wowed.
