5 Reasons Your Product Documentation Is a Marketing Asset

As a CMO, it’s important to understand what clever technology developers and open source leaders have known for years: Great product documentation isn’t loathsome — it’s marketing, and darn good marketing at that.

Today, the smartest apps and campaigns dominate headlines and boardrooms. Meanwhile, documentation has become marketing’s secret weapon.

Documentation is the language that accompanies a product, often outlining its development, design, technical language and marketing strategy in clear, definitive terms.

Ultimately, good documentation won’t comprise a cost, but rather, a profit. Furthermore, it’s an SEO godsend. Documentation can indicate how to evolve products and spark cross-functional communication. It can reveal holes in the sales funnel that otherwise would have eluded you.

In marketing terms, documentation can put you into contact with prospective investors and customers alike. And while much of marketing can be asynchronous and speculative, documentation remains reliable and predictable.

Here’s why you need to start thinking about strategic documentation.

1. Credible Language vs. Marketing Lingo

Documentation can be your best bet as a source of leads.

Integrate documentation into your marketing automation system (Omniture, Eloqua or Marketo, for example) to enhance communication about your product’s features and benefits. Unfortunately, many marketers forget or disregard this step, despite the minimum work involved.

On the other hand, should your documentation look or read like marketing copy? Of course not. Documentation is decidedly not marketing copy. It should be credible, and absent the jargon and salesmanship that customers and prospects have come to expect from the marketing kind. Understandable, your documentation should still be able to demonstrate how well your company understands its market and target customers.

Furthermore, you can discover much about a company based on its documentation. It allows investors and participants a peek behind the company curtain. Savvy buyers — and even users of free products — use documentation as a gauge for company seriousness and dependability. Again, developers have known this since the dawn of the web.

At one time or another, you’ve probably assumed that documentation contains highly technical language. That may be the case, but not exclusively. Documentation should be granular, but also social and searchable. The best documentation contains both generalist and specialist material, designed to engage each intended audience.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Documentation should be keyword-rich, densely linked and expertly structured. Importantly, it doesn’t raise the red flags that other types of content might.

Keep in mind that fresh, social, collaborative and, therefore frequently updated documentation makes it more Google-friendly. Making documentation social from the beginning will ensure steady traffic and save unnecessary stress and upkeep.

Scatter keywords through your documentation, link deliberately, and apply filters and tags. Most importantly, update every now and then to make sure your documentation remains current.

Documentation is an incredible SEO asset, but too often it doesn’t get treated as such. Sometimes marketing won’t have a hand in the construction process. Other times documentation is left unrevised, and thus, outdated.

3. Cross-Functionality

Company documentation makes for better cross-department communication and collaboration. It forges connections among product, marketing, services and support. Therefore, it’s strategic for everyone.

First and foremost, documentation responsibilities should probably fall within the CMO’s duties because that’s where its effect starts and stops. But regardless of ownership or flow charts, documentation can get your SEO and your product team talking in ways they never have before. The same goes for support, PR, services and tech teams.

4. Community Building

Documentation is also a wonderful way to create a community around your product or service.

Although documentation has a bad rap for being wonky, realize that it can actually present an opportunity for community and customer congregation. Why not give them more to do, allow them a seat at the table, and let them find themselves in the product?

There is a profound ladder of engagement that begins with documentation. Documentation sits at the bottom, forming the foundation of interaction. From it, all further engagement flows — interactions can span over social media, to more monolithic, top-down content, and eventually evolve into emails and phone conversations.

Documentation is a company’s lifeblood, seldom seen but crucial to function and health.

5. Identifying Needs

Finally, documentation is a very effective way of identifying unmet customer needs.

It holds a wealth of information that your product team will drool over, and yet that feedback loop is seldom taken advantage of. What are the most commented-upon items, for example? The most viewed? The most cited?

Furthermore, your documentation should contain analytics — there is no greater company intelligence. Ideally, analytics consist of correct, statistically significant signals that reveal cause and effect, with which you can reliably make decisions.

Used correctly, documentation can make your company a better informed, intuitive operation.

Conclusion

Previously, documentation was thought of as a necessary evil. Or worse even — a black hole that consumed budgets and brain function. But two major things have since changed:

First, we invested in social software. And documentation can be inherently social. For many companies, it’s a collaborative tool — a link between internal departments and external audiences. Collaboratively creating documentation content drives down costs and makes the task less daunting.

Secondly, documentation can inform other functions and services. Tie-ins, integrations and all manner of APIs mean more automation, and therefore less long-term work. Ultimately, documentation should leverage and gather all of the great work your company is performing elsewhere.

As a CMO, there is no more strategic, high-margin initiative you can undertake than optimal documentation.

It’s not a sexy undertaking, but it will earn you the respect of your peers, more effective company management and a more collaborative team. Because it’s not about this quarter or this year, but rather, it’s about affecting competitive advantage and long-term growth.