Transform Your Technical Documentation into A Content Marketing Engine with Natalie Luneva

0:01(upbeat electrical music) - We're gonna dive into our first keynote of the day. This is Natalie Luneva, she's gonna be talking about how to transform your technical documentation into a content marketing engine. Natalie is the co-founder of Outranking.io and she's the host of the SaaS Boss podcast. Natalie, thanks for joining me, I'm gonna let you take it away.

0:27- Absolutely, glad to be here. Thanks a lot. Alrighty, um, how do I add my slides? There you go, awesome. Hey everyone, my name is Natalie Luneva, and today we're gonna talk about how to turn your product documentation from collecting dust to a SaaS growth engine, if you have it. If you don't have it,

0:50then I'll share some cheat codes how you can create it. Product documentation is often an after thought for many founders, and I'd like to show you how it can be used as actually and lead generation. So my name is Natalie Luneva and in addition to growing our own SaaS company with my husband, I'm also co-founder at a company called Outranking.io, which is an SEO content research,

1:15writing and optimization tool. I am also a growth and marketing consultant to SaaS founders and I help SaaS companies identify and implement high ROI opportunities. Why high ROI opportunities, because founders, especially who don't have marketing backgrounds, when asked, when they're asking an SEO specialist, do I need help with SEO? Of course SEO specialist is going to say,

1:38yes you need help with SEO. If they're asking, do I need help with content? Well, of course content person is going to say, yes you need content. Do I need with pay per click? Yes, you need help with pay per click. And all of them are right, in their own way, right? Like who is guilty of that?

1:54I am actually checking the chat here as well. So if you put guilty here, that would be awesome. I know that it's not just me and the founders that I that I had the pleasure of working with. Um, so I full disclosure, am not a technical product documentation writer. I'm a marketer, so the advice that's going to

2:14come here right now is from the growths perspective. And if you have any questions, type them in the chat I only have 20 minutes left. So I'm going to try and answer them while I'm running this session. So my promise to you today is what you learn how to analyze your product documentation effectiveness. Number two is best practices to ensure it's not

2:36just their sitting there and collecting dust. And number three is ways to improve conversion rates, at least by 10%, maybe a little bit more, maybe like 50% conversion rate on your website, which is awesome. I love when we're able to improve conversion rate on the website, which means that without doing anything you're just all of a sudden getting more leads

2:57more conversions, more sales, which is awesome. So let's try and make it a little bit more interactive. I want to know, in your opinion, what is average user path, that the user takes on the website? When they land on a SaaS website, where do they usually go? So majority of the times, and I'm looking at the comments,

3:19so feel free to drop something there, but pricing. Some says, home pricing and about. Okay, very good. Yes, majority of the times, people will first land on the homepage. Next they're going to check pricing page, you guys are right, and then next they're going to check something like integrations features. And then the last one going to probably about page. So this is majority of the times, but did you know that people will also land on your product documentation

3:43as their first page? If you have a product documentation pages then people will actually land there and can actually convert into trials from your product documentation page. It is awesome. So not sure if it's a if you're able to see that, but this is an example. And I'm going to share with you, by the way don't worry about that,

4:05this is from Google analytics screenshot. I'm going to share with you exactly the view that you can use to go here. But what we're looking at here is pay, uh, the sixth most popular page where people convert into a trial is actually none of the pages that we talked about but it's actually a product documentation page. This page, number six, by popularity and how many sign-ups to a trial the page has,

4:33which is pretty awesome, huh? You probably didn't know that. So today I'm going to show you how you can do this and how you can check for yourself. What are some pages that are popular on your website? So overall, the benefits of having product documentation pages are multiple. Number one, obviously it can bring you SEO and traffic,

4:52which I just proved to you. Number two, is it's actually helping you decrease support tickets, uh, volume. People don't want to contact your support. Despite what you're thinking, like so many people just you know, contact me and ask weird questions. People don't want to do that, they want to self-serve. It also going to help you reduce churn and streamline your onboarding,

5:13increase your customer success, and happiness. And overall, this is all gonna translate into conversions improving conversions from visitor to trial, from trial to paid, which is, you know, good for everyone. Some prerequisites that I'd like you, that you are going to need to have is number one, you need to have Google analytics set up on your website. Go ahead, and by the way, start opening your Google analytics if you have it, just go ahead and open, because they're going to be a couple of things that we are going to be checking

5:44in your Google analytics right now. So this is a hands-on session, okay? Number two, is that your Google analytics is present on the support pages because a lot of times I see that somehow the Google analytics code is missing from those pages. It is present from homepage, pricing page, but not the product documentation pages, if you have them. And number three, is if you have, and this is probably a little bit more for advanced users,

6:05if you have goals set up in Google analytics. So those are the three things that ideally you need to have. If you don't, that's fine as well, at least just keep in mind the things that you need to have in place and something that you can check, uh, a little bit later. So let's analyze your product documentation

6:26together right now, we'll do it. Hopefully you have your Google analytics, I'm checking some comments here. Hopefully you have your Google analytics open already. Uh, my question to you, how often do you guys and ladies check your Google analytics? Because this thing kills me, really. So many times, founders like log in there maybe once every other month, because, and that's totally fine if you do

6:55because probably you don't know what you're looking at. So today I'm going to share with you the things that you can check in your Google analytics and then you're probably going to want to log in there, you know, at least once a week. And this is my recommendation because you need to know what's happening there as well.

7:15So if you are in your Google analytics, I'd like you to go to, let me increase the size of this, to uh so you go into your Google analytics. Analytics at google.com. You then go under your behavior and then Content Drilldown. And then in this great view, which I, I know you probably have not, have never log, went there,

7:40logged in there. But under Behavior and then Site Content and Content Drilldown, you're going to be able to see what are your most popular clusters of pages. So for example, like folders of pages, right? So for example, here the number one most popular page, is obviously the homepage. And then all the content that you have under support page is going to be, the second most popular,

8:01visited a cluster of pages. And then the pricing page is the third most popular. So I really want to hear, what are your number one, two, three, most popular pages, page clusters? I really want to know. I, I want to know. Okay, Blog, some, someone is saying blog, once a week. Okay, someone's checking once a week, which is awesome. What are number two and number three,

8:25most popular cluster of pages? Oftentimes it is homepage, then the next time it's like blog or pricing. And for some companies you're actually going to see support and this is the killer, but you are going to find very interesting. So someone says home, blog, program, team, documentation is number one. Woo hoo! Jane, awesome! Then you're going to be so excited to,

8:58to see what's coming next. Alright, let me pull back here. I need to get to my clicker.

9:07There you go. Next few that I wanted to go and check is to go under conversions, if you have those set up, because if you don't, you need to work on them. But then next you go to conversions, goals, and then reverse goal path. And then, what's awesome here, is you're going to be able to see which pages people visit right before they hit the goal

9:31which is a convert on the trial. If you have them set up, then this is a gold mine for you, Make sure to check that as well.

9:45But in this particular case, hold on, I'm looking at a couple of you commenting here. Um, In this particular case, you'll see that there's actually a lot of product documentation pages that are bringing conversion. And so, by the way, while you were at it, while you were in Google analytics as a marketer analyst,

10:05this is killing me. I mean, if you've been given access to other people in the past and Google analytics, make sure, make sure to go and delete those people. If you no longer work with them, because otherwise they have access to a lot of things that you don't want them to have access to, okay? And so if you look at here, there's a, uh, around 3% of all conversions page uh, a line number six and then there's another a 1%,

10:28and then we see a couple more percentage points. So you can see actually here that a lot of conversions are happening on those pages. Then the last thing that I'm going to torture you today with is go to reverse goal path, and then you're going to be able to see that all the pages, actual pages

10:50that are bringing you the conversions. And these are goals set up properly. In this case, this is where I see line number two, line number five, and line number eight together they bring 12% of all trial conversions. In addition to pricing pages, integration pages, homepages. Did you ever, you know, did you ever think that this is possible? That your product documentation pages

11:12actually can bring in conversions. Not only that, so just overall total percentage for this pages, for this particular SaaS company is 12% of all conversions to trial is coming from those product documentation pages. And that is, they didn't even have a call to action on those product documentation pages. Isn't it crazy? How many of you have, or do not have,

11:37call to action on product documentation pages? If you don't, then you can easily increase your website conversion, if you get in traffic to those product documentation pages you can increase your website conversion overall from visitor to trial, which is crazy. Without doing anything, just adding those buttons without needing to spend any money on pay-per-click or adding more traffic or content or guest blog posts or anything

12:00you can increase the number of trials. Isn't it crazy? So let's talk about the creation process. So the creation process for product documentation pages and those are the cheat codes that I'm going to share with you, there are two. Number one is when a request comes in that you haven't seen before and you don't have a product documentation

12:25talking about this particular issue. And the person was asking, you know, submitted the ticket, for example. Please, I beg you, do not respond with long elaborated email and text in the email. One-on-one, write to this person. What you need to do is you need to take all, everything that you've written down the answer, ideally you're also have like a walkthrough video that you can upload to YouTube or whatever

12:49and then add that as well and create a page. This is the easiest way for you to start creating those pages. If you take it as a rule that every single time when someone creates a ticket and you need to provide new information that is not publicly available on your product documentation page, please create a separate product documentation page and then send the link to the product documentation page

13:09to this person. Do not answer in private, okay? Number two is I encourage you to start writing weekly Q&A sessions with your existing customers, with all of your prospects, with leads, someone who took you up on the trial and didn't convert, someone who converted, so everyone. You want to include everyone and you want to invite them to a weekly session.

13:33And this is going to be also like, this is so powerful. Not a lot of companies do that. In fact, I don't know, maybe like 1% of all SaaS companies do that, if not less. This is goldmine. What you do is on a weekly basis you have one hour calls with everyone and what you do, you invite your existing database,

13:50uh, everyone to those weekly calls. You don't want to word it so that you are showing all of your features and stuff like that, because this is not about you in particular, this is about you learning what people want. Why they didn't sign up to a trial, if they sign up, why they didn't convert?

14:09This was very interesting. I host multiple sessions like this for multiple SaaS companies as a first step. And they said that we were trying to get people to get on the call with us, like half a, half an hour call and you know share why is it just overall their feedback, right? And it is a big ask. Well, if you invite people to join your weekly sessions and those sessions can be structured a little bit

14:31like a mastermind. So for example, if your tool, let's say a market automation tool, that you can talk about just overall market automation. You can bring a couple of examples from your particular tool. You can share the screen, how your tool helps do that. But overall, you talk about market automation. You can get people to introduce themselves, talk about which company they're with,

14:51which will help in this, uh, people to bond. And then they're much more likely to connect with each other. And if you're going to have existing customers, this happened yesterday on a call like this, existing customer joined and they were raving about the tool. And so all of those leads that are currently just sitting there, just wondering, should I sign up or not?

15:12Is this the best SaaS tool out there? This customer was raving about the tool. And she said, "I love it. I've tried, you know, number one, number two, number three I hated it. And then this, you guys are just absolutely awesome." So do not miss on this opportunity to run those weekly sessions. Quick tip here, if you already have product documentation pages, you can check, uh, go to Outranking.io, this is a SaaS company

15:40that I'm on a co-founder at. And then you can check, you can go, click on the homepage, see in action. And then you can check the pages that are that you can basically convert into a little bit more SEO optimized pages as well. So the AI power is actually doing this for you and you're just plugging your website there. And then you'll be able to see what are some pages that are low hanging fruits that you can convert, you can create into a little bit more

16:06SEO optimized piece of content. This is if you already have product documentation pages. I'll share a little bit about the common problems that I see a lot of founders do with their product documentations. And that is, number one is what you want to add in those, hold on, it is creation process. So you want to include multiple, like multimedia content

16:35into your product documentation pages, which includes video. So for example, if you are able to show a walk through, like a screen share or if you have recordings of those weekly sessions, um, then you can include it into your product documentation, which is again improving your SEO value and juice, and Google absolutely loves that. You can include screenshots,

16:54then just overall structure text is important. Um, case studies, uh, interlinking is also important. So any, any interlink in your internal website from let's say your product documentation into another page is considered an extra backlink, which is great, we want to do that. Breadcrumbs are important, both for Google and for user experience, so include it there. By the way, I cannot stress it enough,

17:18it is important for Google, okay? So Breadcrumbs, ideally you want to have there. And CTAs, do not forget CTAs. Remember, this is like the biggest points of this presentation is CTAs should not be missing from the product documentation pages. Next, some of the problems that I see a lot of companies do is number one,

17:39they don't have Google analytics. Number two, they don't have CTAs, we talked about this. Number three is Keyword research using a free Google tool or you can go to Outranking.io and it's also going to give you some options, uh, to check for keywords, uh, volume. And then you optimize for that not having breadcrumbs and problems

18:01with the interlinking and sub domain versus folder. There's one letter missing folder. So this is a big one. A lot of, uh, what a lot of founders do is they use like a sub domain, something like Support, that's the name of the website that come for example. We don't want to do that. We want to have a folder, because if you do it as a sub domain, then you are not passing the juice

18:26from the website to those product documentation pages. And Google is not going to rank it as high. So we want it to be a folder, okay? And I need to switch between the screens, so that's why there's a little bit of a delay. So overall conclusion, percentage of traffic that visits your product documentation pages,

18:53hopefully you were able to check that, this is important. If you have zero, okay, then you probably don't have any product documentation pages. You know, that you need to work a little bit on that. I shared with you how you want to do that. Number one is you want to create weekly sessions. Number two, never answer long elaborative email always put it as a separate page, okay, that you can,

19:11then everyone else can see that as well. Uh, you can also, uh, hopefully you were able to analyze number of trials that come from your product documentation pages, for some companies this can be 12%, and for some companies, it can be 20%, depending on the size of your product documentation pages. And then hopefully you have planned

19:30how to improve your existing pages. You know now that you need to add CTA buttons, call to action buttons. By the way, I don't know if you mentioned it but CTA stands for call to action buttons. So have them on your product documentation pages, this is important. Hopefully you are going to start your weekly Q&A sessions and then I really want to hear what's feedback

19:51you're going to get out of this. If you start those weekly sessions, please reach out to me, I really want to hear your feedback. If you improve your product documentation pages reach out to me again. Again, I'm not an expert in product documentation pages specifically, writing it. This presentation was about, uh, growth tactics and channels

20:09and, uh, just product documentation was one of them. And that is it, my website is natalieluneva.com, I'm also a SaaS boss, uh, community and, uh, podcasts. And we do a lot of different things as well. So thank you so much. We have couple of minutes for Q&A, so if anyone has any questions. I see that there are some, uh, some comments here.

20:34Let me go over them.

20:38"What tools do folks use in addition to Google tools for search keyword research?" Outranking.io is one of them, um, I would Google is a good tool, go ahead and use that. Um, I would recommend at least those two, start with the Google, checkout Outranking.io as well. "What do you think is the best way to embed CTAs

20:58in the documentation without annoying existing customers?" Maybe in the CTA, ask them to sign or log in and do not show the CTA to log the users. Now, if you were able to do that, that is great, I think. If you can't, I don't think that you're going to annoy existing users. And by the way, you can also check in Google analytics

21:18the percentage of traffic that goes to your page. Is this existing traffic or new traffic? And this is also going to give you an idea whether those CTA buttons, call to action buttons you know, what made them? Are they just create a demo or ask a demo or create a trial? Which I don't think it's gonna annoy existing users, so just check the percentage of people

21:40that visit your product documentation pages. And hopefully there's also going to be an eye opening for you. If you're going to find that a lot of first time users enter your websites through documentation pages, this is awesome, this is awesome.

21:57"How do you handle if the opposite happens? A customer is having an issue with the tool and scares away a prospect." Oh, in the, during the weekly sessions, you know what, uh, I don't think that a lot of people will actually be as vocal if they had a problem. They would actually be appreciative

22:16of you, hosting those sessions. And so even if someone is not a hundred percent happy we know that there's, you know, some users they're always not going to be happy. So that's totally fine. So you can just address that, 'Oh yes, I remember we had such a problem. You know, uh, Jane, uh, hopefully our fix worked for you.'

22:33and usually they're not as vocal. No one's going to come and just, you know, talk about stuff about you on those weekly sessions. Usually they just don't show up. And looks like, "What time is best for weekly Q&A?" Okay, we have a lot of questions about weekly Q&A's, which is awesome. I really want you guys to try that. We have one minute left and this is probably going to be one last questions

22:56that I'm going to take. During the day, now number one, where is majority of your customers are, do you know? If there are somewhere in the US or somewhere in Europe, like this is going to depend, like really where your customer base is. If they're in the US then US time zone and usually around lunchtime. If there is somewhere in Asia, I don't know what the preference there in Asia, I'm here for US audience, I am brought in around lunchtime

23:21between 12 and two, maybe 11 and two. Right now I'm working with someone in Europe but majority of their user base is in the U S. And so we're doing this around 10:00 AM Central I think overall in between 11 and 2:00 PM Central is a good time if your, uh, folks are in the US.

23:40And that's it looks like. - Excellent, Natalie, thank you so much. - Absolutely, was my pleasure.

23:53(upbeat electrical music)

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