Writing or Refreshing Knowledge Base Articles in an Audience-Centric, Revenue-Driven Way

You’ve created a wicked product. You’ve worked with enough customers and businesses to know that there’s a real need for this. And you know this, because people keep signing up to use your product. Unfortunately, your users keep running into the same issues over and over again. This creates friction, which leads to churn. 

This requires writing knowledge base articles that accomplish two very hard objectives at the same time: 

• Gives users the step-by-step information they need to complete their task and achieve a specific goal without being frustrated by missing info
• Meets them where they are so they can actually take action on what you’re telling them without being overloaded with too much info 

It’s the balance between “Give it to me now” and “Whoa, that’s way too much.” People do not want to be responsible for more than they can handle. They want to receive exactly what they need, so they can do what they want. 

Of course, this is where it gets challenging. If you respond to what every single person wants, then you no longer have a platform or a product. You have a bespoke service. As a result, it’s important to categorize different problems or challenges or goals and then categorize that into different users or roles. This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to write something for all of these users, roles, challenges, or goals. It just means that you’ll be able to apply a financial lens to a customer experience problem. Who is bringing in the most money? The answer tells you where to invest. How can we make their experience the best? This brings in more bang for your buck. Then you can ask who brings in the second highest amount of money. Rinse and repeat. 

Fortunately, there are frameworks that you can use to balance these two elements: 

The (Self) Schema Framework (Technical Communications)

This framework looks at what an audience’s collective self-schema is. This includes their existing knowledge, their attitudes, and their mental models. For instance, you may be working with a supply chain audience that is so accustomed to using Excel spreadsheets and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Their mental model is that they use their spreadsheets for inventory management, demand forecasting, supplier/vendor management, purchase order tracking, transportation and logistics planning, production scheduling, KPI dashboards, and cost analysis and budgeting. You might want to speak in the language of columns, conditional formatting, formulas, and tables. 

This framework looks at what an audience’s collective self-schema is. This includes their existing knowledge, their attitudes, and their mental models. For instance, you may be working with an e-commerce supply chain audience that is accustomed to using tools like Quickbooks and Shopify. You know that they’re familiar with the Quickbooks interface and the Shopify interface, so you might want to communicate about your product using the same kind of language that they’re familiar with from Quickbooks and Shopify. 

This way, you do not need to go into the nitty gritty of your tech stack. You can just stack the process you’re trying to teach them on top of processes and workflows that they already trust and that they don’t think too deeply about. 

This kind of approach also requires believing your customers when they say they want to achieve a specific goal. As a writer, it’s easy to add more information because you want to empower people, because you think that it’s interesting, or you think that they need to know about it. When you’re writing technical writing, it’s important to always keep the user’s goal in mind. 

The 5D Audience Insight Method (Executive Presentations)

This approach asks the writer to consider five different dimensions: 

• Demographics: This is the audience’s role, their seniority, and their technical background. 
• Drivers: This is the audience’s motivations, goals, and priorities. 
• Decision-Making Factors: These are the elements that shape your audience’s choices. 
• Disposition: This is your audience’s current attitude and knowledge level. 
• Delivery Context: This is the environment in which your audience will receive the message. 

The Resistance-Readiness Scale

This approach relies on a spectrum. The spectrum runs from Active Resistance (opposed to taking action) to Active Readiness (prepared to take action). 

When someone is on the Active Resistance side, they need low complexity, high empathy, and basic, persuasive, reassuring information. 

When someone is on the Active Readiness side, they need highly complex information, data, and direct, technical directions. 

To continue our example of the supply chain software, the Active Resistance audience might need visual tutorials that tie into their emotional needs for that day: dealing with a high workload, fear of messing up a massive spreadsheet, and pulling out the data they need to send out update emails. For the Active Readiness audience, the highly complex information and technical directions might be how to install the software on their system, details of any compliance certifications they have, or the legalities and contract details of using the software. 

The Audience Knowledge/Interest Framework

This approach is all about analyzing your audience based on specific criteria in order to understand the type of information you need to share with them. This is the criteria you would use for analysis: 

• Knowledge/Understanding: How much information do they already have and are actively using it? Are they beginners or experts? 
• Interest: What is their stake in the information that they already have and any new information that they may acquire? 
• Need: What specific information does your audience need in order to achieve their stated goals? 
• Customization: Providing general, easy-to-follow, jargon-free language for novices and more technical information for experts. 

Writing Knowledge Base Articles Can Be An Exciting (and Financially Lucrative!) Process

Writing knowledge base articles can feel like a daunting task. After all, you know everything about your business and your product team knows all the nooks and crannies of your product. But the thing to come to terms with is that, when it comes to solving their problem, your customer doesn’t care about the ins and outs of the product – they care that it solves their issue and that you have all of the backend stuff worked out when they do need to care about the nooks and crannies. If you can empathize with your audience, it’s easy to turn what seems like an overwhelming amount of information into content that your market loves.