How Good Documentation Helps to Boost Product Sales

Sales is an art. It’s not what you sell, but how you sell that matters the most. Selling a product of any kind requires you to have a full understanding of who are your target customers and what are they looking for. Besides the various marketing tactics, one thing that can help you bolster your product sales is online product documentation. 

A meticulously-created product document that is information-rich and at the same time visually-appealing is enough to grab the attention of customers. If the product is well documented, that is, well presented, it engages more users which eventually creates new product leads. 

According to Forbes, companies that improve sales with product documentation generate 50% more leads than those who do not. Hence, online documentation software should be a part of your content strategy for inbound marketing.

Let’s see how decent product documentation can help you increase your online sales.  Here are five growth hacks for online sales that can help your inbound marketing strategies with your customers – 

1. Better SEO, More Traffic, New Leads

Online documentation software is a good SEO asset, but more often than not, it is not treated as one. It can immensely improve your SEO results and eventually, increase your product sales as well. A keyword-rich, expertly structured, and densely interlinked online documentation works wonders and can improve your on-page SEO, which is an important growth hack for online sales.

Further, keep in mind that fresh and unique content that connects with your customers and has higher readability, will make it more search engine-friendly. To get a good ranking on SERP, you need to constantly update your product manuals with new information. The right blend of keywords, quality and readability will surely bring your document up among the top search results. 

A good search ranking means increased traffic that indirectly converts to more leads and improves product sales. Insert keywords throughout your documentation, apply filters and tags, link as much as possible, and update it every now and then to make sure your online documentation remains relevant.

2. Creating Credible And Trustworthy Content

Accuracy and relevancy of content are of paramount importance for product documentation. Information that you include should be true and jargon-free. It shouldn’t create a false picture of your product. It should be detailed and free of promotional content. 

Further, since a product’s manual or document is the first thing your customers will see, ensure that you put in your best effort while creating it. Your understanding of the industry and expertise in the product line should clearly reflect in the document. This is how it will gain the trust of your customers and they will be more than happy to try your product. 

Additionally, a well-documented product promises better after-sales support, thereby increasing the trust factor among buyers. For instance, once customers have bought your product, they can refer to its online manual to resolve any questions regarding they have. It also saves them from calling up your support staff for trivial issues. 

Product documentation allows savvy buyers to peek behind the company curtain, who can use it as a gauge for company dependability and seriousness.

3. Building a Community

Not many realize this, but product documentation is an intelligent way to create a community around your service or product. When online documentation software is granular, well structured, and self-contained, it is ideal for sharing. And, when it is shared, it forms a foundation of interaction with customers. This interaction can reach beyond your target audience through social media, which might eventually evolve into emails and phone conversations, resulting in a steady increase in product sales.

You can also include a variety of content types like – use cases, concepts, tasks, images, videos, and GIFs to make your product documentation easy to use and more shareable.

4. Identifying Unmet Customer Needs

Online documentation plays a crucial role in identifying unmet customer needs. You can analyze several statistics from documents and make the required changes from time to time. Get actionable insights like the most-read articles, poorly-rated articles, total number of searches, keywords that led to successful or failed searches, etc. Once you know what your customers are up to, it becomes easier to improve your documentation and product sales. 

If you do not have analytics enabled in your online documentation software, you are not an intelligent company. Here’s why – analytics consist of statistically significant and correct signals that reveal the cause and effect. You can use these statistics to make important decisions and eventually use them as growth hacks for online sales. Identifying what your customers are looking for becomes extremely easy with such insightful data.

5. More Miscellaneous Ways

• Pitches more products via online documentation – While explaining a product, you have an opportunity to introduce another product. This way, while reading about product A, buyers might find product B useful too. It helps a great deal in promoting any new product in a subtle way, so that it doesn’t look imposed and at the same time, gives readers an idea of your new launches. 

• Engages visitors – Rather than just giving information about a product and moving on, documentation acts as a source of engagement for your site as well. It offers features such as ‘submit feedback’ or ‘suggest’ along with other reading guides to help you engage with potential buyers and improve product sales.

• Improves post-sales relationship – Customers are often neglected after their initial purchase. Once you have a full-fledged documentation in place, you can be unperturbed on how to go about maintaining a good post-sales relationship with your customers. With an online product manual, customers are equipped with self-help, which lets them resolve questions on their own without reaching out to your support staff over calls or emails. 

Online Documentation Is More Than Just Plain Text

The thought that documentation is simply about writing content is not completely right. It is much more than that. It forms an essential part of every content marketing strategy, thanks to the wide reach that a business can have with online product document. It helps you educate your customers and give them everything they need on a single platform, which in turn helps you get more leads and conversions. 

Guest article written by: Brayn Wills currently holds the position of knowledge management manager at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.