The Customer Education Playbook

13Step 11: Actionable Strategies to Improve Your Content

Once you've published your content and successfully measured its impact, it can be tempting to report your findings, then get straight to your next project. However, this is a missed opportunity. It's really valuable at this stage to take the time to explore how your content can be improved.

If you look back on how you chose to measure the success of your education in Step 10, these metrics become your signals for which content is performing well and which is doing poorly. In this chapter, we will explore how to improve the content that isn't hitting its mark.

Understanding Iterative Design

Improving content requires a real commitment to the idea of iteration. Mark it out forcibly as an item on the to-do list, create a motivated team for it, and put a meeting in your calendars where the agenda is iterating and improving content. Treat your projects like they are living things – you must nurture them, check in regularly, improve and maintain them – rather than just build and forget.

Your iteration mindset should start immediately, right from the ideation stage. Think about the content that you want to create, and continuously aim to validate your assumptions, looking at any data you can use to make improvements even before your education is ready to go live. Invite other stakeholders to whiteboarding sessions or meetings where you can get some feedback on small or large changes, and thoughts about how it alters the flow ...