Marketing and docs

The purpose of documentation is to help users achieve their goals. Documentation can be a powerful marketing and sales tool, but the moment you start to treat it primarily as a marketing channel or sales funnel, you undermine it. The best documentation (and that includes the most effective docs for sales and marketing) is focused on user success, and is treated as a product feature.

However, while documentation isn't primarily a marketing tool, that doesn't mean docs has nothing to learn from marketing. The guides in this section examine how marketing and docs can align (and where they diverge), and look at marketing techniques and tools that can be useful for tech writers.

Marketing and docs should be allies

Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all.

It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view. Peter Drucker

Marketing should be customer obsessed (or market oriented, or market driven, or whatever term you prefer). Documentation should be user obsessed. Often, the customer and user are the same person. Even if they aren't, customers usually consider it very high priority that the user can succeed with the software they're buying. So far, so aligned.

Marketing and docs have different objectives for their output

Where things can diverge is in the end goal of docs and marketing content: documentation content aims to empower users, marketing communications aim to persuade customers.

Documentation can help persuade - but it does this best if it's focused on being good docs. The existence of high quality, accurate, useful documentation is reassuring for potential customers, and can make it easier for them to test out the product.

Marketing can be valuable to docs

A good marketing team knows who the customer is, what they want, what they fear, how they like to communicate. All of this is extremely helpful information for tech writers.

Marketing probably already have some analytics and other data gathering in place, and should be able to help you hook up docs to the same tracking and data sources.

Marketing can harm docs

Marketing should have a voice in docs, and tech writers should be ready to work closely with marketing. But marketing shouldn't own docs, and must remember the primary purpose of documentation. The fundamentals of good documentation (readability, simplicity, clear structure, searchability, accuracy, and so on) must not be compromised. In documentation, it is more important to get the user the information they need than to persuade them to buy. To compromise this weakens the value of docs to the user, which ironically undermines the docs' power to reassure and support customers.