438. User-Inspired Content 💥
A universal alternative to user-generated content strategies
Hi there 👋
In my university teaching, there is one week every semester where we talk about social media, and it’s the one week every semester where I actually need to update the content every single time. My big question this year: What do I even say about Twitter / X? Do I leave it in? Do I pretend it doesn’t exist? (Pretending it doesn’t exist is what I’ve been currently doing in my personal life.)
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Why User-Inspired Content Should Be Your Next Content Play (+5 Cool Ideas)
Nirvana is a content strategy where other people are writing your content for you.
Which is why user-generated content is so appealing.
The only problem with user-generated content is that you are beholden to your users to make the right stuff for your strategy. This obviously works great for some products like Pinterest or Figma. But what if you don’t have a naturally creator-driven product? What if you don’t have consumer-oriented (and eminently Instagram-able) physical goods? You’re out of luck.
Typically, UGC isn’t an option for you if:
You don’t have a product that lends itself naturally to users making content
You don’t have enough users to achieve any scale of UGC
The stuff your users are creating is private or proprietary
The problem with user-generated content isn’t the users. It’s the generation.
Every company has users (or at least, I sure hope you do!). And whether you have dozens like in a big enterprise business or if you have millions like in a B2C / PLG juggernaut, your customer base can — and should — fit into your content strategy.
But you don’t have to make your users generate all your content.
Instead, take a user-inspired content approach.
Here’s how it works.
User-inspired content is the process of taking user behavior as a core input into the content you create.
There are a couple of keys here:
It’s all about user behavior.
You should be poring over your usage data, talking to customers, looking at your most active users, looking at your longest-active users, studying new users.It’s all about you creating the content, not anyone else.
Users are not the ones generating the content. You are. Or, your team is. Your users are simply giving you the ideas and direction for what to create.
The good news? You may already be doing a user-inspired content strategy without even knowing it.
Most content strategies are based on some sort of value for the potential users of a product. They wouldn’t be very effective strategies if they weren’t! But rather than anchor a content strategy to competitive differentiation or easy-to-own keywords or founder vision, a user-inspired approach anchors to what users are actually doing with your product and saying about your product.
5 ideas for user-inspired content
User-inspired content is a philosophy that can be applied to any number of different content tactics. Here are just a few done well:
1 - SEO strategy
When you hop onto research calls, what is the specific language that prospects and customers are using when they talk to you? Chances are, this is also what they’re googling to find you.
As you build your keyword strategy, you can add user-inspired keywords — directly from your research calls — to further build out your content plan.
2 - Template gallery
Ah, template galleries. The PLG magic bullet.
Not only are template galleries great for content, they’re awesome for user activation. With a user-inspired content approach, you observe the types of things people are using your product to create, then you take that inspiration and give new users a head start by building templates from your most common use cases.
Airtable is a great example. Their template gallery is a repository of the most common starting points for new users.
3 - Video strategy
This strategy dovetails with your keyword strategy. Once you take inspiration on what people are asking about, you can also take inspiration on how they are consuming this info. If users are all about your video tutorials, then you can supplement your written content strategy with video content. Check out Ahrefs for an example of how they’ve done this:
4 - Shortform original content
Typically in a PLG or self-serve motion, users are going to run into friction at various points of their activation journey. By watching user behavior more closely or talking to your users, you can identify what’s going wrong and build content to address it.
Wistia has a series of original content on a number of topics, including some user-inspired series like this one on how to fix your video setup at home.
5 - Build this content into your lifecycle comms
User-inspired content is great for an education play with your content strategy (think: new categories of products, complex categories, etc.). And one of the best places to educate is within your lifecycle communication, whether it’s helping leads become customers or helping new signups become healthy, active users.
Here’s an example from Figma, where they’ve clearly been inspired by user behavior or bringing new files into Figma and are now referencing Sketch → Figma imports within their user onboarding.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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