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Content Strategy
9 posts about Content Strategy. Every summary links to the original.
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Doubling down on content - The Intercom Blog
Intercom hired John Collins, a former print journalist with 20 years at The Irish Times, as managing editor to lead its content efforts. The company’s blog, Inside Intercom, has been a key driver of its success by sharing insights on web design, search, and business evolution, not just product features, and increasingly reflects the views of its customers. Intercom avoids typical content marketing tactics like link baiting or artificial publishing schedules, instead focusing on evergreen content that builds a lasting knowledge base and gets referred to weeks and months after publication. This approach allows direct engagement with customers without intermediaries like PR agencies or trade magazines, which have declined, and the company is not setting up a corporate newsroom. The company views this as an experiment putting a journalist among engineers and designers to create content that attracts and engages prospective customers on its own terms.
Empathy: the key to better support content - The Intercom Blog
As businesses scale, they risk losing touch with customer problems, which becomes apparent in support content. The post argues that empathy—both cognitive and emotional—is essential for creating effective help content. Cognitive empathy involves understanding customer perspectives by surrounding oneself with customer information, as Harley Davidson does with bike trip photos, and by staying informed about product evolution through conversations with design, support, and engineering teams. Emotional empathy requires experiencing the frustrations customers face, such as imagining a world without the product’s key features or actively finding and reporting bugs to understand user pain, as encouraged by Intercom’s “if you find something broken, you now own fixing it” poster. By combining both types of empathy, support writers can produce content that resonates with users and addresses their real needs, as shown in Intercom’s Smart Campaigns and User Map documentation.
How we redesigned our blog, Inside Intercom - The Intercom Blog
Intercom redesigned its blog, Inside Intercom, because the volume of articles, podcasts, books, and videos had outpaced the old design’s ability to help readers discover and consume content. The new homepage employs a magazine-like hierarchy on a solid grid, featuring a lead article with secondary and tertiary items, while podcasts now have their own category with an inline player for seamless listening. Two new categories for Startups and Marketing, along with reading enhancements like estimated reading times and progress bars and the removal of the pop-up newsletter signup, improve the user experience. Typography pairs Tiempos serif with Akkurat Pro sans-serif to create an editorial feel, and custom illustrations by a diverse range of artists plus hand-painted author portraits by Jon Stich add a personal touch. The redesign, led by designer Maria Gonzalez and developer Daniel Husar, aims to make content discovery simpler and reflects Intercom’s design-led culture.
Content as a growth engine for your business - The Intercom Blog
Content marketing advice often focuses on promotion rather than the substance of the content itself, leaving businesses without a clear strategy. Drawing on his experience leading Intercom’s content team and two decades as a journalist, John Collins argues for evergreen content that addresses timeless themes like filing a good bug report rather than news events. Evergreen content decays slowly and provides a compound return, with analysis showing it grows traffic three times faster than news-focused blogs over a year. He applies a journalist’s 5W and 1H framework—who, what, where, when, why, how—to plan content strategy, emphasizing that specialists should write, topics should help customers solve problems, and content must be relevant to the business. Collins concludes with four key takeaways: stay committed for the long term, make content relevant, impose a high editorial bar, and embrace unexpected benefits like easier hiring.
Content strategy: How words build a product - The Intercom Blog
Words in a product evolve like the Ship of Theseus, with each change affecting identity; the term “page” long constrained web design, showing how working titles gain unintended baggage. Intercom’s content strategy transforms this organic dialect into an intentional one, addressing team silos and UI inconsistencies. They categorized every visible word—objects, views, people, actions—into a taxonomy and glossary that gave consistency and control over how each part is described and how parts relate. They interviewed all teams to map natural vocabularies, discovering job-related differences and treating them as assets. Finally, they derived three UI writing principles: speak naturally, speak directly to the user but never for the user, and guide users through complex ideas, recommending that content strategy start after discovering the organic voice already present.
Give Your Customers Best Practices, Not Just FAQs - The Intercom Blog
Most companies invest heavily in acquisition content but neglect post-signup support, leaving customers with poorly written FAQs and contributing to high churn rates. Intercom advocates replacing isolated how-tos with best practice content that teaches customers how to get the most from a product. The approach includes giving the entire lesson, using real-life customer examples, writing about how the team uses the product, mirroring customer language, and revisiting content often. Practical techniques include breaking tasks into quick wins, using bullet points and screenshots, embedding videos, and leveraging a bot for automated answers. The goal is to empower customers to self-serve, reducing support contacts and building long-term loyalty.
Lessons learned from scaling a blog - The Intercom Blog
Drawing from nearly four years of running the Intercom blog, John Collins shares eight lessons on scaling content marketing. It provides a slow but compound return: Tomasz Tunguz’s data shows articles tied to principles remain relevant for years, offering lasting value beyond page views. Opinionated, high-quality articles like ‘Why Cards Are The Future Of The Web’ and ‘Growth Hacking Is Bullshit’ outperform generic content, and writing must be practiced as a muscle with company-wide contribution. Not every article needs to sell, but all content is marketing aimed at growing audience loyalty. Scaling requires an editor backed by a clear content strategy that defines topics, depth, and quality bar; not every company should become a publisher.
Using case studies to tell your story for you - The Intercom Blog
Case studies help B2B SaaS companies persuade the majority of potential customers who are not technology enthusiasts and are averse to revolutionary change by de-risking the purchase decision. Effective case studies follow a proven story formula with a relatable protagonist from an aspirational company, strong tension depicting pre-product challenges, and a resolution showing how the product replaced the old workflow. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm prescribes that the only suitable reference for an early majority customer is another early majority member, so you should profile non-innovator customers. Customer interviews should spend most time on tension and resolution, using questions about how they started using the product, what tools they used before, and what jobs the product solves, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Well-crafted case studies can be repurposed across sales, demand generation, events, and communications, and the process deepens the marketer’s empathy for customers.
Designing our new blog - The Intercom Blog
Intercom invested in its blog by hiring a full-time editor and increasing publishing frequency, but recognized risks such as content calendars forcing lower standards and production focus undermining the insights needed for useful posts. The blog had amassed nearly 200 articles, yet the previous design only allowed reverse chronological browsing, making it hard to find related content. The redesign introduces category pages for six main topics—Business, Customer Success, Design, Engineering, Product Strategy, and Intercom Updates—now in the primary navigation, along with tags for deeper topics like jobs-to-be-done. A search tool was finally added to help readers find specific content, and the design is fully responsive for mobile devices. The redesign, credited to Frantisek Kusovsky with input from Jeff Kriege and implemented by David Barrett and Daniel Husar, aims to improve content discoverability without sacrificing the quality insights that come from doing the work.
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