How to Mine Golden Content Ideas From Product Feedback

If you publish blog content to a point, you’ll sometimes hit the wall when looking for new ideas.

You’ve created over 100 blog posts about every topic imaginable in your industry. But your SaaS blog is like an aircraft engine that needs more and more fuel.

You have to think of more questions that your blog can answer. Then, you have to create product-led content that moves visitors closer to a purchase.

Most times, your creativity will bail you out of this problem.

But other times, you need a little bit of help to get your content ideas flowing.

That’s where product feedback comes in.

Naturally, most SaaS companies use product feedback to improve the product and refine onboarding flows.

This makes sense, but you can squeeze more from product feedback by using it to fuel your content efforts.

This guide will explain some ways of collecting product feedback and how to get content ideas that map better to your customer journey.

I’ve also spoken with SaaS founders and marketers who shared how they uncover content ideas from product feedback.

Let’s get into the details.

8 methods to collect product feedback

Here are 8 common methods SaaS companies use to collect product feedback:

In-app surveys 

You can set surveys to trigger based on time or user behavior. For example, a survey can trigger after a user has used a specific feature. 

Surveys help product teams track customer satisfaction, product usage, and pain points.

Idea submission form 

This is usually one of the options in the in-app button. With this, users can submit product ideas.

Path analysis 

This helps you analyze different segments of users. For example, you can analyze the paths of loyal customers or customers who churn early. 

This provides insights on popular features and tasks.

Session replays 

Session replays show how users navigate your product. This also shows tasks or features that cause problems for the user. 

Session replays are useful since many users don’t complain or know how to explain their problem.

Customer support tickets 

These are gold mines for content ideas because most users only contact customer support when they absolutely need to. 

Through tickets, you can find common customer issues that the right content can prevent. And with that, you can reduce the number of tickets.

Customer reviews 

In reviews, customers often explain how they get value from your product and problems they face. 

One, reviews reveal product use cases that can be promoted to prospects. Two, you can see tasks or features that require more user education.

Social listening 

People say many things about your product, competitors, and industry on social media. 

Through listening, you can uncover friction points in your product, a competitor’s weakness to exploit, and industry trends to create content around.

Customer interview 

This involves setting up calls with customers to understand what they find easy and difficult when using your product. 

During these interviews, you’ll uncover problems that better customer education can solve. 

This is not an exhaustive list, but it shows you have many options to collect customer feedback.

The next step is uncovering content ideas from feedback.

How to uncover great content ideas from product feedback

1. Use the right product feedback method

Most SaaS companies use multiple product feedback methods to collect information from users.

The problem here is that some feedback methods won’t work for you.

This can be because users rarely use them or the feedback from them is often useless.

The right feedback methods solve this problem with better insights and content ideas.

Jayson DeMers, founder of EmailAnalytics, says his companies rely on multiple feedback methods to find content ideas.

These include in-app surveys, customer support tickets, user interviews, and social media monitoring.

He says about customer support tickets:

“We meticulously analyze support tickets to identify recurring issues, pain points, and feature requests. This provides a goldmine of content ideas focused on solving specific user problems and improving usability. The patterns we see in support tickets often become our highest-performing help articles and blog posts.”

Here’s a knowledge base article EmailAnalytics published as a result of customer feedback:

But what are the best feedback methods for your SaaS company?

That depends on your business and users. In most cases, the best methods are the ones that deliver the best insights.

To uncover these methods, you’ll have to experiment with a few methods and see the results you get.

For example, you can track how many people respond to a feedback method and the quality of feedback. You can also target a user segment with a feedback method.

Another experiment is to target users at specific stages of the customer journey.

All these help you discover the best feedback methods.

2. Filter noise from useful feedback

If you have thousands of users, you’ll likely have that user who can complain about even the color of the sky.

Other times, you get specific feedback about a trivial issue just once from one user. 

These cases require help from customer support, not content pieces that nobody else needs.

Before creating content about feedback, you want to be sure it affects many users and can affect more.

When I asked Borets Stamenov, CEO of SeekFast, about the biggest problems he faces when turning feedback into content ideas, he said:

“The biggest challenge is separating unique, strategic questions from noise or edge cases. I use a simple upvote system with the support team: if a question comes up three or more times, it goes into the content pipeline. That way, I focus on writing guides that solve real problems and actually cut down on future tickets.”

When the company got many questions about how to search across multiple Excel spreadsheets, he created a blog post to answer them.

The post includes tools (including SeekFast) that help users find text in Excel files and the processes.

You can set up a system that considers feedback after a particular frequency. This system will also work to collect feedback from product, customer support, sales, and marketing teams in one place.

But since you’re looking for content ideas, have a marketing team member or software screen all the feedback to find the best content ideas.

For example, consider creating a knowledge base article or blog post about an issue once 3 customers have complained about it.

For Nicolas, founder of Introwarm, AI analysis helps to uncover feedback insights.

“We pipe all user conversations, support tickets, and beta feedback through a simple AI analysis that categorizes not just what users say, but the emotions and underlying needs behind their words.”

While some of these issues won’t result in a content piece, you’ll find many useful ideas.

Useful feedback should help you create content that can educate many customers and prospects. 

3. Ask users investigative questions

Asking for feedback is an investigation to uncover insights to improve your product and help users navigate it better. 

But in this case, you’re also looking for education opportunities to help customers get more value from your product.

Asking the best questions will deliver the best insights for content opportunities.

So, you’ll have to do some reverse-engineering with your questions.

What insights are you looking for?

These can be:

• Understanding creative product use cases that you’re unaware of
• How customers navigate specific features
• Uncovering product friction points

Once you determine the insights you’re looking for, draft questions that will get you to those insights.

For example, if you want to uncover product friction points, you can send a customer effort score (CES) survey to a user after performing a task.

But beyond picking a score, ask an additional question that prompts them to explain their reasoning.

This is what Wise does whenever you perform a transaction:

Doing this helps the brand quickly uncover problems users face while making payments.

When drafting questions, make them open-ended to get the best insights possible.

For example, Stella Inabo, a content marketer at Float, stresses how important this is. As part of her job, she runs customer interviews to gain insights for case studies and other content pieces.

She says:

“The quality of responses you get depends on the questions that you’re asking. You need to be curious. You need to probe deeper to get the right insights.”

Apart from that, you can also note the terms they use and repeat them in your own content pieces.

Doing this helps you develop rapport quickly with your readers.

Asking the best questions is key to getting the best content ideas.

4. Ask questions at the right time

Imagine you make a payment on a platform and the company asks you to rate your experience 4 days later.

In 4 days, you’ve probably gone on a mini-vacation and returned. 

How can you remember the payment experience?

Or you sign up for a platform and see a net promoter score (NPS) survey 3 days later.

How can you determine if you’ll recommend the product when you’re still finding your way through it?

Even if you ask the right questions, ask at the right time.

And the right time is when the user can answer most accurately.

For example, if you want feedback about a task, ask the user when they’ve just completed it. At this point, the experience is still fresh in their brain.

You can automate the feedback with some tools. Once the user performs a specified action in your product, the feedback collection mechanism will be triggered.

With that, you’ll get more accurate insights.

5. Analyze passive feedback

Passive feedback is feedback you get from users without asking. Some people call it unsolicited feedback.

Passive feedback can come from feedback methods, such as:

• Social media mentions
• Third-party review sites
• In-app feedback widget
• Session replays
• Path analysis
• Support tickets

Let’s face it, most of your users want to hack every minute of the day to make it count. And filling a survey after performing a task may be the least of their priorities. 

Even if you get some users to fill a survey, they won’t do it all the time.

In some cases, users can tell you a feature is hard to use, but can’t tell you why.

That’s why you have to study how they navigate your product and find unsolicited complaints.

To analyze passive feedback, you’ll need a few tools, including:

• Userpilot: To collect passive feedback in-app through widgets.
• Mixpanel: To see how users navigate your product.
• Sprout Social: To track social media mentions.

Passive feedback is vital because it complements the insights you get from active feedback.

6. Collaborate with other departments

In every SaaS company, product feedback comes in through product, customer support, sales, and marketing departments.

So, marketing can easily miss out on information available to other departments.

A collaboration system removes silos to make feedback available to all departments.

When you access feedback from other departments, you’ll have more insights to create useful content.

To improve collaboration, discuss with other departments about a central place to have all product feedback.

Tools like Productboard and Savio can help you centralize and analyze user feedback.

This makes product feedback useful to multiple departments at the same time.

Conclusion

SaaS product feedback delivers insights about pressing issues that users face. These are issues that prospects will also likely face.

When you create content from these insights, you’ll deliver practical information that helps customers use your product better.

And if your content helps users get more value, you’ll keep more users.

If you need a writer to turn your feedback into practical content for your audience, reach out to me about your specific needs.

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