Want To Retain More Customers? Make This Marketing Shift.

I write a lot of bottom-of-funnel content for B2B software products, so I spend a lot of time on Reddit, G2, Capterra and similar platforms where customers are honest about what they love about a product, what frustrates them and why they stopped using it.

Beyond the usual suspects — budget limitations, price hikes, and missing features — another issue keeps surfacing across hundreds of reviews in multiple product categories. Customers struggle to get value from the product, and insufficient documentation, weak onboarding and limited feature visibility all contribute to that.

Findings from Churnkey’s 2025 State of Retention report, which analyzed over a thousand companies, point to the same issue. Alongside budget limitations and infrequent usage, unmet expectations also drive cancellations, including cases where users underutilize features because onboarding is weak or those features aren’t easy to discover. As a result, some users never fully understand how to apply the product to their needs or where to go for help when they get stuck.

Fixing these issues isn’t a job for product, engineering and customer success alone. These teams can fix bugs, answer tickets and reduce the gap between what a product can do and what customers know how to do with it, but they usually can’t close that gap alone at scale.

That’s why marketing teams need to think beyond the funnel. Working with product and customer success, they can create content that helps users discover features, understand how to use them and get value from the product before frustration turns into churn.

Here’s how marketing teams can help close that gap.

1. Find recurring insights on what delights or frustrates customers

It’s hard to create content that helps users get value from your product if you don’t understand how they’re experiencing it and what’s getting in their way.

Start with what your team already has.

• Support tickets (from customer success): These show you where users get stuck and what they can’t solve on their own, but content can help address. Pull data from the past 90 days and look for patterns. If the same issue keeps generating tickets, that’s a content gap. Building self-service help articles around their most common support questions helped Senja — a platform for managing and sharing customer testimonials — cut ticket volume by 50%.

• Product usage data (from product or growth): This shows which features users aren’t adopting and where engagement drops off. Low adoption of a feature users are paying for is a clear signal. Cross-reference it with support tickets or session recordings to understand why, then build content that addresses that specific barrier.

• Onboarding drop-off data (from product or growth): Track your onboarding flow from signup to first value and look at where users abandon. Attention Insight, an AI-driven pre-launch analytics software, found that only 47% of trial users were completing their core activation step. So, they built interactive walkthroughs and onboarding flows at that exact friction point and reached 69% activation within six months.

• Cancellation surveys and NPS responses (from customer success): These tell you what finally pushed someone to downgrade or leave. Focus on the written responses, not the scores. If multiple users mention struggling with the same feature or workflow, create a guide that walks through it clearly. That way, the next customer with the same problem finds a solution instead of a reason to cancel.

• Customer Success Manager (CSM) interviews: CSMs see patterns that don’t show up in tickets. If they keep repeating the same explanation on onboarding calls, turn that explanation into a published guide or video so users can find it on their own. Also, ask about your strongest accounts. Find out which features they rely on most and how they describe the value. Turn those into use-case guides that show newer users how to get the same results.

Then look outside your own walls.

Reviews on G2, Capterra and Reddit show you what users love and what confuses them. Read your competitors’ reviews too. The frustrations their users share often reveal gaps you can fill with better content around features you already have.

2. Prioritize what to create first

If you end up with a long list of possible content ideas, use AI tools like Claude to analyze support tickets, survey responses and reviews in bulk.

Upload or paste in the raw data and ask it to identify recurring themes and patterns across sources. Then weigh how often each issue shows up, how many customers it affects and whether content can realistically solve it or whether it points to a product change instead.

Prioritize issues that are:

• Frequent

• Tied to activation, adoption or retention

• Fixable with education, not a product rebuild

• Connected to high-value features or core use cases

Once you know what to focus on, let the problem tell you what to create:

• Users can’t complete a workflow? Create a step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots or a short video.

• Users don’t know a feature exists? Write a use-case guide that shows how it solves a problem they care about.

• Users keep filing tickets for the same question? Turn the answer into a help article and make it easy to find.

• Onboarding drops off at a specific step? Build a guided tutorial at that exact friction point.

3. Surface the content where users actually need it

If your content sits in a help center nobody visits, it won’t make a difference. The goal is to get the right content in front of users at the moment they need it.

Senja did this by embedding their help center directly inside the app, so users could find answers without leaving the product. Here are more ways to do it:

• Embed walkthroughs directly into the product at the steps where users drop off.

• Use tooltips to highlight features that usage data shows are being overlooked.

• Send targeted emails when product data shows a user hasn’t adopted a key feature after a set number of days.

• Trigger help content based on behavior. If a user is hovering on the same screen or repeating the same action without progress, that’s a signal they need guidance.

Some companies are going further with AI tools that detect frustration in real time — rage-clicking, repeated failed actions, prolonged inactivity — and automatically surface relevant content without the user having to search for it.

4. Track what’s working and keep improving

Once your content is live, measure its impact.

Did support ticket volume drop for the issues you addressed? Did onboarding completion improve where you added walkthroughs? Did feature adoption increase after you published a use-case guide? Over time, look at the bigger picture too. Are churn reasons shifting in your cancellation surveys? Are customers reaching first value faster? Is your content influencing renewals or expansion conversations?

These signals tell you if your content is closing the gap. If the numbers don’t move, find out why and adjust. Build this process into your team’s regular workflow, so the next customer who gets stuck finds guidance instead of another reason to churn.

Post-purchase content won’t fix pricing problems, broken product experiences or missing core functionality, but it can reduce churn caused by confusion, slow activation, weak feature discovery and poor self-service support.

I write a lot of bottom-of-funnel content for B2B software products, so I spend a lot of time on Reddit, G2, Capterra and similar platforms where customers are honest about what they love about a product, what frustrates them and why they stopped using it.

Beyond the usual suspects — budget limitations, price hikes, and missing features — another issue keeps surfacing across hundreds of reviews in multiple product categories. Customers struggle to get value from the product, and insufficient documentation, weak onboarding and limited feature visibility all contribute to that.

Findings from Churnkey’s 2025 State of Retention report, which analyzed over a thousand companies, point to the same issue. Alongside budget limitations and infrequent usage, unmet expectations also drive cancellations, including cases where users underutilize features because onboarding is weak or those features aren’t easy to discover. As a result, some users never fully understand how to apply the product to their needs or where to go for help when they get stuck.