Last Updated on April 1, 2025 by Owen McGab Enaohwo
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.4 percent of businesses fail in their first year, and 65.3 percent fail within 10 years. A lack of clearly defined procedures and processes is one of the reasons startups fail.
Employees may underperform when they aren’t guided on what to do. As a business leader, it’s your responsibility to empower them with accurate information, and you can do that with a how-to guide. Leverage digital software like SweetProcess to create and distribute actionable how-to guides to your team. Sign up for a 14-day free trial without a credit card to check it out.
How-to Guide – Table of Contents
Why Is It Important to Create a How-To Guide For Your Business?
How To Create an Effective How-To Guide in 11 Steps [+Actionable Tips From Experts]
How To Create and Manage Your How-To Guides on SweetProcess
How-To Guide Examples for Different Use Cases
4 Common Mistakes You Can Make With Your How-To Guides
Customizable How-To Guide Template for Your Business
Create and Manage How-To Guides Seamlessly Using SweetProcess
What Is a How-To Guide?
We come across unfamiliar tasks daily. Getting direction on performing is always a delight compared to having no clue what to do. The former usually presents better results.
The workplace is no exception. Employees are more productive when guided on performing tasks, especially the unfamiliar ones. The stakes are even higher in formal or business settings because the outcomes of the tasks in question impact multiple people and entities. Constant errors from incompetence could cause irreparable damage to organizations.
An ineffective how-to guide is equivalent to a poorly drawn map incapable of directing users to their destinations.
Work is either left unfinished or poorly completed. How-to guides in businesses are in various forms; they could be processes, procedures, user manuals, etc. The commonality is that they provide step-by-step instructions on how to execute tasks.
Organizations miss the mark when they make how-to guides grandiose. This approach puts undue pressure on the employees using them. The more “sophisticated” a how-to guide is, the more difficult it is to understand. Using them to provide simple instructions for performing routine tasks increases comprehension and builds employees’ confidence.
How-to guides are important to your current and potential customers as well as your employees. Empowering prospective and existing customers with the information they need to make buying decisions and resolve minor challenges they encounter with your offerings makes their experience seamless.
You can use SweetProcess to create a help section for site visitors interested in your products and/or services. Sign up for its 14-day free trial to try all the features at no expense.
Why Is It Important to Create a How-To Guide For Your Business?
A McKinsey report found that employees spend at least 1.8 hours daily looking for relevant information to perform unfamiliar tasks. An effective how-to, among other benefits, helps put this time to better use.
1. Supports and Empowers Customers
Customer-centric businesses have one more avenue to prioritize their customers’ needs with how-to guides. As technology advances, customers are happy to take advantage of the numerous tools available for self-service. Instead of contacting help desk personnel for every inquiry or service, they are eager to help themselves as long as they can get some direction. How-to guides provide customers with the relevant information to get certain things done independently. This gives them some agency in the interaction and increases their independence.
GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani hinted at this when he talked about meeting customers at their different points of need—empowering independent customers who want to do things themselves with the information they need and providing maximum support to those who need it.
2. Saves Your Support Team Time
Would you rather wait in the queue for a long time or be attended to quickly? Support teams often have many customers to attend to and are under pressure to get through to everyone quickly. This could affect the quality of support they offer, leaving potential customers with queries or issues that aren’t fully resolved.
How-to guides speed up the support process, as staff can refer customers with minor issues to instructions they can use to resolve them. This enables them to move on to the customer with more serious concerns.
3. Helps You Answer FAQs Fast
Your business has questions to which your potential and current customers may need answers. Such questions are usually about the core elements of your business.
How-to guides enable you to be proactive in providing answers to those questions even before the questions are asked. Publishing the guides in areas visible to visitors to your websites speeds up the buying process because people who want to patronize you will get the answers they need to make a buying decision.
4. Onboard and Train New Employees Seamlessly
The onboarding process for new employees empowers them with the information they need to thrive. Such information doesn’t necessarily have to be communicated in person, especially in a busy work environment.
How-to guides enhance onboarding and training as new employees can learn independently and remotely. They also facilitate continuous training, as employees can always refer to the information for guidance.
5. Offers a Competitive Edge
With many options, customers are more willing to opt for helpful businesses before making direct contact. Creating valuable how-to guides shows Potential customers that you have their best interests at heart, thereby winning their trust. This would place you at the top of their list among your competitors.
6. Fosters Understanding and Communication
There’s a new trend of how-to guides that business executives have adopted to streamline working with their employees and stakeholders. Known as a “How To Work With Me” guide, it outlines a person’s work ethic, detailing how they perceive and approach work.
Corporate officer and advisor at Stripe, Claire Hughes Johnson, revealed that the document helped her settle into her role when she joined the company, as the team immediately understood her work ethic. Seeing its effectiveness, her colleagues soon started creating their own “How To Work With Me” guides.
How To Create an Effective How-To Guide in 11 Steps [+Actionable Tips From Experts]
An average business has tons of documentation. More often than not, they don’t use all of them. Here’s how to create a how-to guide that will add value to your business.
1. Identify Key Team Knowledge Gap(s)
It’s redundant to create how-to guides on processes or procedures that people are performing well. Adopt a problem-solving approach by identifying knowledge gaps among your employees and customers.
The best way to do this is to closely observe your operations and speak to your employees about their struggles. For customers, put yourself in their shoes to identify the knowledge gaps from their perspective. You can also use a questionnaire to get their feedback.
2. Know Your Target Audience
Who are you creating the how-to guides for? People understand and interpret messages differently according to their demographics and psychographics. Consider their ages, occupations, skills, etc., to craft your interactive guide comprehensively for them. Use the correct language and format to help draw them in.
3. Research Your Topic
You should write a how-to guide on familiar subjects. Surface-level knowledge may not be sufficient if you want your guide to be detailed and helpful.
Business process consultant and co-founder of the Business Success Consulting Group Adi Klevit advises business leaders against documenting procedures on tasks for which they lack technical know-how because “it takes know-how and ability to create clear instructions and easy-to-follow procedures.”
Even when you know the procedure, research it for more insights. As you do this, you may learn new information that is key to completing the process. Take a cue from your competitors to make your guide even better. It also helps to research how to create effective how-to guides by reading content like this one.
4. Identify Processes
All the information you gather from research should be organized to help employees and customers. Still, you must first identify the processes to channel the information, lest it’s all over the place. Speak to the employees who perform the processes first and incorporate their feedback on improving them in your guide.
5. Decide on Your Title
Choosing a title for your how-to guide might seem easy, but it requires some thought to get it right. The title needs to summarize the main idea of the guide and include the words “how to.” Users should know what the document is about by its title. Keep it simple by adding the activity after the “How to.” For example, “How To Create a User Account.”
6. Write Your How-To Guide
A how-to guide is not an essay. Create an outline that captures the various sections of the process.
Sections of a standard how-to guide include:
- Introduction
- Goal
- Step-by-step instructions
- Resources
- Glossary
- Frequently asked questions
Founder & CEO of Culture Amp Didier Elzinga advises that people want to get the information they need quickly.
You lose their interest when you keep them waiting with fluff. Breaking your guide into sections helps users to assimilate information better. They can quickly skim through it and find the specific information they need, especially in urgent situations.
7. Define Actionable Steps
Actionable steps are the crux of a how-to guide—cover these in the step-by-step section of your guide. Users want to know the specific sequence of steps to take. Each sentence must show the following steps, creating a gap if removed. Use simple language and begin each line with a verb.
This is not the place to overexplain things—be concise. If you need to explain or contextualize actions, do that in a separate section, such as Glossary, Goal, and Resources.
For example, if you are creating a guide on How To Use Google Ads, don’t explain technical jargon like cost per click (CPC) in the step-by-step written instructions section but in the glossary section.
8. Add Images and Examples
Adding images to your steps makes them clearer, as users can see them in action. Including a screenshot of the Google Ads interface in a how-to guide for creating Google ads familiarizes users with the process. Stating a guide example of the scenario further simplifies the process for the user.
9. Include Tips and Resources
Including tips and resources in your how-to guides facilitates favorable results. In creating a Google ad, advising users to spread their budget over some time instead of using it all up in a day or two could help them achieve better advertising results.
The resources section provides more information and tools for users’ benefit. Some good examples are cheat sheets and checklist templates.
10. Review and Publish Your How-To Guide
Confirm that your how-to guide meets its purpose by double-checking the details and reading it out loud for errors. Seek a fresh perspective by sharing it with someone unfamiliar with the process and measure how helpful it is to them.
Digital Operations Consultant Brandon Turner advises that you publish your guide in a central and secure system accessible to employees so they can quickly retrieve the information when needed.
11. Distribute Your How-To Guide
Some how-to guides lay in computer folders unused because employees don’t know that they are there. Inform people about the guide through communication channels like emails and collaborative tools.
You can automate this process using an effective workflow tool that notifies users of newly published documents. Ask for feedback if you want to improve the document for higher efficiency.
How To Create and Manage Your How-To Guides on SweetProcess
Effective how-to guides are actionable, comprehensive, and accessible. However, it takes the right tool to get them to that point.
SweetProcess, a workflow management tool, helps create, store, and distribute how-to documents among employees and customers.
A Salesforce report found that over 90 percent of workers revealed that automating tasks with digital tools boosted their productivity. Rest assured, you will achieve the same or even better results using SweetProcess.
Document Your Company’s Procedures
Organizations can easily fall into the loophole of documenting their business procedures with basic tools like Word documents and Dropbox. Still, they soon realize that such tools are insufficient for streamlining operations.
This was the case with MiPA, a virtual assistant company.
According to the founder, Emma Mills, the documentation rigidity of such systems made it difficult to offer personalized services to their customers. However, all that changed with SweetProcess due to its flexibility, allowing them to provide clients with custom services.
You can capture the step-by-step instructions for tasks with SweetProcess templates and other design elements. The numerous templates are time-saving; you can customize them to your taste and customer needs. The seamless design interface allows first-time users to create how-to procedures easily.
Do you not feel up to writing the content of your procedures? You can use SweetAI to create the procedures automatically. You can also add images, videos, charts, etc., to make them more actionable:
How To Document a Procedure Manually in SweetProcess
Click “Procedures” and “Create Procedure.”
Enter the procedure title and click “Continue.”
Click the pencil icon beside the title.
Enter the procedure details and click “Finished Editing.”
How To Document a Procedure in SweetProcess Automatically With SweetAI
Click “Procedures” and “Create Procedure.”
Enter the procedure title and click “Write with SweetAI.”
Click the pencil icon for editing.
Click “Approve” to publish and distribute the guide.
Turn Existing Procedures Into Internal and External Knowledge Bases
Employee efficiency boils down to the information at their disposal. How much do they know about the job?
As Mark O’Dell, operations director at TechQuarters, puts it, managing information when you have a few employees in your organization is easier.
The big challenge begins when scaling. You no longer have the leeway to speak to all your team members all the time because they are under the same roof as you, and things start to fall apart because everyone isn’t on the same page.
Creating an internal knowledge base in SweetProcess helped O’Dell and his team scale faster, as the entire team had access to information developing on the go. Turn your procedures into an internal knowledge base in SweetProcess to remove accessibility barriers. Authorized team members can retrieve the documents remotely and whenever.
SweetProcess offers additional access control with the internal knowledge base. You can limit access to certain employees, such as members of a particular team or level within your organization.
How To Create an Internal Knowledge Base in SweetProcess
Click “More” and “Knowledge Bases.”
Click “Create Knowledge Base.”
Enter the title of the knowledge base and click “Continue.”
Click the pencil icon next to the title.
Click the column below “Control Access” and select “Private Knowledge Base, only logged-in team members may view (if they have the necessary permissions).”
Enter the page URL to redirect users when clicking the knowledge base title.
How To Create an External Knowledge Base in SweetProcess
How-to guides are sometimes for customers, clients, and the public. Here’s how to turn an existing procedure into an external knowledge base for their use.
Click “More” and “Knowledge Bases.”
Click “Create Knowledge Base.”
Enter your knowledge base title and click “Continue.”
Click the pencil icon beside the title.
Click the column below “Control Access” and select “Public Knowledge Base. Any member of the public can view without logging in.”
Enter the page URL to redirect customers who click the knowledge base title.
You can also redirect users to a custom domain by entering the URL.
Assign Procedures as Tasks to Employees
SweetProcess supports employees in working independently as much as collaboratively. Selecting your preferences from a drop-down menu allows you to assign how-to guides as procedures to groups and specific individuals based on project needs.
Navigate to the document and click “Actions.”
Select the desired action from the drop-down menu. For instance, click “Assign as Task.”
Click “Assign.”
Click “Teammates assigned their own task” for individual tasks and click “Teammates assigned together” for group tasks.
Select the teammate.
Fill in the task name, due date, time, and frequency, and click “Assign Task.”
Implementing software for writing how-to guides is one end of the stick. Getting complex software is counterproductive. “The learning curve on SweetProcess is the number of hours or days. It’s not several weeks, which is rare for a software implementation,” says Ted Fogliani, CEO of ShipCalm, a logistics company.
He and his team use SweetProcess to improve their operations and win customers’ trust by giving them access to the organization’s quality assurance procedures in SweetProcess.
How-To Guide Examples for Different Use Cases
While all how-to guides have a commonality of giving instructions on performing tasks, there are different guidelines for achieving maximum results in different industries, especially because the modes of operations differ.
1. The Standard How-To Guide
This is the most common type of how-to guide. Suitable across various niches, it’s used to answer questions quickly without providing much detail. Key features of a standard how-to guide include its goals, steps, and images or screenshots.
Image: GoDaddy
GoDaddy’s guide on creating an email signature is a good example because it’s succinct and actionable. It briefly states the goals of an email signature and shows the reader how to create one, including screenshots.
2. The Recipe How-To Guide
A recipe how-to guide is mainly used to showcase the steps and requirements for preparing meals and other edibles. It focuses on a specific meal, detailing the time needed to prepare it, the ingredients, skills required, and any additional resources required to successfully prepare it. It usually has an informal and relaxed tone.
Image: Love and Lemons
Love and Lemons’ fried rice recipe combines actionable steps with images to show the user what to do and what the process looks like. It mentions the ingredients needed and tells the reader how to mix them. There are also tips on how they can get the best results.
3. The B2B How-To Guide
A B2B how-to guide is created by a business for other businesses, showcasing a particular process. Since B2B how-to guides are designed for the workplace, they have a formal and direct tone.
The language may include technical jargon in the field, which the users are expected to understand. Nonetheless, all jargon should be explained in the glossary section. Images, templates, and examples are essential in this guide as they make the instructions more actionable.
Image: Hubspot
Hubspot’s guide on creating automated emails is a good example because it targets other businesses. A first-time user can implement a specific task by following its instructions.
The points are actionable, along with screenshots showing the reader what the interface looks like.
It also offers tips on best practices and links to related content for further information.
4. The B2C How-To Guide
A B2C how-to guide is created by businesses for consumers. It’s important that the guide catches the users’ attention and engages them to the end.
To do this, you need to use conversational language. Consumers don’t usually have technical knowledge of the products or services they are reading up on, so using jargon in this guide is unhelpful. Keep it simple.
Don’t make the guide clunky by explaining every detail. Include links that redirect users to additional information.
Image: Asana
Asana’s guide on setting up a user profile shows the reader how to set up their profile easily. It begins with a video guide and product demos that capture the process from start to finish. It then takes the reader through each section of the profile setup process, using actional steps and screenshots. It also includes tips and additional resources for more guidance.
5. The Product-Related How-To Guide
A product-related how-to guide’s job is to show users how to use a product quickly and easily. The faster you get to it, the better. Readers appreciate your not just telling but also showing them how to use the product. Images and screenshots are very useful here. Quicken the pace without leaving out key information.
Image: Amazon
Amazon’s guide on setting up Echo offers practical help on how to set up the device quickly. It combines texts, videos, images, and infographics that show the reader what to do and how to do it. It also provides setup tips and answers frequently asked questions (FAQs).
6. The Lifestyle How-To Guide
The lifestyle how-to guide outlines tips for navigating life. It’s informal, conversational, and personalized to a single reader. Such guides usually touch on various points, so it’s best to outline the items in a numbered list. Readers can also read the listed items however they choose.
Image: Go Skydiving
Go Skydiving’s guide for first-time skydivers educates the reader on how to prepare for skydiving and how to behave while up in the sky. It discusses skydiving rules and regulations as well as safety tips.
There’s also an explanation of technical writing terms for the reader’s understanding.
The most common how-to guides among businesses are the B2B, the B2C, and the product-related how-to guides. However, you may need others on some occasions. Software like SweetProcess allows you to create anything you need, which helps save resources. Sign up for a 14-day free trial without a credit card and check it out yourself.
4 Common Mistakes You Can Make With Your How-To Guides
Putting so much effort into creating a how-to guide and seeing it not meeting expectations can be frustrating. Recognizing possible pitfalls from the onset helps to minimize disappointments to the barest minimum.
1. Not Publishing Your Guide
Visibility is crucial in offering people the help you intend to provide with your how-to guide. It boils down to accessibility. Where will the information be stored, and how can the right people find it?
For guides meant for employees, storing the information in a centralized system, such as an internal knowledge base eases accessibility. Using a system like SweetProcess, for example, team members receive a notification when you publish the guide, and they can access it remotely. This is much better than saving it on a hard drive.
2. Not Writing for the Audience
People might be interested in the same information, but the degree of information they need depends on their current knowledge levels. Engaging with an intermediate user at a beginner’s level is a misalignment.
Using suitable language and expertise meets them at their point of need, making the guide more helpful. This is why engaging with the people you are creating your guide for before going ahead with it to understand their needs is crucial.
3. Not Knowing How To Do the Task
You’ll be making a big mistake creating a how-to guide on a subject you lack expertise on. Anyone who creates such a document takes the role of a teacher, imparting the knowledge in others. Expertise is shown in the minutest detail while teaching. Users can detect your lack of expertise from using the documents because it will fall short in its purpose.
4. Insufficient Use of Visuals
Reading a pile of texts is exhausting. Anyone reading a how-to guide isn’t confident about performing the task. Having visuals depicting the tasks in action is a better confidence booster than pages of text. Presenting information in multimedia formats makes learning interesting and helps prevent information overload. Leverage screenshots, videos, infographics, etc., to make the guide more comprehensive.
All these visual elements are available in SweetProcess, allowing you to create guides that employees find engaging. Check out how it works with its 14-day free trial. No credit card is required.
Customizable How-To Guide Template for Your Business
If you need inspiration for creating a how-to guide, here’s a template to take a cue from:
Title
- Create a suitable title for the guide, beginning with the words “How To.”
Overview
- Summarize the guide, stating the information the reader will get and how that information will enhance the process.
- Add videos, images, or screenshots to further explain your point.
Materials Needed
- List the materials the reader needs to perform the task in bullet points and what they are used for.
Step-by-Step Instructions
- Show the reader how to perform the task. Begin each sentence with a verb.
- Write this section in a numbered list for clarity and easy reading.
- Be mindful of fluff.
- Remove any part that doesn’t move the guide forward.
Tips
- Add additional information for context in this section.
- Outline information to enhance the user’s understanding of the steps highlighted in the previous section.
Glossary
- Explain jargon and unfamiliar words for the reader’s understanding.
- Troubleshooting/FAQs
- List and answer questions the reader may have in mind.
- Identify possible issues the user may encounter with the task and discuss how to resolve them.
Additional Resources
- State any additional resources that will help the reader complete the task. This may include links to related how-to guides, applications, tools, etc.
- Formatting your guide effectively enhances user experience. You can only achieve this with the right content editing tools, such as the ones in SweetProcess.
Create and Manage How-To Guides Seamlessly Using SweetProcess
Employee performance reflects on your business, either positively or negatively. The outcome is largely in your hands. Failure to support employees with the right resources is a leading cause of business failure. If you empower them with the resources to be efficient, they have no excuse to do otherwise. The decision to implement effective software for creating how-to guides is yours.
However, the consequence of that decision will impact everyone, including your employees and customers. Signing up for a 14-day free trial of SweetProcess is in everyone’s best interest.
