By Akshita . Posted on September 16, 2022When you develop any product, the primary motivation is to solve an audience’s pain point. But how do you convince your audience about the same, and educate them on your SaaS product’s usefulness? While content marketing helps in establishing your brand authority, you need product-led content marketing to convert the audiences and move them further down the sales cycle. In product-led content, your product is placed at the front and center.
“Product-led companies […] give the buyer the “keys” to their product” – Wes Bush
If you are having trouble intertwining your SaaS product into your content, then this article is for you. In the following sections, we explain how user insights and team collaboration help drive product-led growth through content, for your business success. Let’s dive into it.
Product-Led Content: Explained
To explain it in simplest terms, product-led content is content in which the product is woven into the narrative to solve a problem, illustrate a pertinent point or help the audience accomplish a goal. The focus of product-led content is always on the needs of the customer. Once you create the content around an audience pain point, the product is then baked into this narrative in the form of a solution. The main goal of product-led content is to generate qualified traffic, i.e., people who already have an interest in the kind of product you’re offering.
So, you might be wondering what kind of content assets can be used for the product-led content marketing strategy. According to data obtained from CMI + Marketing Profs research, the content types that’ll produce the best results for product-led content marketing are –
- Long articles/posts – 3,000 words or more (32%)
- In-person events (37%)
- Videos (38%)
- Case studies (39%)
- White papers/e-books (47%)
- Short articles/blog posts (48%)
- Webinars/virtual events/online courses (58%)
What are the benefits of creating product-led content?
There are various ways in which product-led content can help your business –
1. Customer acquisition
The primary goal of product-led content marketing is boosting conversions. It essentially allows you to rethink the role of top and middle-of-the-funnel content in acquiring customers. It makes it easier to target them earlier in their customer journey. So yes, product-led content supports customer acquisition. With product-led content marketing, you can position your SaaS product as a standard solution for the audience from the very beginning.
2. Customer retention
So, another thing you need to give some thought to is customer retention. The truth is that your customers don’t always know how to use your product and its features to their fullest potential. With product-led content like case studies, video tutorials, webinars, and more, you can educate your customers on the various features of your SaaS product and new ways of using it. By providing more value to the customers, you’ll be able to retain them in the long run.
3. Word-of-mouth marketing
The most important tool in your marketing arsenal is your product. Through product-led content, you introduce your audience to your product and encourage them to try it. The happier your users are, the more likely they are to promote your product.
How to create product-led content?
If you are planning to leverage product-led content marketing, it’s important to note that it will be a little different from traditional strategies for content marketing. You need to create the content in such a way that it’ll convince your audience that it’s the right solution for them. So, here is how to create effective product-led content –
1. Understand your product
The first thing you need to do is develop a good understanding of your product. It’s possible that your product has multiple capabilities and use cases, some of which you still aren’t familiar with. Having numerous capabilities would also mean that you can target different audience segments who might have different needs. In this step, you should be ensuring that your product team and product manager provide the necessary input to the marketing team. Once they have a clear understanding of the product, they’ll be in a better position to create effective product-led content.
2. Examine user activity and collect insights
The content you create should allow you to have an open discussion with your audience about their pain points, their user experience, and the ways it can be improved. For this, you need to have relevant user insights.
- Examine when and where your users are using your products.
- Pick on the product trends that resonate the most with your audience.
- Observe how your users are engaging with your existing content.
With these insights and more, you’ll be able to create content that not only excites the existing users but also helps you reach new potential targets.
3. Identify the common problems of users
In this step, you’ll be finding out the common problems and major pain points of your target users. The role of your sales and customer success teams can be quite crucial here, as they can provide you with a wealth of insights about your existing and potential customers. The marketing team might already be conducting their own search for relevant keywords and SERP analysis. All that needs to be done is to change the focus of the research to the common user frustrations.
Identifying common user problems will allow you to see where to start with your content, and how you can best pitch your product as a solution. If yours is an established business, you can also look through your existing content to see which type of content performed best. Identify the issues you were able to solve in that and apply the same to the product-led content you create in the future.
4. Define your product’s value
When you were developing your product, there must’ve been a user problem in your mind that you wanted to solve. In this step, you’ll be defining the value and usefulness of your product in relation to the problems of your customers. Defining your product will give you new ways to pitch it as a solution.
For instance, in the last few steps, you found out that a major problem faced by users is organizing internal team collaboration and communication in their business. The problem is specifically about the slow speed of communication. If your all-in-one solution has a useful feature for an instant messaging system, you can weave your narrative around this feature to present it as a solution to them.
5. Come up with content strategy through team collaboration
It’s not the best idea to focus on one type of content to cover your entire strategy for product-led marketing. To come up with an effective product-led content strategy, you need to get your sales, customer success, marketing, and engineering teams together to ideate and brainstorm.
6. Align the product with appropriate content
Now that you have come up with a content strategy, you can form a content schedule and start with making content outlines for promoting the product. In this stage, you need to think of clever ways to pitch your products in different content types without coming off as too salesy. If you feel that your product will not fit in naturally into a piece of content, come up with a different focus area. It’s all about matching the right type of content with the right products. Try to think outside the box, and come up with interesting ways to weave your product into the narrative.
7. Distribute and promote your content on the right channels
After you’ve created product-led content, the last step is distribution and promotion of the content. The decisions you take here will ensure the success of your product-led marketing campaign. Identify which marketing channels will be best for promoting your product-led content. For this, look for forums and communities where your prospects would be most interested in the topic. With the right distribution channels, you’ll be able to generate some qualified leads and more conversions.
Tools You Need to Create Impactful Product-Led Content
1. Narrato – Content Collaboration Tool
This content workflow platform can facilitate cross-functional collaboration between your marketing, sales, and product teams, making it easier to take valuable inputs from each team while creating product-led content. The beauty of Narrato is that it lets you manage your entire content process from start to finish on the same platform, so there is no need to switch between multiple apps and tools.
Some of the key features include –
- A powerful content editor, which comes with optimization suggestions and an AI writing assistant too.
- Collaboration features like @mentions, in-line comments on content, on-platform messaging.
- Custom user roles and access.
- AI topic generator to come up with engaging topics for your product-led content.
- Content Calendar to plan content for months in advance.
- SEO content briefs, style guides, custom templates, and more.
Pricing: Narrato offers 3 plans – Free, Pro and Business, and the paid plans start from $8 per user per month.
2. Poll the People – Customer Insights Tool
Poll the People is a research tool that can provide you with useful real customer insights for your product-led content in a matter of minutes. Designed to make data-based decisions cheaper and faster, Poll the People provides easy-to-use templates for testing various things like:
- Content – Get consumer feedback on your content copies, headlines, images, and more, which will help you develop more targeted and valuable product-led content.
- Prototype – Get feedback on how consumers are interacting with your product.
- Brand – Test the image, messaging, design, and overall brand awareness.
Customer insights play a huge role in planning your product-led content, informing you of what customers’ major pain points are, what solutions they’re looking for and more. The great thing about Poll the People is that their panel respondents explain their answers clearly, so you have substantial valuable insights (not just data) to inform your decisions.
Pricing: Poll the People provides multiple pricing plans. In the lite version, you can pay per response. The plus version can be used at $49.99 per month, while the premium version is priced at $99.99 per month.
3. LogRocket – Product Analytics Tools
LogRocket is excellent for analyzing and understanding any performance issues with your product, since it’s ultimately the quality of your product that will determine its success. LogRocket provides you with everything, from user session replay to performance monitoring to product analytics data on a single platform. It makes it easier to catch any glitches or bugs in your SaaS product, so that you can fix these issues and boost your product engagement. It also helps you make better product-led growth decisions by watching how real users are interacting with your product.
Pricing: LogRocket offers 4 plans – Free, Team, Professional, and Enterprise. The paid plans start from $99 per month.
4. TinyTake – Screen Recording Tool
With TinyTake, you can capture images and record videos of your SaaS product in action for creating your product-led content. Compatible with both Mac and Windows, this tool comes with a host of features to take your product-led content to the next level.
- Annotation toolset to add and highlight text, blur parts of the screen, draw arrows, etc.
- Share the files with your team instantaneously.
- Bulk sharing of files.
- Inbuilt online file viewer
- Option to publish recorded and annotated videos directly on YouTube
Pricing: TinyTake offers 4 plans – Free, Standard, Plus, and Jumbo. The paid plans start from @29.95 per year.
Leverage product-led content for your business success
With this, we’ve covered everything you need to know about creating product-led content for ensuring your product’s success. This article hopefully provides you with some valuable insights on using team collaboration and user insights for building effective product-led content. This content will allow you to present your product as the best solution to your audience, which will further help in customer acquisition. So, if you still haven’t given product-led marketing a try, you can get started with it today!
You can signup for free and run your first test within minutes.
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