What is product led content and will it work for you?

A lot of B2B SaaS companies create high-quality content, distribute it, and drive decent traffic too. But they don’t convert.

Why does this happen?

They think that talking about their product is considered self-serving and promotional in nature. Though they publish quality blog posts, they hardly mention their product in their story.

As a result, many times, the visitors who read those content pieces, don’t even know what the company does.

After surveying leadership teams in 47 companies, we realized that it was a mindset issue.

They thought that mentioning the product meant being salesy, self-serving, and being overly promotional.

It can be self-serving if you do it wrong. And worse, it’s a complete disservice, if you don’t do it at all.

That’s where product led content comes in. 

In this blog, we talk about what product led content means, how it is different from product marketing, and how to go about it.

What is product led content?

Product led content simply means content that helps the reader by showing how to solve their problem using your product. The key with product led content is not to tell your readers about your product, but rather show them how it solves their pain. 

Uh.. potato, potahto! Is product led content even a thing? 

Isn’t this already taken care between the product marketing and content marketing teams?

Great questions! While ‘product led content’ might feel like a made-up term by marketers, it’s a strong reminder that a significant portion of your content marketing needs to be focused on solving your customers’ problems.

Product led content is not only about how you write, but also about how you choose your content topics. It can span across formats such as blogs, images, carousels, videos, and more.

The core idea is to pick topics where you can strategically and natively weave your product and its use cases into the story.

Here’s an example of how it works. We recently published a blog for Avoma where we were talking about ‘How asynchronous coaching and feedback can help sales teams close deals faster.’ 

In that blog post, we mentioned that coaching is a two-way street where leaders need to evaluate sales calls and offer scores and feedback. At the same time, sales reps also need to proactively request scores to improve themselves. And in that context, we showed how Avoma’s ‘Request Score’ feature helps them.

And this is how we natively insert our product into the problem-solving narrative.

How is it different from product marketing?

First of all, product marketing is a very cross-functional role that focuses on:

• Audience research
• Positioning and messaging
• In-product experience & adoption
• Sales enablement
• Partner enablement (depending on the org maturity) 

Product led content is one of the content types that your content marketing team creates. It’s not a separate function like product marketing. 

The content created by product marketing teams though closely related to the product, serves a different purpose. For example, they focus on creating content such as help articles, product videos, in-app announcements, landing pages, which directly promote your product.

In the majority of the cases we’ve observed, product marketing primarily tends to focus on solving the problems of their product users, and not the buyers. Therefore, product marketers tend to write to solve the problems experienced by the users, so the adoption improves and positively impacts retention.

While there are definitely overlapping aspects with product marketing, product led content is relatively top of the funnel, focusing on your users as well as prospects. It focuses on solving specific pains by showing how. 

Let’s say you are using Google Search Console (GSC) and you want to know how much of your website traffic comes from branded and non-branded keywords. Since GSC doesn’t make it easy to track, you google how to group branded and non-branded traffic for your analysis. You land on a blog post of an SEO tool that shows you how to do it using their product.

Now, you got your answer, and chances are that you may explore their product or sign up for a trial to test it out for your use case. 

What KPIs does product led content cater to?

Customer acquisition

When a prospect searches for their problem, sees your content ranking high on Google, and if your content clearly shows how you solve their problem, you build trust faster by skipping several steps. It’s by far the most effective content type when it comes to customer acquisition and conversions.

If they don’t convert immediately, the trust earned through this type of content still keeps your product top of mind and they might come back to subscribe later. Lastly, this type of content can be a great retargeting asset for those who have consumed your top-of-the-funnel content pieces.

Customer retention

As discussed earlier, product led content is for both prospects and your existing users. So it can double as content that drives adoption and customer retention by going hand-in-hand with your product marketing efforts.

But, does it make sense for my SaaS?

If your SaaS is built to solve specific problems, you definitely have specific pain points to talk about. However, some of the problems your product solves will be so specific that when you look up Ahrefs or Semrush, those keywords might not have a meaningful search volume. 

But from experience, I can certainly tell you that those topics are still worth writing about. 

They might not help you reach a new bigger audience, but they attract the right kind of customers for your business and directly translate to revenue.

The role of product led content is to do two things:

• Talk to the target customers’ specific first-order and second-order pain and show them how it can be solved using your product
• Close the perceived knowledge gap about your product, and make it easy for them to try your product.

Cater to the first-order and second-order pain points

First-order pain refers to the pains that your product directly solves. For example, if you sell an email marketing tool, the topics around your first order pains could be email templates, best practices, and how-to’s related to email.

Creating content around the first-order pain points helps you: 

✅ Get new visitors 

✅ Build trust by solving their core issue 

✅ Introduce your product as a natural solution 

But don’t limit yourself to first-order pains. Also explore adjacent or second-order pain topics like how to evaluate a CRM, for instance. It’s not something you solve for. But you get access to a far larger audience and establish yourself as a source of trust. 

Why? 

Probably less than 1% prospects are in the market for what you are currently solving. And you want to be truly helpful to your target audience.

So, your content needs to address the second-order pain points as well, ie., the adjacent problems that your prospects are wrestling with, though it may not be directly solved by your product. 

Close the knowledge gap

If you look at some of the most adopted products in the SaaS world such as Canva or Zoom, you’ll notice that no one trains people on how to use them. Everyone knows or feels like they know how to use the product from day one.

That’s because they bridge the knowledge gap with product led content.

Let’s look at what knowledge gap means.

Imagine a spectrum.

On the far left, the user has no clue how your product works:

🟨 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️

On the far right, the ideal user knows your product like the back of their hand:

⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟦

The red square represents the actual product knowledge of a prospective customer, if you are operating in well known product category like CRM or Conversation Intelligence:

🟨 ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟥 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟦

The green square is where they need to be, to be ready to sign up for your product:

🟨 ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟥 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟦

The gap between 🟥 and 🟩 is called the ‘knowledge gap,’ i.e., the knowledge that one needs to acquire to be able to use your product effectively and be successful with it.

The shorter the gap, the faster people will fall in love with your product, adopt it, and even spread the word in online communities.

While some products are more nuanced than others, unless you close this gap, people won’t understand what your product does. And therefore won’t adopt it.

Ahrefs and Semrush do a great job of bridging the knowledge gap with product led content. Almost everyone in the SEO and content marketing community knows how to use the product much before they sign up.

How to create valuable product led content?

Let’s now look at the process of creating product led content that is truly valuable to your readers. Some of the common questions that come to mind are:

✅ How do I prepare myself for creating product led content?

✅ How do I choose the right topics?

✅ How do I ensure that the effort I put into creating this kind of content doesn’t go waste?

Here’s how you go about it.

1. Know your product and customers well

There’s no shortcut to this. You cannot create impactful product led content if you don’t understand your product deeply enough. In other words, you need to be a power user of your product.

You should know your product’s features, use cases, and how it solves your target audience’s problems as you hear the prospect explaining their pain. You know your product well if you can mentally start mapping your product features, even if the use case your prospecting is talking about isn’t a straightforward slam dunk.

For example, two years ago, when I was working with Avoma, one of the prospects was trying to use our conversation intelligence platform for customer success. They wanted to be notified of potential churn signals. Though it wasn’t a straightforward use case, I knew that we had a “Save Search” feature which we could use to solve their problem.

And here’s the blog we wrote around the topic showing how it could be done.

How to use conversation intelligence to identify potential churn?

Two ways to become an expert in your product is:

a) Double up as customer support at least for a month before you start creating product led content

b) Record and listen to at least two sales discovery calls every day

2. Derive your content topics based on what your product solves

If you want to make sure that it doesn’t feel like you are shoehorning your product into your content pieces, you better derive your content topics based on what your product solves. That way, it feels like a natural fit.

To achieve success with your product led content, we at SaaS Sprints recommend that you focus on topics that speak to the pain that your product solves today. And that’s because these topics have the most business impact. 

Once you exhaust the topics around the primary pain your product solves for, you can move to the second-order pain points as discussed above.

The table below might help you in building a list of product led content topics.

We recommend you to prioritize topics that score 1 and 2.

3. Marry the pain and search volume

We had discussed above that some of the problems your product solves will be so specific that when you look up Ahrefs or Semrush, they might not have a meaningful search volume. But you don’t want your content creation efforts to go to waste.

One way to rank better in terms of your SEO and be found for the core pain you solve, you need to marry the pain points and search volume sensibly.

For that we recommend combining the above scorecard with search volume. Find the closest keyword with decent search volume and map it to the customer pain. 

Going back to the above example of the prospect wanting to address ‘potential churn,’ here’s what we did:

👉Pain expressed by the prospect: 

Need to proactively manage potential churn

👉The nearest keyword with decent search volume:

Customer churn (9.5K searches/month)

👉The topic we arrived at: 

“How to use conversation intelligence to identify potential customer churn?”

Summing up…

Product led content is not about creating self-serving content that overly promotes your product. The purpose is to solve the pain of your prospects as well as users by showing how your product does it. It leads to better conversions and more satisfied customers in the long run, who will then in turn become loyal advocates for your product. 

Whether you are creating product led content in-house or working with an agency, we hope you find this blog post helped you.

If you found it useful, give us a shout out or share it with your team. 🙂