How to Create a Product-Led Content Strategy

As a Content Lead, it's up to you to blaze the trail for content that helps move company objectives through exposure to your product. But so far, nothing has seemed to work.

You've tried a bunch of different pieces of content, but traffic to your sales and demo pages is still lower than you'd like.

Maybe you're thinking about attempting product-led content but aren't sure how to approach it. It's a great way to engage with existing customers and get new ones, and this guide will show you how.

Forget hard selling. It comes down to making your product look like the natural best solution to a problem.

What is Product-Led Content, and Why Does it Matter?

Businesses don't just create content for fun — shocker. Content should help sell a product at the end of the day.

That's what product-led content does. It's content that talks about solving problems by using your product and can retain and acquire customers.

For example, suppose you write a piece about helping a company maximize distribution with employee advocacy. If your product happens to have a tool that helps amplify distribution, you should offer that as a solution.

People are usually looking for solutions rather than products. So product-led content is a soft, natural sell rather than an aggressive sell.

When Should You Use Product-Led Content?

Product-led content should generally be the focus of your content strategy from the start.

Why would you create content that doesn't sell your product in the early days? Random content won't drive revenue.

Your goal is to gently nudge customers toward the 'product aware' stage — which we discussed in our article on getting your first 20 blogs out.

Content that focuses on other avenues, such as thought leadership, is important — but that can come later.

How Should You Create a Product-Led Content Strategy?

The primary channels for product-led content are SEO and your Sales Team.

SEO

Do some keyword research with tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Letterdrop. Look for "how to do X" queries where your product can help do X. Prioritize topics by their search volume.

You can also dig a little deeper, looking at related topics that don't have a "how to" modifier yet. That allows you to fill gaps in the content market with product-led content.

Sales Enablement

Find out what questions your Sales Team gets from customers and write down answers to those questions, featuring how your product helps.

Here you want to prioritize writing content on features that customers ask about or refer to the most. That way, your Sales Team doesn't have to repeat themselves and can use your content instead.

You might want to get transcripts and marketing insights from sales calls, which you can do with Letterdrop's Gong.io integration or a tool like Fathom.

Examples of Product-Led Content

1. Letterdrop

We've talked to content marketers at Scribe and Census, and they find Webflow publishing slow and tedious. (Web-Slow, am I right?)

We used these common problems to create a piece about the ten pain points of Webflow publishing.

For each problem, we showed how a Letterdrop feature solved the issue. Letterdrop also just happens to integrate with Webflow.

2. Ahrefs

This blog post by Ahrefs suggests some Top-Of-The-Funnel marketing tactics for readers to try, among them writing blog posts.

Writer Bill Widmer casually plugs Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer as a way to find high-volume topics to write on.

3. Metadata

‎In this post, writer Mark Huber aims to assist marketers looking to invest in a demand gen tool.

He then recommends three tools for demand gen, including Metadata.

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The Soft Sell Could Be The Winner

Product-led content offers a nice break from aggressive marketing tactics and sales pages. It allows you to weave your product naturally into content that already discusses solutions.

With it, you can show readers how your product is the best solution on the market without slapping them in the face with it.

If you have any questions as to how Letterdrop can save you hours a week on content ops, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn.