How Product-led Content is Revolutionizing SaaS Marketing

Until a few years ago, content marketing was seen as a means of building brand awareness by simply offering value to the audience. Your audience seeks an answer to a query, they find the answer on your business blog and get to know about your brand. But there is one very crucial thing that they don't find out - that you have exactly the tool they need to solve their problem. You had the perfect opportunity to make it known, but by not mentioning your product anywhere in the content you likely lost a potential customer. This is what product-led content marketing is changing.

More and more SaaS brands today are investing in product-led content. They not only offer solutions and answers to their audience but also grab every opportunity there is to put their product in the limelight. Instead of a very subtle CTA at the end of the article or a discreetly placed link to your product page, with product-led content, you can actually talk about what your product does. And all of this, without sounding promotional or 'salesy'.

What is product-led content marketing?

Product-led content marketing is when you seamlessly weave your product into your content without pushing it or making it look blatantly promotional. In other words, your product is very much a relevant and valuable part of the content. This helps you solve your audience's problems while also showing them that you have the exact tool they need for implementing this solution.

To bring your product into the picture, you can either demonstrate an example or illustrate a point you've just made, using your product. Many popular and successful SaaS brands use this tactic to show their audience how their product can help them carry out an actionable step.

Here's a perfect example of this from the Shopify blog. The article talks about how to set up an online clothing store. Though the article is entirely informational and shares some very useful, actionable steps to help you set up an online store, it demonstrates the steps using Shopify itself.

By doing this, they are not only giving their audience a possible solution to their problem but also showing them that Shopify is an ideal tool for it. They are not adding any CTA or pushing the product but still making it known to the reader how it could be helpful.

How is product-led content marketing different from other marketing tactics?

The biggest difference between conventional marketing tactics and product-led content marketing is that product-led marketing is not the sole responsibility of the marketing team alone. Creating impactful product-led content requires the collaboration of marketing, product, sales, and customer success teams.

To correctly and aptly place the product within the content, content marketers must know the product inside out. This requires them to work closely with the product team and stay updated on all the latest features and upgrades.

To create engaging product-led content, you also need to understand customer pain points, how they can benefit from the product, how existing customers are using the product, and more. All this data is usually available with the sales and customer success teams, as they regularly interact with leads and gather customer feedback. Collaborating with sales and customer success can be very crucial in discovering new opportunities for product-led content.

How product-led content aids customer retention

A major advantage of creating product-led content for SaaS marketing is that it can cater to the audience at any stage of the customer journey. So product-led content does not just help a prospect discover your product, it can also help your existing customers discover new ways of using the product.

Here's another example from the Ahrefs blog. This is a post on Advanced Keyword Research (which targets experienced marketers and likely Ahrefs' users too), sharing tips on how you can take your keyword research to the next level. It also shows how Ahrefs Site Explorer helps with this, including competitor keyword research.

So if you were already using the tool but never thought of this use case, you would be pleasantly surprised. By demonstrating new capabilities of your product to existing customers you bring a sense of novelty and freshness that helps retain them longer.

Tips to ace SaaS marketing with product-led content

1. Gather the tools you need

Like any other content marketing effort, product-led content creation requires the right tool stack as well. Apart from your usual content tools, you will need specific platforms that are particularly important to execute a product-led content strategy successfully. Here are a few.

Content creation and collaboration tools

Since content creation in product-led marketing is a combined effort of various teams, having a collaboration platform becomes essential to maintain and enhance productivity. You will often need to work together with the product or customer success teams and get their input on the content. This is where a content collaboration platform like Narrato can come in handy. Narrato allows you to add multiple team members under custom user roles for seamless collaboration. Users can leave inline content comments and messages to collaborate on a content task and share feedback. A custom workflow can be defined as well to seek approvals or make every content piece go through a structured process.

What we like about Narrato is that it can help you manage your entire content creation process from start to finish, on a single platform, without having to juggle multiple disjointed tools. It also has content optimization tools, SEO content briefs, an AI content assistant, content calendars, custom automation, and content ideas generator to support your product-led content strategy. It can be a worthy addition to your product-led content marketing arsenal.

Screen recording tools

In product-led marketing, an important part of your content is going to be screen grabs of your SaaS product. To demonstrate any use case you will need screen recordings, GIFs, or screenshots very often. So having a good screen recording tool where you can not only capture but also edit your images and videos can save you a lot of time.

A tool like Loom can be a good choice for this. On Loom, you can customize how you want your screen recordings to appear and also edit your screen grabs to get the desired final outcomes.

You can easily turn these screen recordings into GIFs using tools like Giphy, or capture screenshots as images to add to your content as well.

Product analytics tools

For creating good product-led content, you also need information on user behavior and your product's performance. This is where a product analytics tool becomes indispensable. A product analytics tool will give you insights into product performance, usage frequency, user demography, and behavioral patterns, user pain points, issues faced with the product, and a lot more.

There are several options in analytics tools to choose from. We could recommend tools like Heap, Mixpanel, or Pendo.

These tools are popular among product-led SaaS companies and offer almost all the features you would need for thorough product analysis.

2. Find various ways to position your product

Once you start to create product-led content, you will realize that there are so many ways you can position your product in front of a potential customer. Different prospects with different pain points can use your product differently. This means there has to be more than one value proposition. The secret to mastering product-led content marketing is identifying all these opportunities and creating content to target a wider, diverse user base.

There may also be certain topics where your product is the hero and an all-in-one solution for the audience's pain points, while in another article it may be one of many solutions. Knowing how to make your product stand out and finding different angles to weave your product into the narrative is what determines your product-led marketing success.

3. Experiment with content formats

Product-led content can be a lot more interesting than just long and tedious case studies or tool lists. Instead of sticking to just one format, experiment with different product-led content types and media. Videos, for instance, offer a tremendous opportunity to show your product in action. You could create some great tutorial videos on topics that your audience would be interested in, and demonstrate solutions using your product. This allows your audience to actually see what your product does.

Webinars and live videos can offer great business potential as well. If you can incorporate product-led content in your webinars or live discussions, you have a much better chance of influencing your audience. You can answer their queries in real time and build more credibility for your product. A little innovation in the way you present your content can go a long way in achieving product-led growth.

4. Leverage user-generated content

Nobody can be a better advocate for your SaaS product than the users themselves. So why not leverage this asset in your product-led content marketing strategy? Many big brands like Notion are already doing it. Notion, for instance, has a vast and highly active user community. They regularly create helpful product-led content showing how they use the platform in their field of work. They share templates they've created on Notion, use cases they've applied the platform to, and much more. This not only engages new users and prospects but also offers additional customer support which can improve customer retention.

User-generated content can still be gathered even if your SaaS product does not have a big user community yet. You could collaborate with your users on some cross-promotional campaigns. Ask them to create something that your audience would find valuable while also demonstrating how they've been using your product in that context. This would help them promote their brand as well.

User-generated content can build trust among your audience, encouraging others to try the product as well.

5. Optimize your existing content

Your product-led content strategy does not have to start with creating fresh content from scratch. Many of your existing blog posts, articles, etc. could have tremendous potential to convert customers if turned into product-led pieces. Look for such content and optimize them by introducing your product where it fits. If you have a blog post that is doing great in search results, for example, it can be a great place to highlight your product and put it out in front of a wide audience. As long as you've been creating helpful content keeping audience pain points in mind, you will often find it extremely easy to illustrate a point or show an example using your product.

Wrapping up

Major brands like HubSpot, Ahrefs, ClickUp, and Notion have been creating product-led content from the very beginning and the outcome is evident from the way their content and products perform. But despite the great returns that product-led content marketing offers, it is still quite an underutilized approach. Budding SaaS marketers need to realize that if your product can address your audience's challenges, you're doing everyone a favour by making it known through your content. Once every content marketer understands how powerful product-led content can be, SaaS marketing will change for good.