A Beginner’s Guide to Product-Led Content Marketing

As a content marketer, you always seek new ways to connect with your audience and drive business results. One strategy that has gained popularity in recent years is product-led content marketing. 

Product-led content is a type of marketing that focuses on using your product as the centerpiece of your content strategy. In this blog, we will take you through everything you need to know about product-led content marketing: what it is, what it's not, and why it matters. 

We'll also share some tips on creating a product-led content engine for your business and how to make sure it ranks well on search engines. So, whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting out, keep reading to learn how product-led content can help boost your business's growth.

What is "Product-Led Content"?

Product-led content focuses on creating content that highlights the benefits and value of a particular product or service. It is a type of content marketing intended to provide potential customers with the information they need to make an informed decision about whether or not to use a product or service.

Product-led content appeals to the audience by showing off a product's features, how it works, and what it can do for them. This type of content may take many forms, including blog posts, video tutorials, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, and more.

The key to good product-led content is helpful, interesting, and informative content. Product-led content marketing can help businesses show themselves as experts in their field and gain the trust of potential customers, which can lead to more sales and customer loyalty.

Example of Product-Led Content

Some examples of product-led content are customer success stories, product tutorials and videos, product reviews, how-to guides, and more. 

1. How-to guides: Create step-by-step guides that explain how to use specific features of your product or how to solve common problems that your product helps to address. For example, if you are a business that sells project management tools, you can create a blog post that explains how to create a project plan using your tool.
2. Case studies: Share stories of how your product has helped real customers achieve their goals. Case studies are powerful social proof that can help potential customers see the value of your product.
3. Comparison posts: Create blog posts that compare your product to competitors or other similar products in the market. By highlighting the features and benefits of your product, you can help potential customers make an informed decision.
4. Video tutorials: Create videos that demonstrate how to use your product or that showcase the benefits of your product in action. Video content can be a great way to engage potential customers and make your product more tangible.
5. Expert advice: Share expert advice and insights about your industry or niche. By establishing yourself as an expert in your field, you can build trust with potential customers and position your product as a solution to their needs.
   

What Product-Led Content is Not?

Product-led content should not be confused with purely promotional content such as traditional advertisements and sales content. It is not focused solely on selling a product. Here are some examples of what product-led content is not:

1. Hard-selling: Product-led content is not about pushing your product aggressively to your audience. Hard-selling content can drive potential customers away and be counterproductive.
2. Overly promotional: Product-led content is not just a list of your product's features or benefits. Overly-promotional content can come across as insincere and may not resonate with your audience.
3. One-size-fits-all: Product-led content is not generic content that tries to appeal to everyone. One-size-fits-all content may not address your target audience's specific pain points or needs.
4. Disconnected from your product: Product-led content is not content that has no relation to your product. Disconnected content may be interesting, but it won't help you achieve your business goals.
5. Ignorant to your audience's feedback: Product-led content does not ignore your audience's feedback. Ignoring feedback can lead to a disconnect between your brand and your audience and may even damage your reputation.

In short, product-led content should provide value to your audience by solving their problems, answering their questions, and educating them, while also showcasing how your product can help them. It should not be solely focused on promoting your product or pushing sales.

Why Does Product-Led Content Matter?

In today's fast-paced digital world, product-led content has become a crucial element in any successful marketing strategy. Here are some reasons why product-led content matters:

Helps in acquiring new customers

By creating product-led content that showcases the value of your product or app, you can attract new customers who are interested in your product. This type of content can be in the form of website copy, blog posts, case studies, videos, or any other kind of content that demonstrates how your product can solve problems.

Using targeted keywords in your content can also help you rank higher on Google, driving more qualified traffic to your website. By focusing on the customer journey and creating content that speaks to their pain points, you can create a funnel that leads to more qualified leads.

With product-led content used from the homepage to your blogs, every page has the potential to guide potential customers through their journey of making a purchase. 

Also read: Homepage SEO Best Practices (+ Free Checklist)

Helps in retaining customers

Product-led content can also help you retain your existing customers. By providing great content that showcases the best solution to their problems, you can build trust with your customers and establish your brand as an authority in your niche.

Using customer feedback tools like Ahrefs or Hubspot can help you identify gaps in your content creation and generate new content ideas that cater to your customers' needs. Creating templates, how-to guides, and other kinds of content that are relevant to your customers can also help in retaining them.

Helps in generating awareness about your products

Product-led content can also help in generating awareness about your product and increase brand visibility. By creating great content that showcases your product's value and how it solves your customers' problems, you can attract new customers and build brand loyalty.

Using social media platforms such as LinkedIn to share your product-led content can also help increase your brand's visibility. Including a clear call-to-action (CTA) in your content can help bring more qualified traffic to your website and turn them into paying customers.

Creating a product-led content strategy that focuses on making great content, using customer feedback, and following best practices can help you get more qualified traffic, raise brand awareness, and keep your current customers. 

By using metrics and automation tools to measure the success of your content, you can optimize your content creation process and drive more revenue for your product-led company.

How do you Create a Product-Led Content Engine for Your Business?

Creating a product-led content engine involves a series of steps that can help any business drive more sales and customer engagement.

Let’s understand every step of the process in detail. 

Understand the pain point your product is solving

To create a product-led content engine for your business, the first step is to understand the pain point your product is solving. This means identifying the specific problem that your product solves for customers and understanding how it fits into their lives.

For example, if you are selling a meal kit delivery service, the pain point you are solving could be that people cannot find time for grocery shopping or planning meals. Alternatively, if you are selling a software tool for project management, the pain point you are solving could be disorganization and inefficiency in team collaboration.

Do market research and customer surveys to get feedback and insights that will help you figure out what your product's pain point is. It's also important to consider the unique value proposition of your product and how it differentiates from competitors.

Use social listening tools like Answer the Public and Google Trends to keep track of online conversations about your industry and do A/B testing on different ways to talk to customers to see what they respond to.

By understanding the pain point your product is solving, you can create compelling content that speaks directly to your target audience's needs and interests.

Identify your target audience for whom you want to write content

To create a product-led content engine for your business, it is crucial to identify the target audience for whom you want to write content. This means understanding your ideal customer's demographics, interests, and pain points. For example, suppose you are a software company that sells project management tools to small businesses. In that case, your target audience might be small business owners and managers looking for ways to streamline their workflow.

Another example could be a skincare company targeting millennials with eco-friendly and cruelty-free products. In this case, the target audience would be young adults who are conscious of sustainability and animal welfare.

Creating buyer personas, conducting surveys or focus groups, and analyzing data from website analytics or social media insights. 

Once you know your target audience, you can create content focused on your products and speaks directly to their needs and interests. This will lead to more sales and brand loyalty.

Show your TG the solution to their problem

For your business to have a product-led content engine, you have to show your target audience how to solve the problem. This means understanding your audience's pain points and creating content that addresses those issues by highlighting how your product can help. 

For example, if you're in the health and wellness industry, you can create content around how your product would help with weight loss or improve mental health. Alternatively, if you're in the tech industry, you can create content around how your product can streamline workflow processes or improve customer engagement.

Use story techniques to make the content more relatable, and use data-driven insights to prove that your product works. By creating content that is useful, informative, and solves the problems of your audience, you can gain their trust and build long-term relationships with them.

Display how the product works and value offered

Creating a product-led content engine for your business involves displaying how the product works and the value it offers to customers. An effective way to do this is through the use of instructional videos or demos that showcase the product in action. 

For example, a software company could create a video tutorial that walks users through the various features and capabilities of their product.

Another approach is to create case studies or customer success stories that demonstrate how the product has helped other businesses or individuals achieve their goals. For example, a company that makes fitness equipment could show testimonials from customers who used their products to get great results.

Keep them short and focused on the most important benefits of the product. If possible, use real-world examples and highlight any unique features or benefits that set your product apart from competitors. By showing potential customers how your product works and what it can do for them, you can build trust and credibility, boost sales, and keep customers coming back.

Don't forget to offer a free demo

When creating a product-led content engine for your business, it's important to remember to offer a free demo. This allows potential customers to try out your product before committing to a purchase, which can increase conversion rates and build trust with your audience.

For example, a SaaS company might offer a free trial of their software, while a cosmetics brand may offer samples of their products. To make the most of this step, be sure to clearly promote the availability of the free demo on your website and social media channels.

Set clear expectations for how long the demo will last and what features will be available; provide useful resources like how-to guides and FAQs; and follow up with users after their trial period has ended to gather feedback and answer any questions they may have. 

By offering a free demo as part of your product-led content marketing strategy, you can bring in new customers and build relationships with your audience that will last.

How Do I Create Product-Led Content That Ranks on SERP?

Creating product-led content that ranks in SERPs involves several steps. By following these steps, you can create product-led content that ranks on SERPs and drives conversions for your business.

Find topics with high search traffic potential

To create product-led content that ranks on SERPs, it's important to find topics with high search traffic potential. This means looking up keywords that are related to your product and finding topics that have both a high number of searches and a low CPC. 

A tool like the Scalenut Keyword Planner can be used to find the most relevant key terms for your primary keyword. This tool gives you information like the number of searches, the cost per click, and how relevant your main keyword is.

From the Scalenut Keyword Planner report, you can select keyword clusters to create high-value topics for your website. 

It's important to use the related keyword in the content for that topic. By following these steps, you can create product-led content that is optimized for search engines and ranks well on SERP.

Prioritize them using “business potential”

Creating product-led content that ranks on SERPs requires prioritizing the products you want to rank for based on their "business potential". This means taking into account things like customer demand, the number of searches, the cost of getting a new customer, and product margins. 

It's also important to consider how well the product or service is positioned in the market and what its unique selling points are.

For example, if you sell kitchen appliances, you might prioritize ranking a high-margin and high-search-volume product like a dishwasher with strong customer demand and a high search volume. In contrast, a lower-margin product like an immersion blender or hotpoint gas hob might not be as high of a priority.

By focusing on these aspects of your products or services, you can create content that resonates better with customers and ranks higher on SERP. 

This could mean making targeted landing pages, optimizing your website for specific keywords, and making blog posts or videos that show the benefits of your products in a way that appeals to your target audience. 

Ultimately, by taking a product-led approach to content marketing, you can drive more traffic to your site and increase conversions from interested prospects.

Create product-led content with ranking potential

Creating product-led content that ranks on SERPs requires a strategic approach. Firstly, it's important to understand your target audience and create content that speaks to their needs. Utilizing NLP keywords can capture more specific queries and help boost rankings. 

Compelling visuals such as images and videos can make the content more engaging. Including links to other relevant content on your website can also increase page views and time on the site. Further, including the most frequently asked questions will boost your visibility on SERPs. 

Also read: FAQ Page SEO: How To create SEO friendly FAQ website page

It's also beneficial to use tools like Scalenut Article Writer that come with a detailed SEO report of the top-ranking pages. 

This tool gives information about competitors, such as competitor outlines and NLP key terms that can be added to content to help it rank higher. With these tactics in place, you can create product-led content that not only informs your audience but also earns a higher rank on search engines.

Optimize content for SEO

Creating product-led content that ranks on SERPs requires optimizing the content for SEO. To do this, it's important to research relevant keywords and tailor the content to target them. Also, it's important to make sure that the content works well on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices.

Other key factors in optimizing your content for SEO include ensuring primary keywords in your meta tags and making sure all your images have proper alt texts. These steps can help ensure that search engine crawlers can properly index your content and boost its visibility on SERPs.

To make sure every aspect of SEO is taken care of, you can also use tools like Scalenut Content Optimizer. 

This tool gives you a real-time SEO score that takes several SEO factors into account, from meta tags and H1 tags to NLP key terms, and helps make sure that your product-led content is as visible as possible in SERPs.

Also read: What is H1 Tags and How It Helps In SEO?

Conclusion

Product-led content marketing is a strategy in which you make content that shows potential customers how valuable your product is. It’s not about pushing your product but rather providing valuable information about how it can help solve their problems. This method has been shown to be effective at getting new customers, keeping old ones, and making people aware of your products. 

To create a successful product-led content engine for your business, you must first understand the pain points your product solves and identify your target audience. Then, show them how your product can provide a solution, which can be done by offering a free demo. Also, you need to optimize your content for SEO by finding topics that are likely to get a lot of search traffic and putting them in order of business value. 

On the other hand, you could use a powerful tool like Scalenut to get your product-led content engine going and get some amazing results. From the initial stages of planning and picking the right keywords to target to the final publishing stage, Scalenut has one tool for every stage of the content creation process. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an example of a product-led approach?

An example of a product-led approach is Dropbox, which focused on creating a user-friendly product that drove growth through word-of-mouth referrals. Other companies, like Slack and Zoom, also put making useful products ahead of traditional ways of marketing and selling.

For a product-led approach to work, the product itself needs to be constantly updated and improved to keep users interested and happy. By making the product the main source of growth, these businesses were able to build strong customer loyalty and have a lot of success.

What is product-led vs. sales-led?

Product-led and sales-led are two different business approaches. Product-led refers to a strategy where the product itself drives customer acquisition and retention, while sales-led focuses on sales as the main priority, with the product being secondary.

A product-led approach often leads to more satisfied customers and long-term growth, as it prioritizes meeting customer needs. On the other hand, a sales-led strategy can be effective in certain industries or situations but may not prioritize customer needs as much as a product-led approach.

About Scalenut
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