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Many SaaS companies are guilty of producing content that waits until the conclusion to reveal the solution – your product. Others create content that only mentions the product in passing, hoping readers will subscribe when they stumble upon it.
These are failing strategies. Instead, you need to create product-led content.
With product-led content marketing, you can hit two birds with one stone. You can provide value to your readers and generate qualified leads for your business.
As a SaaS content marketing agency, we at MADX work closely with product-led content. In this guide, we’ll show you how we help companies create targeted content without being too salesy.
What We'll Cover:
What is Product-Led Content?
Product-led content positions your product as a way of solving the user’s problem or helping them achieve their goal.
For example, in the article “What is Keyword Difficulty?” by Semrush, they naturally weave the different keyword tools they offer.
Notice how they are not hard-selling their tool or breaking the flow but strategically inserting it to solve a problem.
By creating product-led content for Postalytics, we helped them create 1000+ new accounts and increase their traffic from 3K to 81K monthly visitors.
Why Should You Use Product-Led Content?
Below are four reasons why creating a product-led content strategy is helpful:
Showcases the Value of the Product
It’s normal for SaaS products to have multiple use cases. Thus, it could be possible that your audience does not know everything your product can do. Product-led content allows you to show unique ways of using your product and signifies to your audience that they will benefit from subscribing to your tool.
Helps with Customer Acquisition
When your product-led content ranks high on Google, your readers may think it’s the best way to solve their current problems. It also helps bring awareness about your tool and its various benefits. This makes it easier for these readers to convert because they are already familiar with your brand, and your product is at the top of their minds.
Can Lead to a Free Trial
With so many SaaS companies offering free trials and even free tools, product-led content becomes a great way to promote these offerings. For example, you can create a guide on “How to manage your social media business easily?” and naturally talk about different features of your social media tool that can help these businesses. Some even go so far as to include multiple CTAs in their product-led content instead of one at the end.
Supports Customer Retention
There are always 10 different ways of using the same product. For example, my business can use a social media tool to schedule posts, while another business may use it for competitor analysis and find unique content gaps to capitalize on. By creating product-led content around different use cases, you keep providing value to your existing customers and support customer retention.
How to Create Relevant Product-Led Content?
Irrespective of the type of product you work with, here’s a seven-step framework to help you create effective product-led content.
#1 Know Your Product Really Well
You cannot create great product-led content without knowing your product in depth. Your marketers and writers don’t just need a quick demo or tutorial; they need to understand the different features, use cases, and buyer personas you’re targeting.
Giving them hands-on experience using your SaaS product also helps them discover new things independently. This way, the writers can find opportunities to insert your tool naturally into the content.
For example, look at how Planable talks about the simplicity of their drag-and-drop scheduling feature in this article.
You can even create an introduction course for your marketers to help them understand everything related to your product.
#2 Find Topics With Search Traffic Potential
If you create product-led content around topics that hardly anyone searches for, you’re just wasting time and resources. Instead, target those topics that will keep getting you search traffic over a long period.
You need to find topics with good search traffic potential to do this. These topics would generally be informational queries instead of transactional queries, as it can’t be defined product-led content if the page points to a sales or landing page.
To find these topics, you can use the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool.
You can enter your keywords and find out the monthly search volume.
To get more keyword suggestions, click on the “Matching terms” report and get a list of topics for content creation.
MADX Digital’s Technical SEO for SaaS
MADX follows a tried-and-tested approach to finding relevant content topics for our SaaS clients. Instead of spending days and weeks trying to get this step right, you can get in touch with our SEO experts, who can help you learn the ropes.
#3 Choose Your Content Focus
Instead of creating single, unrelated pieces of content, you can create an overall content strategy that focuses on building multiple pieces of content with a single focus. For example, if you have a social media tool, you can create a series of content around the focus “Social Media Scheduling.”
It could look like this:
Content_A: A guide to creating a social media schedule
Content_B: 7 tips to help you stick with your social media posting schedule
Content_C: Best time to schedule your posts on different social platforms
You can develop such clusters that focus on a single use case or important feature of your tool.
#4 Prioritize Them Using Business Potential
Do you want to talk about your product in the content and yet not give off a “salesy” feeling to the reader?
One way to do that is by prioritizing topics using a business potential score.
Here’s what a score chart for a social media tool would look like.
Prioritize topics with scores of 2 and 3 first, then move on to 1, and eliminate 0 for product-led content.
#5 Align Related Products With Appropriate Content & Integrate
Now that you have a list of topics ready, you can start creating content outlines for your team. While doing that, ensure you align related products with content.
For example, instead of putting all your social media tools in the topic “A guide to social media scheduling,” you can focus on the different features of your scheduling tool.
A quick way to ensure you align the right products is by asking yourself, “Does this product insertion make sense for the topic?”
You can even have your team review product-led content to ensure it doesn’t come out as a hard sell.
You can even get creative by integrating relevant case studies and customer stories that align with the topic.
#6 Include a Strong Call-to-Action & 1-Click Solution
If your reader has to figure out how to navigate to the mentioned tool/feature in your content, you lose out on many conversions.
After all, nobody wants to perform an action that takes much time to figure out.
There are two solutions to this:
- Include a CTA button whenever you mention your tool.
While using this strategy, ensure you don’t overdo it and stick to a minimum of 2-4 CTAs per article.
- Provide a link to the tool so readers can simply reach your product or landing page with one click.
This practice is used more as it does not hinder the flow of the content, and readers can simply click on the hyperlinked text to reach the linked page.
#7 Create Product-Led Content That Ranks
Here are three best practices to follow while writing product-led content:
- Don’t just talk about your product’s features or functionality. Include screenshots, GIFs, and videos on how to use the tool and what the final result looks like.
- Don’t overdo it. Instead of discussing your product in every subheading or paragraph, use references only where applicable or where the reader wants to know more about how to do something.
- Include links to other relevant content on your website.
- Optimize your content for SEO. This means using relevant keywords, proper meta tags and alt texts, checking for mobile responsiveness, etc.
MADX Digital’s Content Marketing Services
MADX provides digital content marketing services so you can publish effective product-led content and get the results you want.
What are the Pillars Needed to Achieve High-Quality Product-Led Content?
Below are the three pillars you must focus on to create effective product-led content.
#1 Narrative
A consistent narrative across all your product-led content allows you to build brand recognition and trust. Your readers can quickly recognize your tool whenever they come across your article, ebook, newsletter, or landing page.
#2 Simplicity
Many companies make product-led content that is too technical and complicated to understand for a non-specialist. It leaves the reader confused and means they often don't convert or opt for a free trial.
That’s why practicing simplicity is so crucial. Instead of overwhelming the reader with technical know-how, direct them toward your product with simple steps and actions.
#3 Consistency
Stay consistent with your brand image, story, tone, and message through the different types of content you publish. For example, if your landing page portrays a completely different message than your article, you confuse your reader and lose out on valuable conversions.
What are Some Examples of Companies Creating Product-Led Content?
Do you need some inspiration before creating product-led content for your SaaS business? Here are four examples for you.
#1 MADX
Whether we’re creating content for our SaaS clients or creating one for our blog, the first question we ask is, “Will this content be helpful to readers who come to the blog after visiting our product page?”
This helps us select only those topics that would be relevant to our audience and where we can naturally talk about our services.
For example, look at our blog and the topics we cover. Each category is closely related to our services.
#2 Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best examples of SaaS companies driving growth and revenue with strategic content marketing and product-led content.
They excel at creating powerful content because they make it mandatory for marketing team members to work in their customer support team for at least three months before moving to the marketing team.
This turns everyone into Ahrefs experts, and because they interact with customers, they know clearly about their pain points and what they would look for while consuming their content.
See how in their recent article, they naturally find ways to talk about their tools.
#3 Zapier
Zapier’s blog has many articles on “How to use ‘XYZ’ tools” or “Best ‘XYZ’ tools.” This is because Zapier’s main purpose is to allow its users to connect different apps and set up automated workflows.
For example, in this article on “How to use ChatGPT,” they talk about how you can create article summaries with Zapier’s OpenAI integration.
Even in their articles featuring different tools, they naturally insert CTAs about how Zapier integrates with each tool.
#4 Beardbrand
Product-led content is not limited to SaaS companies. Beardbrand proves the same. Every article on their blog scores high on business potential, and they gently introduce their tools in the content.
For example, in the article “Your Summer Beard Survival Guide,” they mention their products as a solution instead of just sharing tips.
You’ll find this consistency across most of their articles, which helps them bring a lot of traffic to their online store.
Streamline Your Company with Product-Led Content
Many marketers view content marketing as a way to increase brand awareness and other marketing channels, hoping to generate leads.
With product-led content, you can get the best of both worlds. You can educate your readers and demonstrate your product’s value and importance in solving their problems.
If you’re still confused about how to start or need guidance setting up your content marketing domain, MADX can help. Get in touch with our content experts today.
