What is “product-led content marketing�
As the name suggests the entire process of content creation plus content marketing with all the focus on the product is known as product-led content marketing.
Similarly, product-led growth refers to the growth achieved by a company with full focus on its product. A company achieves growth when it is able to drive a significant amount of real traffic consistently and most of that traffic converts into customers. And when that growth is product-led, it means that the traffic and customers are very much interested in the product. They love it and most importantly they are talking about it. When that happens, the product automatically gets more exposure.
It’s important to understand the fact that e-books and white papers are also products, but if people come to the site just to download the e-book, the white paper or even a podcast material for their personal use and then forget it, then that doesn’t do any good to the company or the creator of the product. So, when a user likes the e-book or white paper and likes to share with others, then that is considered as a good user activity because it contributes to the growth of the company or the creator of the product.
So, product-led content marketing involves the following steps.
Making the product the best solution to the target audience’s problems.
Educating the potential users on the exact benefits of the product and its proper usage.
Continuously improving the quality and efficiency of the product to make it more beneficial for the users.
Informing the existing customers about the improvement in the product quality and the additional benefits it has to offer. This will improve the customer retention rate.
In simpler terms, product-led content marketing is a suitable combination of content creation & marketing, product development and customer success. It is right at the intersection point of these three entities.
How to do product-led content marketing the right way
The goal here is to:
Create a product that is an irreplaceable solution to the customers’ problems.
And, create amazing content with that product and help it reach out to its targeted audience.
We will learn how to do product-led content marketing the right way and achieve growth in the following 5 steps.
Step #1: Select a problem that troubles your customers.
You are not just creating a product for your customers, but providing a solution to them. The first step of product-led content marketing is to find an issue or a problem that troubles your target customers a lot. They are very much worried but cannot find a solution. If you do the proper research and analysis based on data and statistics, then you should easily discover at least a couple of problems that trouble your customers. Problems are always going to be there either in visible or in hidden form, you simply have to discover them and bring to the notice if they are hidden. If there are a couple of issues or problems you have discovered, make sure to select one of them that your product is able to solve. This one problem has to be a big headache for your customers. Discovery is a really important step.
Step #2: Develop your product to be the best solution for the problem, and brainstorm content ideas.
Once you have discovered a problem that is a real headache for your customers, start putting effort into developing a product that solves the issue. Make sure the product you are developing is able to provide the best solution to the problem. Again, a good amount of research would be useful during developing your product.
Since we are talking about product-led content marketing, you should put equal amount of focus on developing the value of your product and creating excellent content to promote your product. But before you create content, it’s essential to find out some great content ideas. Brainstorming helps you in finding out great content ideas.
Your brainstorming would be based on three important factors: (i) What your audience or customers care about, (ii) What value your business provides, and (iii) How your product is different from others.
The next step is to create content based on the content ideas you have chosen.
Step #3: Start creating the best content to promote your product
Once you have made up your mind about the content ideas, it’s time to actually create the content. Just before you begin writing your content, make a short note of the features of your product and its value propositions that you would include in the content.
Whether you are writing an article or creating an infographic post, or making a video, it’s important to find a way to naturally include the features and value propositions of your product in the content. The target audience must find your content interesting, user-friendly and valuable.
That has to be the aim.
If your audience comes to your content page and finds no value or info or help, then your content fails to make an impression. Your content might not satisfy all of your audience, but if it has the power of helping even some of them, then that would be considered as a good job.
There will be some that will come to see your product, like it and use it. If the product has genuine value and the content has the ability to represent the product’s benefits, then you get repeat customers. When that happens, your product-led content marketing turns out to be a big success.
Step #4: Promote the content so the product can reach out to your potential customers
In the previous step we discussed how you can create good quality content and how to measure the success of your content creation. We learned that when your product has genuine value and your content has the ability to market the product effectively, your product-led content marketing is said to be a huge success.
In this step, we will learn how you can promote your content so that your target audience gets to know about your product and its benefits.
There are many different types of content marketing and promotion techniques, and you can actually use several of those. Feel free experiment on a regular basis as experimentation helps discover more good ways of content promotion.
I’m sure you’re aware of the power of social media. Make use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. and even YouTube (if you can make videos to share the info and the benefits of your product). Depending on your product and industry, you may choose a few of the social media networks as not all of them are good for all industries. See what works best for you.
Optimize your product pages or content pages for search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great marketing technique to rank your pages on the popular search engines and drive traffic to the pages. You may use a professional SEO agency’s SEO and Social media service and get enough time to focus on developing your product and content. If you’re looking for a good SEO agency for that job, SEO Extent could be an excellent option for you.
Step #5: Encourage your customers to engage in activities and leave feedback
You have done all the hard work of creating an awesome product and marketing it through great content. You have also done a good job of reaching out to your potential customers.
But wait… it’s not over yet.
You have to connect with your customers, interact with them and encourage them to engage in more and more activities on your product page. You may not ask them to buy the product straight away. Just request them to engage with your product and do certain activities. Their feedback is of utmost importance in the initial days of your product’s life, so request for feedback all the time.
There are companies that don’t care about customer feedback, which means they are not serious about growth.
There are companies that take feedback from their customers but show little or no interest in working on their product.
And there are companies out there who genuinely care for their customers and are very serious about their product and business growth. They take feedback, work on it and keep improving their product’s effectiveness all the time. Their product offers value to their customers and earns trust. Those are the companies that stay in the business for long-term. Make sure you’re one of them.
So, these were my tips and suggestions for a successful product-led content marketing strategy. If you are running a product, make sure your product is awesome and it is an irreplaceable solution for an important problem your customers are facing. Do you think you can add anything more to this article? Please drop your suggestions in the comments below.