#28: PLC = TLC
Are you creating product-led content yet?
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Are you creating product-led content yet?
That is: are you integrating your brand’s product into all of the content you create?
Product can be ‘woven’ into content a million different ways. It can be central to the story told in a blog post, or an understated subhead at the bottom of a post.
Let’s look at how to start updating your existing content library with a product-led approach.
(If you’re looking for the basics of product-led content principles, folks like Fio Dossetto have written great primers, plus check out Amanda Natividad’s podcast episode on this topic. Links at the bottom.)
🪡 How product is integrated into existing content
You don’t need anything to get started with product-led content.
But you can incorporate assets that are already lying around: templates, demo videos, screenshots of your interface, data that you have about how something is done (or should be done) that can help illustrate the correct ways to do things.
- In a ‘How to’ post, show how to do it – in your product. Or add a template that can be used within your product (Airtable does a great job of this.)
- If it’s a ‘What is…’ post, use your product to show how your company thinks about the topic. If your product is thoughtfully-designed, and can quickly help a beginner get up to speed, reflect that design in your content.
- For anything you write, think about how the product itself might support the ideas behind the article.
But what about posts where it’s not clear what the connection to your product is?
You might have an app that is hard to relate to this blog post. But maybe you also have a whitepaper or newsletter that can help readers, and that’s easy to include?
- “Thinking about replacing Slack? Our guide shows you all the things to consider.”
- “If you’re just learning double-entry bookkeeping, our newsletter has helpful tips every week.”
- “Our app automates all of these steps so you can move on to more important things. It’s free to try.”
🏄🏼 What you can do
Rather than adding product-led material to every single blog in your library, figure out which ones show the most potential. This will be determined by traffic and engagement metrics.
✅ Revisit your pages with the high engagement stats (stars and wallflowers).
Since these pages are already performing well, you’ll want to make small edits. They’ll improve conversion rates without gambling with the page’s overall performance.
✅ Revisit posts that have low-engagement but high traffic (sloths).
Consider a more thorough revision, which allows you to integrate a product-led approach. In other words: figure out a new story for this topic.
Since these pages are not yet really engaging readers, this is an opportunity to improve them all-around.
If you’re struggling to build new stories in this way, it might be time to pay a visit to your product team. They can get you more comfortable with the ins and outs, use cases, and strengths of a product, which will really help you tell better stories.
Moving forward, make it a policy of devoting at least one subhead in every post to a (relevant, useful) discussion of your product.
And, as always, make sure your internal links, calls to action, and distribution plans are optimized for conversion too!
📚 Further reading
xoxo, Ercule