You’ve spent two years building your content engine. Your blog ranks on page one for key terms. Your Domain Rating is respectable. Your topical authority is established.
Yet when leadership asks, “How much revenue is our blog generating?” the answer is uncomfortable.
The data tells a frustrating story:
50,000+ monthly visitors
Page one rankings for 200+ keywords
10,000+ newsletter subscribers
But minimal demo requests, low trial conversions, and long sales cycles
You’ve solved the distribution problem. Now you need to solve the conversion problem.
The answer isn’t more traffic, better SEO, or more frequent publishing. The answer is product-led content—a fundamentally different approach to content strategy that transforms high-traffic articles from educational resources into revenue-generating assets.
The Conversion Gap: Why Your Content Drives Traffic But Not Revenue
Before understanding the solution, you need to understand why your current approach isn’t working.
Your Content Educates But Doesn’t Sell
Traditional content teaches prospects about topics related to your space. An article about “employee onboarding best practices” educates readers about onboarding. It doesn’t show them how your product solves their specific onboarding challenges.
Prospects leave your site informed but not convinced. They’ve learned something valuable, but they haven’t learned why they should choose your product over the dozen alternatives they’re also researching.
The knowledge gap is closed, but the purchase decision isn’t advanced.
Your Product Appears as an Afterthought (If At All)
Scroll to the bottom of your highest-traffic articles. You’ll likely find:
A generic CTA mentioning your product
A “Learn More” button
A brief paragraph about how “our solution helps with [topic]”
By the time readers reach these CTAs, they’ve already found what they needed. Most don’t even scroll that far. Those who do see exactly what these elements are: advertisements tacked onto useful content.
Readers have trained themselves to ignore these afterthoughts just as they ignore banner ads. The product isn’t part of the solution—it’s an interruption after the solution.
Your Content Attracts Unqualified Traffic
High-volume keywords bring traffic. But not all traffic is valuable. Your analytics might show thousands of visitors, but dig deeper and you’ll find:
Students researching papers
Job seekers learning industry concepts
Users of competing products doing general research
Small businesses when you target enterprise
International visitors when you sell domestically
People in awareness stage when you need decision-stage buyers
These visitors boost your metrics but provide zero business value. Your content isn’t pre-qualifying leads—it’s casting a wide net and hoping.
Your Content Doesn’t Address the Buying Journey
B2B SaaS purchases are complex decisions. Research shows 90% of B2B buyers consume 2-7 pieces of content before purchasing. They’re:
Comparing features across 5-10 alternatives
Evaluating whether solutions fit their specific use cases
Calculating ROI and justifying budget
Seeking proof that your product solves their exact problem
Traditional content focuses on top-of-funnel education, leaving prospects to figure out product fit on their own. Your content explains what SaaS management is, but not how your specific product manages SaaS better than alternatives.
By the time prospects reach your sales team, they’re asking foundational questions your content should have already answered.
The Result: Vanity Metrics Without Business Impact
Your dashboard looks impressive. Your business metrics don’t.
You have traffic without trials, engagement without demos, awareness without acquisition. You’ve essentially built a media company, not a demand generation engine.
The gap between content performance and business performance reveals a fundamental misalignment: your content strategy optimizes for pageviews when your business needs pipeline.
What is Product-Led Content?
Product-led content (PLC) fundamentally reimagines the relationship between your content and your product. Instead of treating them as separate entities—content over here, product mentions at the end—PLC weaves your product contextually into the problem-solving narrative.
The core principle: Your product becomes the hero of the customer’s journey from problem to solution.
The Defining Characteristics of Product-Led Content
1. Contextual Integration, Not Appended Mentions
In PLC, your product appears exactly when readers need it—at the moment they’re learning about a problem it solves.
Traditional approach:
2,000 words explaining employee onboarding challenges
Solutions discussed in generic terms
At the end: “Our platform helps with onboarding. Book a demo.”
Product-led approach:
Same onboarding challenges discussed
When explaining “how to automate tool access,” your Employee App Store feature is introduced naturally
Screenshots show exactly how it works in context
The product is the answer, not an advertisement
The integration doesn’t interrupt the reading experience—it completes it.
2. Demonstration, Not Description
PLC shows your product in action rather than describing it in vague terms.
Traditional content says: “Our platform streamlines employee onboarding with intuitive automation and seamless integrations.”
Product-led content shows:
Annotated screenshot of the actual interface
Step-by-step workflow: “New hire clicks ‘Request Access’ → Manager approves in Slack → Access granted automatically in 2 minutes”
Specific metrics: “Reduces average onboarding time from 47 IT tickets over 2 weeks to 3 self-service clicks in under 5 minutes”
Readers see the product solving the problem, not just claims that it does.
3. Hyper-Specific, Not Generic
Rather than broad articles about industry topics, PLC zooms in on the specific use cases, problems, and workflows your product addresses.
Generic topic: “Employee Onboarding Best Practices” Product-led topic: “How to Give New Employees Access to 200+ Tools Without Creating IT Bottlenecks”
The second article has lower search volume but dramatically higher conversion potential because it speaks to a specific, urgent problem your product solves.
4. Natural Solution Positioning
Because the product appears as an organic answer to the problem being discussed, reader resistance stays low.
The advice is genuinely helpful. The product makes the advice actionable. There’s no hard sell, just a clear connection between problem and solution.
When executed well, readers think: “This is exactly what I need” rather than “They’re trying to sell me something.”
What Product-Led Content Looks Like In Practice
Let’s examine a real example: Zluri’s article “Ways of Giving Quick Access to Tools While Onboarding Employees.”
The structure:
Problem setup: IT teams get overwhelmed with access requests during onboarding (reader nods—this is their pain)
Traditional solutions explored: Manual provisioning, spreadsheet tracking, ticketing systems (reader recognizes these insufficient approaches)
Better approach introduced: Employee App Store concept explained (reader sees the logic)
Product in action: Screenshot of Zluri’s Employee App Store with annotations showing how it works (reader sees the solution)
Specific benefits: “New hires self-serve access to pre-approved tools. IT approves exceptions only. 47 average tickets eliminated per hire.” (reader calculates their ROI)
Natural CTA: “See how Zluri’s Employee App Store works in your environment” (reader is curious, not resistant)
The product reference doesn’t feel forced. It feels like the obvious answer to the problem the article addresses.
The Spectrum: From Generic to Product-Led
Not all content needs maximum product integration. PLC exists on a spectrum:
Light mention (TOFU):
Article about broad industry trends
Brief mention: “Solutions like Zluri are helping companies solve this”
Appropriate for awareness-stage content
Contextual integration (MOFU):
Article about specific problems
Product introduced as one solution with brief explanation
Screenshots or short demos
Appropriate for consideration-stage content
Product as hero (BOFU):
Article about solving exact use case
Product deeply woven throughout
Detailed demonstrations, comparisons, workflows
Appropriate for decision-stage content
The key is matching product integration intensity to reader intent and funnel stage.
Why Product-Led Content Solves Your Conversion Problem
For companies with established content operations, PLC isn’t about starting over. It’s about optimizing what you’ve built to actually drive business outcomes.
Converts Existing Traffic at Higher Rates
You don’t need more traffic. You need your existing traffic to convert better.
PLC typically improves conversion rates 2-3x because it pre-qualifies and educates prospects before they ever reach your sales team. When someone requests a demo after reading a product-led article, they already understand:
Whether your product solves their specific problem
How your key features work
Why your approach differs from competitors
What results they can expect
This means higher-quality leads who convert faster and close at higher rates. Same traffic, more revenue—no additional SEO investment required.
Shortens Sales Cycles by 30-40%
Your sales team currently spends the first 30-60 minutes of every demo explaining product basics: what it does, how it works, why it matters.
With PLC, prospects arrive at sales conversations already educated. Sales calls transform from “let me explain our product” to “let’s discuss your specific implementation.”
When your content handles education and qualification, your sales team focuses on closing, not teaching.
Increases Close Rates by 20-50%
PLC-educated leads don’t just close faster—they close more frequently.
These leads close at higher rates because they’ve already convinced themselves. They’ve seen the product solve their problem. They’ve understood its value. They’ve compared it to alternatives.
By the time they talk to sales, they’re looking for confirmation and pricing, not persuasion.
Compare this to leads from traditional content who show up to demos uncertain whether your product is right for them. Your sales team must overcome skepticism, explain basics, and compete with half-formed impressions from competitor research.
PLC gives your sales team prospects who want to be convinced, not prospects who need to be convinced.
Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost
The combination of higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and improved close rates creates dramatic improvement in unit economics:
Lower CAC from efficiency: When more traffic converts, each customer costs less to acquire. When sales cycles shorten, you close more deals with the same sales headcount. When close rates improve, you waste less time on deals that won’t close.
Higher LTV from better fit: PLC doesn’t just convert more leads—it converts better leads. Prospects who understand exactly what your product does become customers who actually use your product and stick around. They have realistic expectations and experience faster time-to-value.
Most companies see 25-40% CAC reduction within 6-12 months of implementing PLC, with no decrease in customer quality.
Creates Differentiation in Crowded Markets
In competitive B2B SaaS markets, prospects evaluate 5-10 alternatives. Traditional content makes you sound like everyone else because everyone writes the same generic articles about industry topics.
PLC creates differentiation because most competitors don’t do it:
Transparency builds trust. By openly showing how your product works—features, workflows, interfaces—you appear more credible than competitors hiding behind vague marketing claims.
Narrative control positions you strategically. PLC lets you tell your complete story: your philosophy, your approach, why you built features the way you did. Consider Zluri’s article “How Zluri’s Discovery Engine Works”—it communicates product philosophy and technical approach in ways a 30-minute demo never could.
Your rankings become competitive moats. When your high-ranking articles show prospects exactly how your product solves their problems—with screenshots, workflows, and specific features—competitors can’t easily replicate that advantage. They can write similar articles, but their articles promote their products, not yours.
Improves Lead Quality Across All Metrics
Better leads mean better business outcomes. PLC improves lead quality across every dimension:
Higher intent: People who request demos after reading product-led content have higher purchase intent. They’re not browsing—they’re evaluating.
Better fit: The specificity of PLC content naturally filters prospects. Someone reading “How to Automate SaaS Procurement for 500+ Employee Companies” is more likely to be your target customer than someone reading “What is SaaS Management?”
More informed: PLC-educated leads ask better questions, have realistic expectations, and understand your differentiation. Your sales team has substantive conversations instead of basic explanations.
Faster time-to-value: Because prospects understand the product before purchasing, they onboard faster and reach “aha moments” quicker. This improves retention and reduces early churn.
When you’re generating 1,000 leads per month that convert at 2%, improving lead quality to convert at 4% doubles your revenue without increasing traffic.
What Product-Led Content Is NOT
To execute PLC effectively, you need to understand what it isn’t:
NOT Product Announcements or Feature Lists
PLC isn’t:
“Introducing our new dashboard redesign”
“10 features that make our product great”
Release notes dressed up as blog posts
These are product marketing, not product-led content. They serve a purpose, but they don’t solve prospects’ problems or demonstrate value in context.
NOT Sales Pages Disguised as Articles
PLC isn’t thin content built around keywords with heavy product promotion:
“Looking for employee onboarding software? Try our platform!”
Articles that are really just long-form sales copy
Content that prioritizes promotion over education
If readers feel like they’re being sold to rather than helped, you’re doing PLC wrong.
NOT Generic Content With Product Mentions
Adding a “Our product can help with this” paragraph at the end of traditional articles isn’t PLC. Neither is:
Find-and-replace mentions of “solutions” with your product name
Adding a screenshot without context
Forcing product mentions where they don’t naturally fit
PLC requires rethinking the entire article structure around demonstrating your product’s value, not retrofitting mentions into existing articles.
NOT Just For BOFU Content
While PLC is most powerful at bottom-of-funnel, it applies across the funnel. Even TOFU content can integrate light product mentions when contextually appropriate.
The key is matching integration intensity to reader intent, not avoiding product mentions until prospects are decision-ready.
When to Use Product-Led Content
PLC works best when:
Your Product is Market-Ready
You’ve made sales to companies outside your network. You have customers using the product successfully. You can showcase real features, not mockups or vaporware.
If you’re still in MVP stage or haven’t found product-market fit, focus on positioning first.
Your Positioning is Clear
You know your unique value proposition. You can articulate why customers choose you over alternatives. You understand which problems you solve better than competitors.
If you can’t clearly differentiate yourself, PLC will magnify that positioning problem, not solve it.
You Have Content Authority Already
PLC is most effective when you already have rankings and traffic. You’re optimizing existing assets for conversion, not building from scratch.
If you’re just starting content marketing, build authority first with traditional approaches, then layer in PLC as you mature.
You’re Targeting MOFU and BOFU Keywords
PLC works best for topics where readers are actively solving problems, not just learning about concepts.
High PLC potential:
“How to automate employee onboarding”
“Best SaaS management platform for enterprise”
“Zluri vs. Torii comparison”
Low PLC potential:
“What is SaaS?”
“History of enterprise software”
“Future of work trends”
Focus PLC efforts on content targeting prospects in consideration and decision stages.
What Results to Expect
When companies with established content operations transition to PLC, typical results include:
60-90 days:
2-3x improvement in demo request rates from blog traffic
Higher MQL-to-SQL conversion as content pre-qualifies better
Sales team reports leads are more informed
90 days – 6 months:
30-40% reduction in sales cycle length
20-50% improvement in close rates from content-sourced leads
Clear revenue attribution to specific articles
6-12 months:
25-40% reduction in customer acquisition cost
Sustainable competitive moats in high-value content
Content becomes measurable revenue driver, not cost center
These improvements happen without increasing traffic—they come entirely from converting your existing traffic more effectively.
The Strategic Shift: From Media Company to Revenue Engine
You’ve spent two years proving you can attract prospects. That’s an achievement most companies never accomplish.
But traffic without conversion is incomplete success. You’ve built the distribution channel. Now you need to optimize it for the outcome that matters: revenue.
Product-led content transforms your existing investment in content from a cost center measured by pageviews into a revenue driver measured by closed deals. It takes your established authority and rankings and weaponizes them for business growth.
The companies that figure this out don’t just get better marketing results. They build sustainable competitive advantages because their content educates prospects while simultaneously positioning their product as the obvious solution.
Your competitors can copy your features, but they can’t replicate years of authoritative content that’s deeply integrated with product-led narratives.
The question isn’t whether your content can drive business outcomes. The question is whether you’re ready to evolve beyond traditional content marketing to make it happen.
After years of building product-led content strategies for B2B SaaS companies, I can predict which comparison content will fail before a single word gets written. The warning signs appear in the discovery phase: feature parity, vague ICPs, and no defensible differentiators.
Most content strategists see these red flags and push forward anyway. The keywords are there. Comparison content is proven. Surely, great execution can overcome weak positioning.
It can’t. And the sooner you admit this, the sooner we stop wasting resources on comparison content that was doomed from the strategy phase.
The Three Bad Options When Differentiation Is Weak
When your product lacks clear differentiation, comparison content forces you into one of three paths—all of them problematic.
Option 1: Stretch the Truth or Exaggerate Differences
This is the most tempting path, and the most dangerous.
You start looking for ANY differences you can spin as advantages. Maybe the competitor has a feature that does X, and your product does X slightly differently. You present this as a major distinction. Or you cherry-pick specific use cases where the product performs marginally better and present them as universal truths.
Example scenarios you’ll recognize:
For example, you might highlight “24/7 customer support” when the competitor also has it, just phrased differently. Or you claim “enterprise-grade security” when both products have the same SOC 2 compliance. You position a UI difference as a fundamental UX advantage. You exaggerate the importance of a minor feature that few users actually need.
Why this fails:
B2B buyers aren’t stupid. They do extensive research. They’ll compare your claims against the competitor’s website, reviews, and other comparison articles. When they catch the exaggeration, you loses all credibility—not just for that article, but for their brand.
Even worse, if the competitor notices, you’ve opened yourself up to legal risk. Comparative advertising has strict rules about truthfulness, and misleading comparisons can result in trademark disputes or false advertising claims.
Option 2: Write Bland “They’re Pretty Similar” Content
This is the honest approach, but it’s commercially useless.
You acknowledge that both products are functionally similar. You list features side by side, and most rows have checkmarks for both columns. You conclude with something like, “Both are solid options—it really depends on your specific needs.”
Why this fails:
Someone searching for “Product A vs Product B” is looking for a reason to choose one over the other. If you essentially tell them “they’re the same,” you’ve wasted their time—and your budget.
Even if this content ranks well, it provides no unique value. It won’t convert because it gives no reason to choose your product. And it certainly won’t justify the retainer investment.
Worse, if you’re truly being neutral, you might accidentally make the competitor look better by showcasing their strengths fairly.
Option 3: Highlight Superficial Differences
This is the middle ground that most agencies take, but buyers see through it immediately.
You focus on differences that exist but don’t really matter: slightly different navigation patterns, user interface preferences, or other subjective elements that vary by user.
Example scenarios:
For example, you write “Our dashboard is more intuitive” (which is subjective and unprovable). Or you claim “We have a modern, clean design” (which is aesthetic preference). You say “Our onboarding is simpler” (which is debatable). You focus on integrations when both products have the major ones covered.
Why this fails:
Buyers are making decisions based on capabilities, ROI, and strategic fit—not whether the buttons are blue or green.
Surface-level differences don’t address real business problems. When you build your comparison case on superficial points, you signal that there aren’t any substantial differences worth mentioning.
The Core Scenarios That Create This Problem
We’ve identified four main situations that lead to weak differentiation and make comparison content nearly impossible to execute well.
Scenario 1: Feature Parity
This is increasingly common in mature SaaS markets. Your product and the competitor’s product do fundamentally the same things. They both have:
The same core features
Similar integration ecosystems
Comparable pricing tiers
Equivalent customer support offerings
Similar security and compliance certifications
Why feature parity happens:
Markets mature and best practices converge. Customers expect certain baseline features. Investors push for feature completeness. Product teams copy successful competitors.
For example, take project management tools. Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, and dozens of others all offer tasks, boards, timelines, automations, and reporting. The core functionality is nearly identical.
When you’re working with a company that has feature parity with competitors, creating honest comparison content becomes an exercise in finding distinctions that barely exist. You’re forced to zoom in on minor implementation differences that most users won’t notice or care about.
Scenario 2: No Clear ICP Focus
Many products, especially in their early stages or when chasing growth, try to serve everyone. They position themselves as the solution for freelancers AND enterprises, for marketing teams AND development teams, for startups AND Fortune 500s.
The comparison content problem:
When someone searches for alternatives, they’re usually looking for something better suited to THEIR specific situation. If you can’t say “we’re built specifically for X type of company” or “we specialize in Y use case,” you can’t give searchers a compelling reason to choose them.
For example, consider a CRM that tries to serve both B2B and B2C, both inside sales and field sales, both small teams and large enterprises. Every comparison becomes muddy because you can’t confidently say who they’re BEST for.
The competitor might not be specifically positioned either, which makes the comparison even less useful. You end up with comparison content that essentially says, “We both do lots of things for lots of people.”
Scenario 3: Weak Positioning
Sometimes the product DOES have differentiation, but the company hasn’t clearly articulated it. They know they’re different but haven’t codified:
What makes them unique
Who benefits most from those unique attributes
How to communicate that difference simply
Signs of weak positioning you’ll spot in discovery:
Marketing messages that sound like they could describe any competitor
Frequent pivots in messaging as the team searches for what resonates
Sales explaining the product differently than marketing does
Inability to complete the sentence: “Unlike [competitor], we…”
The comparison content trap:
You’re trying to write comparison content before you have done the strategic work of positioning. You’re expected to magically articulate a differentiation that the entire organization hasn’t figured out yet.
This results in generic comparison content that tries to be everything to everyone and ends up resonating with no one.
Scenario 4: Commoditized Market
Some markets are just genuinely commoditized. The products do essentially the same thing, at similar price points, with similar quality. Value is based more on relationships, sales process, or marginal optimizations than on fundamental product differences.
Examples:
For example, basic email service providers compete primarily on price and reliability. Web hosting services differentiate mostly on customer support. Many infrastructure and DevOps tools have nearly identical feature sets. Basic productivity software tools all offer the same core capabilities.
In these markets, companies compete on:
Price (race to the bottom)
Customer service quality
Brand and trust
Sales relationships
Marginal performance improvements
The comparison content reality:
When you’re working in a commoditized market, comparison content can still work—but only if you’re honest about the commodity nature and compete on the dimensions that actually matter (price, support, reliability).
Most companies aren’t willing to admit they’re in a commodity market, so they push you to manufacture differentiation for comparison content, which brings us back to the three bad options.
Why People Search “Product A vs Product B”
To understand why weak differentiation is fatal for comparison content, you need to understand the searcher’s intent.
Someone searching comparison queries is typically:
At a decision point: They’ve narrowed down to 2-4 options and need to make a final choice
Looking for meaningful differences: They want to understand which product better fits their specific situation, budget, or use case
Trying to avoid mistakes: They want to be confident they’re choosing wisely and won’t regret the decision or need to switch later
Seeking validation: They may already be leaning one direction and want confirmation, or they’re genuinely torn and need a tiebreaker
What they’re NOT looking for:
Generic feature lists they can find on each product’s website
Marketing fluff and buzzwords
Surface-level observations anyone could make
Biased content that’s obviously promotional
When your product lacks differentiation, you can’t satisfy this search intent authentically. You can’t answer the fundamental question: “Which should I choose and why?”
The Tough Reality: Content Cannot Create Differentiation
This is the hard truth that many content strategists don’t want to accept: Content is an amplifier, not a creator of differentiation.
Great content can:
✓ Articulate existing differentiation clearly
✓ Educate buyers about why differences matter
✓ Position strengths in the most favorable light
✓ Make complex differences easy to understand
✓ Connect product capabilities to business outcomes
Great content cannot:
✗ Manufacture differentiation that doesn’t exist
✗ Convince buyers that similar products are dramatically different
✗ Override the reality of what the product actually does
✗ Create strategic positioning through clever copywriting
✗ Substitute for genuine product innovation
Think of content as a microphone. It makes your voice louder, but if you have nothing meaningful to say, a louder voice just means more people hear nothing.
Comparison content specifically requires substance to work. You need real, meaningful differences to write about. Without them, you’re building on sand.
What You Actually Needs Before You Write Comparison Content
If you find yourself in this situation—building a comparison content strategy but lacking clear differentiation—here’s what needs to happen FIRST:
1. Clear Positioning Strategy
Positioning is the strategic work of defining:
What they are: Their category and what they do
Who they’re for: Their ideal customer profile
What makes them different: Their unique value proposition
Why it matters: The problems they solve better than alternatives
The positioning work involves:
Market research and competitive analysis
Customer interviews and win/loss analysis
Identifying underserved segments or use cases
Making strategic trade-offs about who they WON’T serve
Aligning product, marketing, and sales on the positioning
Outputs you need:
Positioning statement the whole company agrees on
Clear competitive differentiators
Messaging framework that cascades from positioning
Value propositions for different buyer personas
This is not a content project. This is a strategic initiative that requires leadership buy-in, cross-functional collaboration, and often external expertise. It might take months.
But without it, your comparison content strategy will always be weak.
2. Defined ICP and Target Audience
You need to know specifically who your product is best for. This means:
Firmographic clarity:
Company size (employees, revenue)
Industry or vertical
Geography
Growth stage
Use case specificity:
Primary jobs-to-be-done
Specific workflows they excel at
Problems they solve better than alternatives
Success metrics and outcomes
Buyer persona details:
Roles and titles
Pain points and motivations
Decision-making process
Evaluation criteria
Why this matters for comparison content:
When you know the ICP, you can write comparison content that says: “If you’re [specific type of company] trying to [specific outcome], here’s why we’re better than [competitor].”
The narrower and more specific the ICP, the easier comparison content becomes. You’re not trying to win everyone; you’re trying to win the right people.
For example, instead of “We’re a project management tool,” you position as “We’re the project management tool for creative agencies running client projects.” Now your comparison content can focus on things like client collaboration, creative review workflows, and time tracking for billing—dimensions that matter to agencies.
3. Genuine Product Differentiators (Even If Narrow)
You need something real that’s different and better for the target audience. This doesn’t have to be revolutionary, but it does need to be:
Meaningful: It solves a real problem or creates tangible value
Defensible: It’s based on truth, not spin
Relevant: The target audience cares about it
Sustainable: It’s not easily copied immediately
Types of genuine differentiators:
Specialization: You focus on a specific use case or industry while competitors are generalist.
For example, you’re a CRM built specifically for real estate agents versus general CRMs that try to serve everyone.
Technical approach: Your underlying technology or methodology is fundamentally different.
For example, you use AI-powered automation while competitors rely on rules-based workflows.
Integration ecosystem: You have deeper, better integrations with tools the ICP uses.
For example, you have native Salesforce integration while competitors only offer Zapier connections.
Workflow optimization: You’ve designed the product around a specific workflow the ICP uses.
For example, your tool is built for the specific way that law firms handle client intake.
Performance or scale: You handle volumes or speeds that competitors can’t match.
For example, you process real-time data while competitors batch process hourly.
Pricing model: Your pricing structure is fundamentally different and better for the ICP.
For example, you charge per outcome instead of per user.
Customer experience: You’ve built a genuinely superior experience in a specific dimension.
For example, your onboarding gets users to value in 5 minutes versus a competitor’s 2 hours.
The narrow focus advantage:
Notice that most strong differentiators are NARROW. You’re better at something specific, for someone specific. This is not a weakness—it’s a strength.
When you try to position your product as better at everything for everyone, you end up with content that’s better at nothing for no one. But when you can say “we’re clearly better at X for Y,” your comparison content writes itself.
What To Do If You’re Already In This Situation
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking: “Too late. The strategy’s already sold, and we definitely don’t have clear positioning.”
Here are your options:
Option A: Push Back (Recommended)
Be honest with your CEO/founder. Explain that comparison content requires clear differentiation to be effective. Present the three bad options and their consequences.
Propose doing the positioning work first, even if it’s a lightweight version. This might include:
Customer interviews to find what they value about the product
Competitive research to identify gaps
Internal workshops to align on positioning
Win/loss analysis to understand why they win or lose deals
Script: “I want to create comparison content that actually converts. To do that effectively, we need to first align on what makes you different and who you’re best for. Otherwise, we risk creating content that either damages credibility or simply doesn’t drive results.”
Option B: Narrow the Scope
If you can’t tackle full positioning, narrow the comparison content focus:
Write comparison content for a SPECIFIC use case where you know they’re strong
Create comparison content targeting a SPECIFIC buyer persona that loves the product
Focus on one aspect where they genuinely are different (even if it’s not the whole product)
For example, instead of “Product A vs Product B” (broad), write “Product A vs Product B for E-commerce Brands” (narrow). You can find differentiation in specificity even when broad comparison is difficult.
Option C: Take a Different Content Approach
Sometimes comparison content just isn’t the right play. Consider alternative content types:
Educational content: Teach buyers how to evaluate products in the category without directly comparing
Use case content: Show how the product solves specific problems, which naturally positions it
Customer stories: Let customers explain in their own words why they chose it
Category creation: Position the product in a different category where it can win
Option D: Be Radically Honest
Some companies have found success with brutally honest comparison content that acknowledges similarities while still being helpful:
Openly admit where competitors are better
Explain the specific situations where you’re the better choice
Give genuine guidance about how to choose
Build trust through transparency
For example: “Honestly, if you need [X feature], Competitor is better. But if you’re [specific scenario], here’s why we’re the better fit…”
This approach can work, but it requires executive buy-in for a transparency-first brand strategy.
You Can’t Write Your Way Out of This
Creating comparison content when you lack clear differentiation is like trying to win a debate when you don’t have a position. You can use rhetorical tricks, speak louder, and gesticulate wildly—but you’re not going to be convincing.
The uncomfortable truth is that many B2B SaaS products genuinely are similar to their competitors. The technology has matured, best practices have converged, and the markets are efficient. This is reality.
But similarity doesn’t mean sameness. Every product is used by real customers who chose it for reasons. Your job as a content strategist is to:
Discover what those reasons actually are
Help articulate them clearly as positioning
Amplify them through content
Until you’ve done steps 1 and 2, step 3 is premature.
The good news: This positioning work makes ALL your marketing more effective—not just comparison content. It clarifies messaging, focuses the product roadmap, and helps sales close deals.
The question to ask yourself: Are you recommending comparison content because it’s genuinely the right strategy, or because it seems easier than doing the hard work of figuring out what actually makes your product different?
If it’s the latter, step back. Do the positioning work first. Your comparison content—and your entire content strategy—will be infinitely better for it.
Remember: Content amplifies differentiation. It cannot create it.
Don’t try to content-strategy your way out of a positioning problem. Solve the positioning problem first, then let your content do what it does best: make the right voice heard by the right people.
Most marketers know that at any time, only a small portion of the target audience in the market is actively looking for their product. Still, most marketers make the mistake of prioritizing that segment of the target audience that is not ready to buy when starting content marketing.
For content marketing purposes, we define in-market audience as that portion of your target audience ready to buy the product you sell.
In-market audience is a common term in performance marketing (i.e., marketers who run paid ads), but I’ve never seen anyone using this concept when it comes to content marketing.
Naturally, the search volume of the queries representing your in-market audience is a small fraction (< 5%) of the volume of the head keywords.
Head keywords means the main terms for your product.
For example,
if you sell a employee engagement tool, like Empuls, Lattice, so the head keyword would be ’employee engagement’
if you sell a compliance automation tool, like Sprinto, Drata, etc, the head keywords would be ‘compliance automation’, ISO 27001, GDPR, SOC 2, etc
if you sell a product analytics tool, like MixPanel, Amplitude, etc, the head keywords would be ‘product analytics’, etc
The low volume of keywords of the in-market audience makes them less attractive for most in-house content marketers and agencies.
They follow this approach for content prioritization:
First, they type the most common keywords in the SEO tool like Ahref, Semrush, Moz, etc.
Then, they filter keywords with high volume and low KD
The driving factor for topic selection is keyword volume. Keyword difficulty (KD) is the second factor that acts as a guardrail for not going after too competitive keywords while still optimizing for the volume.
They think the more the traffic, the higher the number of conversions.
Let’s take VWO (a tool for running AB tests), for example.
With the driving factors being keyword volume, most content marketers and SEO will prioritize the keyword “AB testing”.
Or some smart search engine optimizers, knowing that it will be difficult to rank for the head keyword may apply a filter on KD (say 40) to find easy wins.
So, they will try to rank for terms such as ‘bayesian ab testing’ or ‘ab testing interview questions’.
To rank for this keyword, they will create something like “the ultimate guide to AB testing” or “the definitive guide to AB testing,” or “everything you need to know about AB testing.”
As you will hear from them, they are taking the funnel approach, also called the AIDA funnel. AIDA standards for awareness, interest, desire, and action.
The concept says, the consumer goes through different stages (awareness, interest, and desire) before they are ready to buy (take action.)
Awareness: The goal is to create awareness via these ultimate/definitive/beginners guides. These guides help you capture the prospects’ attention.
Interest: At this stage, the prospects are aware of the brand and the goal is to create interest in your product.
Desire: At the desire stage, the prospects are serious about making a decision but not sure whether to choose you or not.
Action: The action you expect them to take. It could be buying your product, filling up the lead or demo form, signing up for the free trial, etc.
Further, you will hear that this nurturing process happens over multiple weeks or months before they finally convert to leads or customers.
You may also hear other variations of the AIDA funnel, like the top of funnel (ToFu), middle of the funnel (MoFu), and bottom of funnel (BoFu)—but the concept is the same of taking the prospects through multiple stages to make them purchase-ready.
As marketing evolves, tactics like ToFu, MoFu, BoFu, or AIDA may change but what doesn’t change is the fundamental—go after people who are ready to purchase.
What is the Problem with Creating Content based on the Traditional (Keyword-Based) Approach?
Problem with this strategy: More traffic ≠ More leads
This would have been a good strategy if the goal was to drive website traffic but not generate qualified leads.
Most of the time, an increase in traffic is not correlated with an increase in leads.
The above thinking may lead to this kind of result.
Why is the above strategy bad?
Even if the funnel strategy works, this is not worth doing for early-stage startups. Because this process takes a long time, and startups cannot afford it.
The customer acquisition cost (CAC) also gets higher with this strategy because you are not optimizing for leads.
1. You need to wait for weeks or months before converting the traffic
Even if you manage to get eyeballs on your website, your traffic won’t convert. You won’t get leads and sign-ups with these kinds of content.
With head terms like ‘ab testing’, you are not attracting the right kind of people to your website. Instead of people looking to buy a solution, you end up attracting people who are more interested in the information.
Founders don’t realize that educating your target market requires a lot of budget. This is not the job of startups. It requires changing people’s behavior, is very costly, and is generally done by large corporations or happens due to government regulations or major events, like pandemics.
Many startups falsely believe that they are category creators when they are not. Even if there are no or very few direct competitors, there are always traditional solutions. The old way of doing the job.
It is much easier to sell when there is demand for the category solutions because they are already sold off the importance of the category. You just need to convince them on why they need to choose you.
A problem faced by VP marketing: 10,000 traffic but not giving any leads
Once, a VP of marketing and growth reached out to us. At that time, they were selling a product that helps HR implement OKR in their companies.
They were getting 10,000 monthly traffic, which is a good number considering it just took them a year to reach this place.
But their problem was that the traffic was not converting at all. When I checked out their blog, I found most of their content was produced for creating awareness.
For example, an article was titled“A beginner guide to OKR.“
When I asked him the reason for creating this article, his response was that it was meant to drive awareness.
My reply was: “Do you really need make CHRO aware about what OKR is?” All CHROs already know this. You don’t need to make them aware of what it is.
2. Even if you get the leads, you need to chase them
Another issue with the traditional keyword-based approach for prioritizing content is that these content pieces don’t generate qualified leads.
Note that we are not saying to avoid creating awareness content at all. This is just a prioritization issue. We are saying, don’t start with awareness content when starting your content marketing operations.
Even if you get leads from your awareness content, the people who fill up the lead/demo form are not highly motivated to buy the product. You need to chase them a lot.
They may not even show up on the demo call. You may need to send them multiple emails saying they filled the form and if they are still interested in the product. Or you may find yourself bumping up the topic in their inbox.
To understand this, let’s continue with our ab testing example.
Look at the monthly searches for the query “ab testing.”
This means approx. 3400 people are searching for the term ‘ab testing’ in the USA. Searching for this means they want to know what ab testing is, not looking for a tool to help them run ab tests.
This is evident from the search results.
People searching for ‘ab testing’ may be of two types:
Either they don’t know what AB testing is. So, in the search results, we see results like ‘what is ab testing’, ‘a refresher on a/b testing’, and “a beginner’s guide to ab testing.
Though some of this audience may also want to move to the next step, so, we see posts ranking like ‘how to do AB testing.’ But this would be a great leap forward for someone to move from wanting to know about what is ab testing to actually purchasing the tool.
When leads come from these types of content, you will need to convince them a lot. I’ve seen this earlier in my career. People will come for a discussion, and it always felt like we were pushing them for sales.
It seemed like they were not much interested. When I was going through our sales call, I heard these lines multiple times:
I don’t remember filling up the form.
Which company are you from?
How did you get my number?
I’m not interested.
I was just testing.
I filled by mistake.
Since multiple people were involved in the buying process, the deal would almost always get stuck.
The setup required some docs and info from them. Our sales team would share the plan for moving ahead and ownership for each step.
But each stage required us sending them multiple follow-ups.
They would be postponing the meeting multiple times. The sales velocity was extremely slow.
It always felt like an uphill battle.
3. It leads to uninteresting content
This mostly happens when you hire an SEO to do your content marketing. When following this distribution first approach, you end up writing articles for the search engines and not actual people who will buy your product.
You are driven not by unique insights, purpose, or your mission but by distribution. The end result is the same boring listicles.
Further, the traditional (keyword-research) method for content prioritization is very easy to do. So, it leads to genericcopycat content.
This is also a very common scenario among startups working with freelance writers.
Their working process looks like this: the content marketer or search engine optimizer (SEO) does keyword research and gives these keywords to writers to produce content.
Since, the writer doesn’t have any experience with the target audience, product, and market, they rewrite similar articles on the same topic. Content produced with this process doesn’t help at all with generating leads.
4. You are at a competitive disadvantage
This is from two angles:
You are not creating any moat, so your rankings are not stable
If you create generic keyword-based content throughout your blog, it’s very easy for your competitors to copy your strategy. Content is one of the few moats remaining that you can still create. But you can’t create a moat with such type of keyword-first content.
To create a content moat, you need to make a significant investment in content marketing. It requires a content culture which is nearly impossible without founders’ buy-in in content marketing.
You can’t create a content moat by totally outsourcing your content marketing to freelancers or bulk writing agencies.
SEO content is becoming a commodity. This is what most marketers and writers focus on. You can’t create differentiation based on this type of content.
Most content marketers who believe in this are inspired by Hubspot, Moz, etc. Though, this strategy was working till a few years ago, it doesn’t work now.
Others end up converting the prospects that you have nurtured
If you are marketing to an audience that is not ready to buy yet, you will have to nurture them till they are. When the time comes to purchase, though you may have a slight advantage, it is not necessary that they will buy from you. They may buy from others as well.
Then Why Do Most Content Marketers Take This Approach?
Marketers that follow this funnel approach have arguments like this: Most of the prospects are not ready to buy. So, we should make them aware of our brand via useful content so that they will buy from us when they are ready. So, they propose to get more eyeballs on your educational content and nurture people to the next stage.
Learning from common sources: Most marketers have learned content marketing via commonly available courses like HubSpot academy, Ahrefs blogging for business, etc. Though these courses are good to get started, they were made many years ago. The content is based on what worked for them.
Further, these courses were mainly made for selling their own product. Hence, the marketers who learn from these sources have an overreliance on tools. So, the thinking prevails that this new tool will solve our marketing problems.
Now, a lot has changed. But content marketers don’t have good resources to upskill themselves. So, they follow the same old traditional playbook.
No support from founders/leadership team. Content marketing is a collaborative process. When done rightly, it can generate leads and sales. But doing it correctly requires the involvement of other departments, like sales, customer support and success, and product.
When there is no buy-in from founders, it is difficult to get the necessary data, and access to people from different departments also gets difficult. Naturally, it requires much more work and investment than founders think. They just hire a writer and expect them to give leads. While in reality, you need more than that.
You need content marketers, strategists, subject matter experts, and support from the design and development team in order to give a business impact.
Easier to be accountable for traffic than leads: Most marketers have a playbook for growing traffic. Growing traffic is much easier than growing leads.
Another issue is that most content marketers are not confident in their abilities to drive sales and leads. So, they focus on something safe and easy.
The nurture approach also plays a role in delaying the bad results—waiting for months to nurture these audiences only to find that these are not converting.
Startups incentivize the wrong metrics: After working with many startups, we found that almost always, founders and marketers have a temptation to grow traffic. They have this misconception that more traffic will result in more leads.
Even worse, many startups focus on outputs, like the number of words written daily or the number of posts created. This quantity over quality and outputs over outcomes approach forces content strategists to go in the wrong direction.
Content marketers are supposed to give results ASAP. So, they are not given time to do customer research because there are no/less outputs. Without research, people will do templatized content and what they have familiarity with.
This focus on productivity and efficiency before effectiveness is a big reason marketers prioritize traffic over leads.
Attribution Problem: Marketers say, accurate attribution is not possible as it is not possible to measure every customer touchpoint. So, there is no point in measuring it. This leads to constantly going in the wrong direction.
We strongly disagree. Just because you cannot measure correctly, doesn’t mean you don’t need to measure at all. Since most marketers don’t measure leads from content, they cannot optimize for it.
Not possible to intercept the ready-to-buy audience: Another objection by these marketers is that you don’t know when they would be ready to buy and cannot reach them then.
Our Solution to These Problems: Forget Traffic, Go With Intent
We believe that startups should focus on capturing the demand that is already there before they go for demand generation.
So, for us, searcher intent is the ultimate deciding factor when prioritizing any topic. We prioritize those topics that show customers are very near the purchasing cycle. When someone has an intent to purchase, your job is just to show them you can solve the problem better than other options.
Moreover, while using this approach, you don’t need to nurture the leads through different stages of the consumer journey.
Note that when you go after keywords with high purchase intent that have no or low volume, it can still bring a lot of traffic. You can promote it via other distribution channels like social media, community, email, etc.
Further, it may still receive SEO traffic.
People who have the problem/pain point and are actively looking for a product have much more chance of buying than those who are interested in the information.
So, while other content marketers are making the mistake of ignoring those low-volume, high-intent keywords, you can jump over them.
It also gives you a competitive advantage over startups educating the market. You can capture those leads after they are nurtured by other companies.
Let’s understand this with an analogy of football. In football, you get points only for kicking the ball in the nets. Who has brought the ball from one side to the other doesn’t matter.
Benji from Grow and Convert puts it best by saying, marketers think their company needs to be the one to educate all potential customers at every stage of the buyers’ journey, which is not true.
Why We Prioritize In-Market Audience
1. Time is not on your side. You can’t wait months for leads
We agree that you get an advantage when there is a higher brand value. But most early-stage startups (seed and Series A) don’t have the luxury to build a brand. If you are okay not wanting leads, sales, and immediate revenue (or revenue in the short term), then go ahead with your branding goals.
While taking on new clients, we make sure we align with their goals. When we discuss with early-stage founders for most of them generating revenue is more important than branding.
VC-backed startups have to achieve their milestones (tied to revenue) within the next 12 -18 months. So, it doesn’t make sense to prioritize branding over sales.
Brand building is time taking process and it does not happen just based on marketing. It is formed based on everything your company does: right from culture, and hiring, to sales, marketing, product, customer service, etc.
The second thing is you will be educating about the category (and not your product, otherwise, it would be salesy and thus not helpful for customers).
2. Customer behavior is not that unpredictable
We disagree with the claim that it’s not possible to intercept the ready-to-buy audience. We think it is possible.
There are mainly two ways of doing it:
First, from an SEO perspective, buyers’ goal is to evaluate what options they have. They usually shortlist 3-5 products among the hundreds of options in the market.
There are mainly 3 types of keywords
Information keywords
Transaction/commercial keywords
Navigational keywords
When the time comes for the purchase (commercial queries), people behave differently than when their goal is to get educated (information queries).
People who are ready to buy have specific searches, like category tools, alternatives, and comparisons (discussed further in the next section).
Most of the time, you would see companies running ads on these keywords, which shows how valuable these queries are. If these keywords were not giving customers, why would startups spend money on them?
Second, you can identify what the target audience searches when they are ready to buy and where they hang out for advice. That is why we don’t entirely rely on keyword research for topic ideation.
When we do consumer research, we look for specific things people search for when they are in-market.
3. This strategy works well with paid marketing and retargeting
When you prioritize an in-market audience, you get highly qualified traffic. This strategy goes well with remarketing strategy via display ads on Google and LinkedIn ads.
On the other hand, generic traffic inflates your customer acquisition cost (CAC) of paid channels. When you don’t have targeted traffic, there is a lot of budgets wasted while remarketing them.
Examples of Content Pieces That Target In-Market Audience
Category tools/solutions: These people are already searching for tools/software to solve their problems. Most probably they have a budget carved out for the solution. At this stage, people are evaluating what options are available in the market. Buyers usually shortlist 3-5 products. Your job is to just get in that consideration set. Now, let’s continue with our AB testing example.
Alternatives to famous tools in the space: Another way of finding your in-market audience is by creating alternative posts. These are people who just know a famous brand in the category but want other options to evaluate.
They are aware of the problem and solution (your category). What you need to do is make them aware of your product and then position it as the best option for their problem (assuming the product really solves the problem. i.e., you really do what you claim).
Comparison posts: This is targeted toward people who are very near the purchasing decision and have already shortlisted a few options and are now comparing which one is better. You can compare yourself to other options showing what unique benefits prospects are set to get by choosing you.
Note, how many tools one shortlist depends on are called consideration set—on their individual preferences. It can range from 2-5 tools for most people.For startups, is very important to get into this consideration set. This separates you from all the other 100s of tools that exist in the market.
If you cannot get into this consideration set, you won’t get the clients—no matter how good your product is.
But once you are in the race till now, your chances of winning the customer increases are high from here.
Let’s see the Google results for Optimizely vs VWO. (both ab testing tools)
We can visualize the user journey till now like this: It is safe to assume that the person has first searched for top ab testing tools. Of all the tools, finally, they shortlisted two: Optimizely and VWO (for simplicity, let’s say it’s 2 here).Now, they want to know to choose the one which better suits their needs. Hence, highlight if you have low pricing, better features, etc.
Solving for pain points: Identify what are the customer’s pain points and help them with solutions. In such articles, you naturally find a way to introduce your articles thus teasing people to sign up for your product.
Take this example on setting up ESOP, from our client Qapita. (ranking #2 for the term esop setup)
When answering such questions, it’s very important to mention how your product/service can help. It fits very well naturally in the context.
People looking to optimize their Microsoft licenses will find value in the product.Note that the advice in this post is valuable even if we remove the product. Just that the product will solve it in a better way. This is our approach to content at Product Led Content.
Addressing an obstacle: Others are unpredictable topics for which you need to do consumer research. These can be found by interviewing existing customers.
Talk to salespeople and make note of objections, and questions they are asking so that you don’t lose any sales because of it.Consider this example we got after being part of a few sales calls.
When discussing with the sales team, we found that many prospects had this question: Do they need an SMP if they were using SSO?
Answering this required a good level of technical understanding. So, we went on a call with the CTO, Chaitanya, took his interview, and created a blog post comparing Zluri with SSOs. And it converts very well.
We couldn’t have found this topic by doing keyword research. Only because we were doing consumer research did we find that buyers had this problem.
You understand what product-led content is. You recognize why your current content strategy isn’t driving conversions. You’re convinced PLC is the answer.
Then you try to implement it—and hit walls everywhere.
Your writers struggle to integrate products naturally. Your product team resists sharing screenshots. Your review cycles stretch to weeks. Your first few PLC attempts feel forced and promotional rather than helpful and natural.
You’re not alone. Most companies that attempt PLC fail to execute it properly. Not because the strategy is flawed, but because they underestimate how different PLC is from traditional content marketing.
Understanding why companies fail—and how to overcome each obstacle—is the difference between PLC that transforms your business and PLC that becomes another abandoned initiative.
The Seven Obstacles to Product-Led Content Success
Obstacle 1: Your Writers Lack Product Knowledge
This is the single biggest reason companies can’t create effective PLC—and it affects both freelance and in-house writers.
Why This Happens
Most content writers fear technical products. B2B SaaS products are complex. They have detailed features, technical specifications, integration requirements, and industry-specific use cases. Most content writers lack the technical background or inclination to deeply understand these products.
Writing skills don’t translate to product understanding. Your writers might be excellent at crafting engaging content, optimizing for SEO, and structuring arguments. But writing ability doesn’t automatically mean they can understand how your provisioning engine works or why your discovery method differs from competitors.
Product complexity overwhelms generalist writers. When writers look at your product, they see an intimidating system of interconnected features, workflows, and use cases. They don’t know where to start, which features matter most, or how customers actually use the product.
Even in-house writers remain at surface level. Proximity to the product doesn’t equal understanding. In-house writers might attend product demos and read documentation, but without deep, structured training, their knowledge remains superficial.
The Result
Surface-level content that doesn’t convert. Writers who lack product knowledge can’t integrate products naturally or meaningfully. They resort to:
Generic mentions: “Our platform helps with this”
Vague claims: “Powerful automation capabilities”
End-of-article CTAs disconnected from content
Feature lists without context or demonstration
Missed opportunities throughout articles. Writers can’t identify natural moments to integrate product because they don’t understand when and how customers use specific features. An article about reducing IT tickets during onboarding should naturally introduce your automated provisioning feature—but writers who don’t understand provisioning can’t make that connection.
Content that looks like PLC but doesn’t function like it. You get articles with product screenshots and mentions, but they feel forced. The integration interrupts rather than enhances because writers are checking a box (“include product”) without understanding the strategic purpose.
What to Do About It
Invest in comprehensive product training. At our agency, we invest 10+ hours in initial product training before writers create their first piece, and over 100 hours total in ongoing product education.
Your training program should include:
1. Hands-on product access
Give writers full access to your product (test accounts, sandbox environments)
Have them complete key workflows as a user would
Let them experience “aha moments” firsthand
2. Structured product walkthroughs
Record detailed product demos focused on key use cases
Break down each feature: what it does, why it matters, how customers use it
Show before/after scenarios of problems solved
3. Customer story immersion
Share customer case studies with specific problems and solutions
Provide testimonials explaining which features deliver value
Give access to customer success call recordings (with permission)
4. Competitive context
Explain how your product differs from alternatives
Show comparison demos highlighting your advantages
Clarify your positioning and unique value proposition
5. Regular product update sessions
Monthly syncs on new features and changes
Explanation of why features were built (customer problems they solve)
Use case examples for new capabilities
Make product understanding a hiring criterion. When hiring writers for PLC, prioritize:
Technical aptitude and willingness to learn complex products
B2B SaaS experience (they understand the space)
Curiosity about how things work (they ask “why” and “how”)
Strategic thinking beyond just writing skills
Create a product knowledge library. Build a centralized resource with:
Product demo recordings
Feature documentation written for content team
Customer case studies and testimonials
Competitive analyses
Glossary of technical terms and concepts
Obstacle 2: Your Processes Aren’t Built for PLC
Traditional content marketing workflows don’t support PLC creation. The collaboration models, review cycles, and approval processes that work for generic content break down when creating product-led content.
Why This Happens
Content teams work in isolation. In most companies, content teams operate separately from product teams. They get product information through:
Marketing briefs (often outdated or incomplete)
Product marketing docs (written for different purposes)
Their own limited understanding
Occasional requests to product teams (often low priority)
No structured collaboration exists. There’s no regular touchpoint between content and product. No shared Slack channels, no weekly syncs, no collaborative planning. Product teams are surprised when content team asks questions, and content teams feel like they’re bothering product.
Review cycles are undefined or too slow. PLC requires technical accuracy review from product experts. But if you don’t have:
Clear ownership of who reviews what
Defined SLAs for review turnaround
Process for handling feedback efficiently
Priority signaling for urgent reviews
…then content sits in “pending review” for weeks, killing momentum and productivity.
Too many approval gates. When legal, product, marketing leadership, and sometimes even executive team need to approve content, the process becomes:
Slow (waiting for multiple approvals)
Diluted (everyone has different concerns)
Political (avoiding anything controversial)
Compromised (final result pleases committees but doesn’t convert)
The Result
Slow production that misses opportunities. What should take days takes weeks or months. Your competitors move faster. Market conditions change. Product updates make drafts outdated before publication.
Content that’s technically inaccurate. Without proper product review, content includes:
Outdated information about features
Misunderstanding of how features work
Wrong use case descriptions
Claims the product can’t actually deliver
Watered-down content that doesn’t differentiate. To get through approval gates, teams remove anything specific, any competitive claims, any demonstration that might be “risky.” The result is safe, generic content that doesn’t convert.
What to Do About It
Establish product-content collaboration rituals:
Weekly sync meetings (30 minutes)
Content team shares upcoming articles and questions
Product team provides updates on new features and changes
Quick Q&A on technical details
Works because: Regular cadence prevents bottlenecks
Dedicated Slack channel (#product-content-collab)
Content writers can ask quick questions
Product team shares relevant updates
Async communication for non-urgent items
Works because: Lowers barrier to asking questions
Quarterly planning sessions (2 hours)
Align on product roadmap and content calendar
Identify big opportunities for product-led content
Assign product champions to major content initiatives
Works because: Creates strategic alignment
Build efficient review processes:
Assign clear reviewers:
Technical accuracy: Product Manager for relevant feature
Positioning/messaging: Product Marketing
Legal/compliance: Only for sensitive claims
Final approval: Content Director (not committee)
Set and enforce SLAs:
Technical reviews: 48 hours
Marketing reviews: 24 hours
Final approval: 24 hours
Total cycle: 5 business days maximum
Create review guidelines:
What reviewers should focus on (technical accuracy, claims)
How to provide feedback (specific, actionable, in-doc comments)
Use tools that streamline collaboration:
Google Docs for collaborative editing and commenting
Notion or Confluence for shared knowledge bases
Loom for quick video explanations of products
Project management tools to track status
Get leadership buy-in for prioritization:
Have a conversation with product leadership about why content collaboration matters:
Show the revenue impact of PLC (improved conversion rates, shorter sales cycles)
Quantify the opportunity cost of slow reviews
Frame product reviews as sales enablement, not content favor
Get explicit commitment to response time SLAs
Obstacle 3: Your Strategy Isn’t Aligned with Business Outcomes
Even when companies attempt PLC, they often maintain metrics and goals that undermine its effectiveness. You can’t optimize for conversions while being measured on pageviews.
Why This Happens
Inertia of traditional content metrics. You’ve spent two years building authority and traffic. Your dashboards show:
Organic sessions
Pageviews
Rankings
Time on page
Bounce rate
Everyone understands these metrics. Leadership celebrates when they go up. The team is measured by them. Changing feels risky.
Lack of attribution infrastructure. Many companies can’t connect content to revenue because:
CRM and analytics aren’t properly integrated
Attribution models don’t exist or are overly simplistic
Sales team doesn’t tag lead sources accurately
Multi-touch attribution is too complex to implement
Without clear revenue attribution, teams default to metrics they can measure (traffic) rather than metrics that matter (pipeline).
Misaligned incentives. When writers are measured by articles published per week, they optimize for volume. When content managers are evaluated on traffic growth, they choose high-volume keywords over high-intent ones. When CMOs report on “content performance” using engagement metrics, everyone focuses on engagement rather than conversion.
Fear of traffic decline. PLC often means:
Fewer articles published (higher quality, more intensive)
Targeting lower-volume, higher-intent keywords
Potentially lower overall traffic numbers
Teams fear that shifting to PLC will make their metrics look worse, even if business outcomes improve.
The Result
Traffic growth with stagnant conversions. You keep creating high-volume content because that’s what drives your metrics. But these articles target awareness-stage prospects, not decision-stage buyers. Traffic grows, but conversion rates stay flat or decline.
Wrong topic selection. You choose topics by search volume, not conversion potential. An article targeting 10,000 monthly searches but attracting students and job-seekers wins over an article targeting 500 monthly searches attracting enterprise buyers actively evaluating solutions.
Optimization efforts focused on wrong outcomes. You A/B test headlines for click-through rate. You optimize images for engagement. You improve page speed for SEO. These things matter, but they’re not what’s preventing conversions. You’re optimizing the wrong part of the funnel.
No way to prove PLC works. Without proper attribution, you can’t show that PLC drives revenue. Which means you can’t get buy-in for continuing it. Which means teams revert to traditional approaches that feel safer because the metrics are comfortable.
What to Do About It
Redefine content success metrics:
Primary metrics (what you’re measured on):
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from content
Conversion rate: visitor → lead
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) from content
Conversion rate: MQL → SQL
Closed-won deals attributed to content
Pipeline generated from content
Revenue attributed to content
Secondary metrics (monitoring health):
Organic traffic (ensure you’re not tanking visibility)
Rankings for target keywords (maintain search presence)
Content engagement (ensure quality remains high)
Build revenue attribution:
1. Implement first-touch attribution:
Track the first content piece prospects engaged with
Weight based on funnel stage (BOFU content gets more credit)
Show content’s role across buyer journey
3. Enable sales-content feedback loop:
Have sales team tag lead quality (high/medium/low)
Track which content sources produce best leads
Identify which articles sales team shares most
Gather qualitative feedback on lead readiness
Create topic selection framework based on conversion potential:
Instead of choosing topics by search volume, evaluate by:
Business value score:
Does this target our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)?
Does this address a problem our product solves?
Is this a bottom-of-funnel topic?
Do prospects in this stage have budget/authority?
Conversion potential score:
Can we naturally integrate product deeply?
Do we have screenshots/demos to show?
Can we differentiate from competitors here?
Will this pre-qualify prospects effectively?
Keyword opportunity score:
Can we realistically rank (given competition)?
Is search volume sufficient (even if lower)?
Does search intent match our content goals?
Choose topics scoring high across all three dimensions, even if search volume is moderate.
Run PLC as a measured experiment:
If leadership resists changing metrics, propose a test:
Select 10 high-traffic articles to rewrite with PLC
Track conversions before and after rewrite
Compare lead quality and close rates
Calculate ROI based on incremental revenue
Present results to justify broader rollout
When you can show “we rewrote 10 articles and generated $500K in pipeline,” resistance melts.
Obstacle 4: Your Product Positioning Is Unclear
PLC magnifies positioning problems. If you haven’t nailed your positioning, attempting PLC becomes frustrating and ineffective.
Why This Happens
You’re still figuring out your market position. Early-stage companies often haven’t clarified:
Who their ideal customer is (trying to serve everyone)
What unique value they provide (still iterating)
Why customers choose them over alternatives (no clear differentiators)
Which problems they solve best (many features, unclear focus)
Your differentiation is weak. In crowded markets, many products have similar features. If you can’t articulate what makes you distinctly better, your content will sound like everyone else’s—just with your product name swapped in.
You’re positioned against the wrong competitors. You might be comparing yourself to established players when you should create a new category. Or claiming to be “better” at things that don’t actually matter to your target customers.
Internal misalignment on positioning. Product team emphasizes certain features. Sales team focuses on different benefits. Marketing has its own angle. This confusion makes consistent, compelling content impossible.
The Result
Comparison content that doesn’t differentiate. You write “[Your Product] vs. [Competitor]” articles, but both products sound similar. You make the same claims they do. You can’t show meaningful differences because you haven’t identified meaningful differences.
Weak product demonstrations. Your screenshots and demos show features, but don’t tell a compelling story about why those features matter or how they’re uniquely valuable.
Generic use cases. You discuss broad problems (“improve productivity”) rather than specific, differentiated solutions your product delivers best.
Content that doesn’t position you strategically. PLC should control the narrative and define evaluation criteria in your favor. But if you don’t know your strategic position, your content can’t establish it.
What to Do About It
Do the positioning work first. Before attempting PLC at scale, clarify:
1. Your ideal customer profile:
Company size, industry, growth stage
Specific roles who use/buy your product
Key problems they face
Budget and buying process
2. Your unique value proposition:
What do you do better than anyone else?
Why do customers choose you over alternatives?
What would they lose if they switched to competitors?
Use customer interviews to validate: “Why did you choose us?”
3. Your differentiation:
Feature differences (what you have that competitors don’t)
Approach differences (how you solve problems differently)
Philosophy differences (what you believe about the problem)
4. Your category position:
Are you creating a new category or competing in existing one?
How do you want prospects to think about your product?
What criteria should they use to evaluate solutions?
Use customer language in positioning:
Don’t use internal jargon or marketing speak. Talk to 10-20 customers and ask:
What problem were you trying to solve when you found us?
How did you describe this problem to colleagues?
What alternatives did you consider?
Why did you choose us?
How do you explain our product to others?
Their language reveals how your target market thinks about the problem and your solution. Use that language in your content.
Create positioning documents for content team:
Document your positioning clearly:
Positioning statement: For [target customer] who [faces this problem], [your product] is the [category] that [unique approach] unlike [alternatives] that [their approach].
Key differentiators: 3-5 specific ways you’re meaningfully different
Proof points: Customer examples, metrics, features that prove each differentiator
Competitive positioning: How you compare to main alternatives
Language guidelines: Terms to use and avoid
Share this with content team and use it to guide topic selection and product integration.
Test positioning through content:
PLC can actually help refine positioning. Create content around different positioning angles and see what resonates:
Which articles generate most engagement from target customers?
Which positioning angles get shared most by sales?
Which differentiation claims get mentioned in customer conversations?
Which competitive comparisons drive most conversions?
Use this feedback to refine positioning iteratively.
Obstacle 5: Your Organization Fears Transparency
Some companies hesitate to create PLC because leadership fears competitors will copy their product or customers will discover limitations.
Why This Happens
“Competitors will steal our secret sauce.” CTOs and product leaders worry that showing features in detail will make it easier for competitors to copy their approach.
“We should save product details for sales calls.” Leaders believe product information is a sales asset that should only be shared with qualified prospects, not published openly.
“Showing everything reveals our weaknesses.” Every product has limitations. Some leaders fear that transparent content will help competitors attack those weaknesses or give prospects reasons not to buy.
“We’re not ready to show the product publicly.” UI might be rough. Some features are incomplete. Leaders want to wait until everything is “perfect” before showcasing it.
The Result
Content can’t demonstrate value. Without screenshots, demos, or detailed feature explanations, your content remains abstract. You make claims but can’t substantiate them. Prospects remain skeptical.
You lose to competitors who are transparent. While you hide behind vague descriptions, competitors are showing their products in action. Prospects trust transparency. They choose vendors who demonstrate rather than just claim.
Sales team inherits the full burden. Without content doing product education, sales must start from scratch with every prospect. Cycles lengthen. Conversion rates suffer.
You miss the opportunity to control the narrative. When you don’t show your product, analysts, reviewers, and competitors define it for you. You lose the ability to frame conversations around your strengths.
What to Do About It
Reframe transparency as competitive advantage:
Have honest conversations with leadership about the reality:
Competitors who want to copy you will find a way:
They’ll sign up for trials
They’ll attend demos under fake names
They’ll interview your customers
They’ll reverse-engineer your approach
Hiding your product from prospects to protect it from competitors means you lose sales to those same competitors.
Transparency builds trust that drives conversions:
B2B buyers are skeptical of vague marketing claims
Showing your product proves you have substance
Transparent companies are perceived as more credible
Prospects choose vendors who demonstrate value
PLC gives you first-mover narrative control:
You define the evaluation criteria
You explain your approach in your terms
You control the comparison framing
You establish thought leadership
Establish transparency guidelines:
Create clear rules for what to show and what to protect:
SHOW freely:
UI/UX screenshots (they can see this in trials anyway)
Feature capabilities and benefits
Common workflows and use cases
Integration approaches
Results and outcomes customers achieve
Comparisons with competitors (honest, fact-based)
PROTECT legitimately:
Proprietary algorithms (high-level approach is fine, code isn’t)
The list of what to truly protect is shorter than most leaders think.
Address the “product isn’t perfect” concern:
No product is perfect. Every product has limitations. The question isn’t whether to acknowledge this, but how:
In PLC, you can:
Focus on what you do well (genuine strengths)
Be honest about what you’re not optimized for
Show your roadmap addressing gaps
Position limitations as trade-offs for benefits
Example: “We prioritize ease of use over advanced customization. For teams that need extensive configuration, [Competitor] might be better. For teams that want to get up and running in 24 hours, we’re the right choice.”
This honesty actually builds trust and helps prospects self-select.
Show the ROI of transparency:
Track metrics that prove transparency works:
Conversion rates from product-demonstrative content vs. vague content
Sales cycle length for leads who engaged with detailed product content
Close rates for prospects who saw product before demo
Customer satisfaction for those with realistic expectations
When data shows transparency drives revenue, fear diminishes.
Obstacle 6: Your Company Culture Doesn’t Support PLC
Even when leadership approves PLC conceptually, organizational culture and team dynamics can prevent effective execution.
Why This Happens
Siloed teams don’t collaborate. In many companies:
Content sits in marketing
Product sits in engineering
Customer success sits in operations
Sales sits in revenue
These teams have different priorities, metrics, and incentives. They don’t collaborate naturally.
Information hoarding is the norm. Some companies have secretive cultures where:
Product doesn’t share customer usage data (worried about misinterpretation)
Leadership doesn’t trust teams with competitive information
“That’s not my job” mentality. Product teams think content is marketing’s job. Content teams think product education is product marketing’s job. No one takes ownership of ensuring PLC succeeds.
Lack of executive sponsorship. Without a leader who champions PLC across functions and holds teams accountable for collaboration, it becomes optional. Teams deprioritize it when other work competes.
The Result
Content team can’t access information needed for PLC. They don’t know:
How customers actually use the product
What problems features solve in practice
Why customers chose you over competitors
What objections sales encounters repeatedly
Which features drive retention vs. churn
Reviews and approvals stall indefinitely. Content sits in queues because:
No one’s accountable for reviewing
Product team doesn’t see content as priority
Leaders are too busy to review quickly
Feedback is vague or contradictory
PLC quality suffers from lack of input. Without cross-functional collaboration, content is:
Technically inaccurate
Disconnected from customer reality
Missing key differentiation points
Not aligned with sales messaging
What to Do About It
Get executive sponsorship:
PLC requires leadership commitment at VP or C-level. Find a sponsor (CMO, CEO, VP Product) who will:
Champion PLC cross-functionally
Hold teams accountable for collaboration
Remove roadblocks and resolve conflicts
Celebrate PLC wins publicly
Allocate resources (time, budget, headcount)
Without this sponsorship, PLC becomes just another marketing initiative that other teams ignore.
Create cross-functional PLC team:
Form a working group with representatives from:
Content/Marketing (leads execution)
Product Management (provides product expertise)
Product Marketing (ensures messaging alignment)
Sales (shares customer insights)
Customer Success (provides usage data and feedback)
Meet monthly (or more for major initiatives) to:
Align on priorities
Share insights across functions
Solve collaboration problems
Plan upcoming content together
Build information sharing systems:
Break down silos by creating shared resources:
Customer insight repository:
Win/loss interview summaries
Customer testimonials and case studies
Usage analytics and adoption patterns
Support ticket trends and common questions
Renewal and churn analysis
Competitive intelligence database:
Competitor product comparisons
Win/loss competitive analysis
Sales battlecards
Market positioning research
Product knowledge center:
Feature documentation for content team
Demo recordings and screenshots
Product roadmap and release notes
Technical architecture overviews
Make these accessible to content team so they’re not constantly requesting information.
Align incentives:
Ensure teams are rewarded for PLC success:
Product team:
Track product adoption from content-sourced leads
Celebrate when content drives qualified pipeline
Recognize product managers who support content
Sales team:
Show them how PLC shortens sales cycles
Track close rates from PLC-educated leads
Let them see content impact on their quotas
Content team:
Measure and reward based on conversion metrics
Celebrate pipeline and revenue attribution
Connect their work to business outcomes
When everyone benefits from PLC success, collaboration improves.
Obstacle 7: Creating PLC Is Slow and Resource-Intensive
Even with the right knowledge, processes, and culture, PLC takes significantly more time and effort than traditional content.
Why This Happens
PLC requires more research. For each article, you need to:
Understand the specific use case deeply
Identify which product features are relevant
Gather screenshots, demos, or create new visuals
Find customer examples or testimonials
Research competitor approaches
Verify technical accuracy
Traditional content might require 2-3 hours of research. PLC might require 8-10 hours.
Production is more complex. Beyond writing, PLC involves:
Creating or sourcing product screenshots
Annotating images to highlight relevant elements
Recording or editing demo videos
Building comparison tables
Testing interactive elements
Ensuring all product information is current
Review cycles are more involved. PLC requires:
Technical accuracy review from product
Screenshot approval (legal, product, sometimes customers)
Competitive claim validation
Multiple rounds of iteration
Writers need more support. Even trained writers need ongoing:
Answers to product questions
Access to subject matter experts
Feedback on whether integration feels natural
Help understanding technical concepts
The Result
Slower publication pace. Where you might have published 8 articles per month before, you might publish 3-4 PLC articles. Leadership questions why output decreased.
Topics closely aligned with key product capabilities
Content targeting your ideal customer profile
Articles sales team requests or shares frequently
Let some lower-priority content remain traditional while you focus PLC efforts where they’ll have the most impact.
The Implementation Framework: From Obstacles to Execution
Understanding obstacles is necessary but not sufficient. Here’s how to systematically overcome them and implement PLC successfully:
Phase 1: Foundation (Weeks 1-4)
Get leadership alignment:
Present PLC business case with expected ROI
Secure executive sponsor
Get commitment for cross-functional collaboration
Agree on new success metrics
Audit current state:
Identify top 20 articles by traffic
Assess current conversion rates
Map content to product use cases
Prioritize optimization opportunities
Establish processes:
Define content-product collaboration model
Create review workflows with SLAs
Set up attribution tracking
Build product knowledge resources
Phase 2: Training & Piloting (Weeks 5-12)
Train content team:
Intensive product training (10+ hours)
PLC writing workshops
Review successful examples
Practice on low-stakes content
Run pilot program:
Select 5 articles for PLC transformation
Go through full process start to finish
Document what works and what doesn’t
Measure conversion improvements
Refine systems:
Fix bottlenecks discovered in pilot
Improve collaboration processes
Develop additional resources needed
Gather feedback from all stakeholders
Phase 3: Scaling (Weeks 13-24)
Expand production:
Increase to 10-15 PLC articles
Establish sustainable pace (quality over quantity)
Continue refining processes
Build efficiency through templates and systems
Measure and optimize:
Track conversion metrics religiously
A/B test different PLC approaches
Identify what types of integration work best
Double down on what drives results
Prove ROI:
Calculate pipeline generated
Show sales cycle improvements
Demonstrate close rate increases
Present business impact to leadership
Phase 4: Maturity (Month 7+)
Systematize excellence:
Document your PLC playbook
Train new team members efficiently
Maintain quality at scale
Continuously improve based on data
Expand to new formats:
Apply PLC to video content
Develop interactive demos
Create comparison landing pages
Build comprehensive product content hub
Build competitive moats:
Dominate search results for key terms with superior PLC
Establish thought leadership in your category
Make it hard for competitors to replicate your content advantage
The Bottom Line: PLC Is Hard, But Worth It
Product-led content is significantly harder than traditional content marketing. It requires:
More specialized skills
Deeper collaboration
More complex processes
Greater time investment
Cultural change
But the payoff is transformational:
2-3x improvement in conversion rates
30-40% shorter sales cycles
20-50% better close rates
25-40% reduction in CAC
Sustainable competitive advantage
The companies that succeed at PLC don’t do it because it’s easy. They do it because it’s the only way to turn their content investment into a real revenue engine.
Every obstacle is solvable. Every barrier can be overcome. The question is whether you’re committed enough to do the hard work of transforming your content from traffic generator to revenue driver.
Start with one article. Prove the model. Build from there.
The competitive advantage goes to companies willing to do what’s difficult, not what’s easy.
Hiring for marketing is the toughest job in startups. It can make or break your startup.
When starting content marketing operations, you have two choices: Build a team in-house or Hire an external party (can be freelancers or agencies).
I’ve been helping startup founders to start their content marketing programs for many years. The first question that I usually encounter from them is whether they should build an in-house team from scratch, hire freelancers, or work with an agency.
Some other variations of this question are:
Should I Hire A Full-Time Employee Or Outsource Our Content Marketing
Does it Make Sense to Outsource our Content Marketing?
Should I Build Our Own Content Team or Outsource?
If you are thinking about whether to hire a full-time employee or an agency or freelancer to do content marketing for your B2B SaaS product, you are in the right place. I’ve been where you are now.
While I was looking for help running content marketing during my last job, I explored all these options. I’ve worked with many freelancers as well as many well-known agencies across the world, and I think you’ll benefit from my experience.
Building A Content Team In-House
Hiring can definitely work, but it is tough. Since most of the founders and even marketing heads are not from content backgrounds, it is difficult to judge if the person you are hiring possesses the right set of skills.
Want to build an in-house team, you can take our content team-building service.
Who is involved in running content marketing operations?
Before you go about building your content marketing team, let’s see who is involved in running content marketing operations.
We have discussed this in detail in this post. Here is a summary of the post.
Content writers: Technical content writers are foot soldiers of your content marketing operations. They write articles for your blog. The content writers in the content marketing team must be well versed in the 3 key pillars of content writing for marketing purposes: target audience (TA), product, and market.
Content marketers: Marketing is the core job. They distribute content via channels such as SEO, social media, and community promotions in different groups on LinkedIn, Slack, Reddit, etc.
Content strategist: Responsible for the overall content marketing, from making strategies, to overseeing content creation and distribution
Editors: They work on the articles and give feedback to writers. Mainly responsible for content quality.
SMEs: Subject matter experts are an important but often ignored piece of the content marketing team. Though they don’t work full time, their inputs are necessary. They provide contextual examples and help writers write posts relevant to the target audience.
Designers: Graphic designers create visual content pieces for blog posts and their promotions.
Developers: Developers help the content team by helping with making changes to the website for SEO and UX improvement purposes.
Earlier (till a few years ago), a content writer was sufficient to run content marketing operations at small companies. Now, after the funding boom in the SaaS space, every startup wants to do content marketing because of the huge benefits it offers.
Because of this, the competition is very high. Now, just hiring a writer is not enough. To cut through the noise, you should be able to distribute it.
You have to be very strategic in your approach. It requires huge planning and someone experienced to plan for different situations and get the results quickly because content marketing is a slow channel. So, having content marketers and strategists is a must. It’s not optional anymore.
If you are going this way, keep in mind the following things.
Hiring is time-consuming
Hiring is time-consuming. It takes months to build a content marketing team. As content marketing takes a good amount of time to show results, waiting to build a full content team from the start can prove to be a wrong decision.
Moreover, a significant amount of time goes into training them. They need to train about the product, market, and target audience. Until they get a complete understanding of all these, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll produce content that brings leads.
Probability of failure is high (when nobody in your content marketing team has hands-on experience)
Even if you build a complete team there is a good chance that things won’t work out if you don’t have previous experience in content marketing or you won’t take the help of experts in hiring.
Most companies don’t provide training to writers about products and target audiences. So writers fail to contextually include the product in posts.
Not only that it is hard to build authority or trust among the target audience if your writers don’t know about them, the disconnect heavily impacts the conversion rate for sign-up/demo.
Outsourcing Your Content Marketing to Freelancers or Agencies
Outsourcing is not about throwing money and getting results. Content marketing is not a money problem. If you don’t have the right strategy and execution, you will fail even after spending a considerable amount of money on content marketing.
This is one of the main reasons why we like content marketing. Unlike paid ads, the guy with deep pockets does not always win!
There are two cases where you want to outsource.
You don’t have internal expertise. If none in your team has a content background, you would want to take external help. Even marketing heads with a proven track record can’t help you as content marketing is very dynamic. If they have got success with content marketing in their previous job, it doesn’t mean that they will get into your company as well. Content marketing is rapidly evolving. It has changed a lot in the last 2 years. The strategies that worked in 2018 won’t work now. You wouldn’t want to take chances with content marketing. The cost of doing it wrong is very high. So, you can take expert help.
You want to focus on your core job. It takes a lot of time to build a content team from scratch; you may not have the time to search for good content writers, marketers, editors, and strategists. It will take many months. Furthermore, building a team from scratch distracts you from your core job. Hence, to save time, you may want to outsource your content marketing. Considering the slow nature of the channel, it may be a good strategy to engage external parties specializing in content marketing.
For saving money. When you are building an in-house team, there is a minimum cost involved. Further, you can’t just get rid of the team when things don’t work out. There is always an emotional connection and bonding with the team. On the other hand, you can find external people in all ranges of prices—starting with a few thousand.
Now, let’s see the pros and cons of two main outsourcing options: freelancers and marketing agencies.
Outsourcing to Freelancers
When it comes to outsourcing, it’s extremely rare to find a freelancer who can take care of your content marketing end to end. You can at most outsource the content writing part.
Here are the key points you need to know about outsourcing to freelancers.
Finding good freelancers is difficult. A good freelancer can help you immensely. But they are hard to find. If you are starting out, it is difficult to hire them without spending a lot of money or committing a regular work.
Working with freelancers requires huge time from your end. To make the engagement worth it requires a huge time commitment on your end. You cannot just give a topic and a few keywords to a freelancer and expect them to write high-quality content pieces for you. You would still need a content strategist in-house as there is a lot of work involved before the after the writing process, like creating content briefs, reviewing written drafts, giving feedback, SEO optimization, etc.
They are economical. Freelancer writers come in various prices and generally charge based on word count. My advice is to do a test piece to check the quality of writing.
Issue with professionalism. One major problem with many freelancers is a lack of professionalism. It reflects in everything they do, from their invoices to communications. We don’t blame them. They are working solo—and they work with multiple clients—so you may face deadline issues. Note that this represents a general sentiment. I’m not saying that all freelancers are non-professionals. There are very good freelancers but the charges can shoot up high.
Outsourcing to a Digital Marketing Agency
Today, there are hundreds of digital marketing agencies in the world. Let’s see what to expect when you go out to work with a digital marketing agency.
Most teams have no specialization. There are large digital marketing agencies that do everything in digital marketing: PPC, email, social media, SEO, content marketing, and PR.
Their content marketing team works for multiple niches with no specialization. They work with both B2C as well as B2B clients. They market SaaS products, eCommerce, and services in all.
Their main goal is the optimization of time. So they treat content like a pipeline. There is less customization according to your specific requirements.
Rapidly scale your content outputs. If you need a very high volume of content in a short period of time, such agencies can be a good fit. They can churn content at a high velocity.
There can be quality issues: Many agencies charge an exorbitant amount based on their reputation. You have to ask who would be actually working on your project.
While working with an agency, the content quality was so poor that I had to rewrite all the content pieces. Furthermore, their content strategist was only passing my feedback to the writer and then the writer’s replies to me—and not taking responsibility for the quality.
I found that the writer has a lot of misconceptions, and we need to discuss those first before he writes anything.
So, I thought it was better to give feedback directly to the writers, but they didn’t allow me to. Instead, they asked me to send voice notes, and write detailed comments when the same thing could have happened over a video call.
It was an unnecessary step, especially since the account manager is not from the content background. Why? Because they don’t have any value. In fact, they diluted the feedback which I was giving for the writer.
Though I like to suggest changes in Google Docs, I (as a content strategist) want to explain the reasons/why behind those comments so that writers don’t repeat the mistakes.
As you can see there are pros and cons to each option. There is another option, i.e working with a specialized agency. We (Product Led Content) faced these issues at the beginning of our career and hence started our content marketing agency.
About Us: A Specialized Content Marketing Agency for B2B SaaS Products
Now, I’d like to give you a glance at what it is like to work with us.
We (Product Led Content) are a specialized B2B SaaS content marketing agency that works with only a handful of clients. We only work with clients if we see there is a mutual fit.
We take responsibility from strategizing to creating content to distribution to analytics and improvement—basically, we are accountable for getting leads, sales, and revenue from content.
We have a full team of specialists:
Content strategists
Editors
Content marketers,
Designers
Writers
Further, we have access to all the important tools needed for running robust content marketing operations.
Our approach is very collaborative. We work together as an extension of your marketing team. We don’t work as an outside third-party vendor.
We have deep insights that can save you months or even years. We specialize and work with multiple clients, so we have data, and we can find insights quickly. We can see patterns in what is working and what is not.
I've helped a lot of startup founders and marketing heads build a content marketing team over the last few years. One of the biggest mistakes I see them making is hiring a content writer to run their content marketing operations.
While a writer can write well, they may not be the best person to include the substance. The writers are not subject matter experts.
While a writer can and should promote their articles, it doesn’t mean they are the best person to do so. The majority of them don’t have distribution skills.
These are the people you need for your content team to work efficiently:
Content writer(s)
Content marketer
Content strategist
Content editor
Designers
Subject Matter Experts
Disclaimer
Here, we are assuming that your goal is to generate revenue from your content. You can see the list is a mouthful. This is because content marketing has changed a lot in the last few years. You need to make an investment if you are serious about content marketing.
Otherwise, if you want to do it for the sake of doing it or even if your goal is on vanity metrics like generating traffic, you can just hire a content writer or outsource to freelance writers or agencies who can produce content in bulk for you. But as we discussed in our previous article, higher traffic more often doesn’t mean more leads.
We are not saying you need to hire separate individuals for each of these positions to start your content marketing. In the beginning, one person plays more than one role. But you need to hire smart people who have the skillsets required to do these jobs.
As a general rule, seed-stage startups should have 3 roles in full-time positions to run content marketing operations: writer, marketer, and strategist.
At series A, you can add 1-2 more writers and full-time designers to your content marketing team. For example, if you have any gap in your content marketing team, you can hire for that position, like a dedicated editor, social media specialist, or SEO specialist.
When building a team from scratch, it will take months to hire for these roles, and you can’t judge them if you have not done content marketing yourself/don’t have first-hand experience running content marketing.
One Big Mistake to Avoid: Non-marketer building the content team
Even someone from a marketing background but with no hands-on experience in the content will most likely fail.
Going with the cheapest option while building your content team only leads to time, money, and effort wastage. Is demoralizing. We’ve seen companies back to square one after months of working in this way.
One of our customers did not choose to work with us because they have found a less expensive option but came back to us months later only to do the whole work from scratch. When they came back, they had already published over 100 articles on their blog but it had generated 0 leads in 7 months.
We are always looking for good content writers and markets and are in touch with them via many communities. If you need our help, you can take our content writer hiring service.
Let us see the responsibilities of each role:
The Role of Writers, Marketers, Strategists, Editors, and SMEs in a Content Marketing Team
1. Content Writer(s)
Technical content writers are foot soldiers of your content marketing operations. They write articles for your blog.
Note that these writers should be dedicated to content marketing work. If you need content for other marketing or sales activities like newsletters, knowledge base, website revamp, or landing pages and copy for paid adverts, you will need another writer.
The content writers in the content marketing team must be well versed in the 3 key pillars of content writing for marketing purposes: target audience (TA), product, and market.
Awareness of the target audience
Awareness of the target audience is required because articles must be written considering your ideal customers. Though it may seem obvious, I’ve seen many content writers lose awareness of their target audience while writing content.
In effect, this means:
Saying obvious things that they already know
Not respecting their expertise
Not providing context
Not addressing the pain points of decision-makers and end-users
Writing for travel or health niches is not very difficult as you can relate to these. We all have some experience in our personal lives. But when it comes to B2B, it is not easy to relate with decision-makers unless you have been in the position yourself.
We have seen such content writers making weird analogies. For example, when we were working with a freelance writer in our early days, the writer was explaining a point about getting discounts when buying assets for their company in bulk.
She explained that by giving an example of buying vegetables in bulk. Though there is nothing wrong with logic, since our target audience was procurement teams in enterprises, it was not an appropriate example.
This was not the only instance. Even after a lot of training, it is very difficult for someone to get this if they have never worked in a B2B setting.
We had constantly seen variations of such instances with many writers where we were frightened that if it went unnoticed, it would have posed the risk of losing credibility in front of the target audience.
Most content writers have little to no knowledge about the product the company sells. Most companies don’t provide product training to their content writers.
This is why we see writers not being able to sell the product in blog posts. Product expertise helps in weaving products in the blog post naturally—so that it doesn’t look forced at the bottom.
For example, take this article on employee retention.
This article discusses ways to improve employee retention.
In the best case, they would do something like this:
There is no mention of the product in this entire article. If this product helps with employee retention, why did they not show it?
If it is one of the product use cases, then this is a lost chance of showing the product in action. I think it is because the writer doesn’t have a deep product understanding.
But you cannot sell the product unless you know the product very well. If your goal is to sell a product, then product training is very important. If your content writer doesn’t know the product, they cannot sell it via content.
Contextual product appearance in the blog suits well with selling the product.
At PLC, we only work with companies who have nailed their positioning and messaging. That means you know your strengths and weaknesses compared to other products in the market.
At the beginning of our work with any client, we discuss and get comparisons with competitors so we can include them in the article.
So, we provide our content writers with product battle cards, positioning, and other product marketing collaterals that are generally used during sales (sales enablement content) to show not only that your product can solve the target audience’s problem but it can solve it in the best way in the market.
In fact, it is very easy for the target audience to smell the fakeness in such selling.
Note that content writers who are a part of a B2B content marketing team are very different from general writers, like those who write for hobby or social media, newsletters, copywriters, and B2C writers. It’s writing with a goal.
Normally, everyone thinks they can write. But it is a job that requires creative and analytical skills. It requires immense research skills and a truth-seeking attitude.
SaaS products are more complex than other products and the writing requires technical (domain-expertise) understanding. I’ve seen many writers having fear when it comes to going into technical details. But you cannot write good articles and convince the TA without having in-depth knowledge/ understanding of the problem, product and competitors.
It requires storytelling skills. You cannot engage people for long.
2. Content Marketers
They are marketers at the core. They are well versed in consumer psychology. Many people have misconceptions about this role. They think content marketers mean content writers. But they are very different.
Till a few years ago, (till 2018) a content writer was sufficient to run content marketing.
Earlier, just writing anything used to get a lot of attention because very few companies were leveraging content marketing. Just writing “top 10 tips” or “20 ways to improve your employee engagement” was enough.
Because of this content supply is now more than content demand. So, there are dedicated efforts required to distribute content.
Content Demand – Supply
Because of this, the competition is very high. Now, just hiring a writer is not enough. To cut through the noise, you should be able to distribute it. So, having a content marketer and strategist is a must. It’s not optional anymore.
Earlier there was less/no competition, so people have no/fewer choices. Now the competition is more, to attract people you have to work with a distribution strategy.
Content marketers are people who can do the distribution. Content promotion is their key role. So, things like SEO, social media, and community promotion are done by them. Their goal is to get the content in front of the target audience. If you fail at this, no matter how good your content is, it is bound to fail.
SEO is a vast and technical field. So, you can’t leave it to content writers.
In SEO, one main task could be building topical authority. A few other things that search engine optimizers will do:
Off-page SEO: Outreach efforts are also from the content marketer to get relevant backlinks. They can also shortlist websites for guest posting.
Technical SEO: They give technical SEO suggestions. There are few people in marketing who can implement these as well. Because not the standard for these people to touch the website/coding part.
Apart from this, content marketers collaborate with designers to get the distribution materials:
PPT
Social media marketing
Infographics
Videos
Youtube community
They repurpose the content for distribution on various other platforms. Find opportunities for promoting every article:
Quora
Reddit
LinkedIn and Facebook group etc
Other industry-specific communities
Social media (if there is no dedicated social media marketing executive)
Webinars, if you don’t have a separate community manager (optional)
3. Content Strategist
Content strategists own the entire content marketing outcomes. This is a managerial role. They are the ones who make the strategy, come up with new ideas, and talk to content writers and marketers internally to get things done.
A content strategist hire and trains writers. They also work as editors in small teams.
They talk to various stakeholders to make KPIs and work on the same to deliver that. First, they work with CMO to finalize the KPIs, and then they report on the same.
They also enable insights from other departments. They are the one who talks with other people like product managers, sales managers, account executives, customer success, and support. They enable the flow of information from these people to content writers and marketers.
Content writers need to make a lot of decisions while working on a content piece. They need context. A proper content brief includes all these things which are required to make good decisions. Good decisions are a function of what information you have.
Some of the key tasks that a content strategist does:
They do topic ideation and create content briefs.
Use keyword research inputs from marketers to finalize keywords worth targeting.
Competitor research.
They create content for the entire funnel: BOFU, MOFU, and TOFU.
Identify low-hanging fruits. Find opportunities for quick conversion.
When new content makes sense and when a content refresh/update is required.
A content strategist is not a project manager though it requires project management skills. Being a content strategist requires deep knowledge of content marketing to complete things on time (deadline).
Content writers without a content strategist (manager) are like an engineering team without a product manager and senior developers. First, they can execute many tasks, but these things don’t add up because of no clear direction.
Running content marketing operations without a content strategist leads to content debt (similar to technical debt for engineering teams.)
A content strategist can start with a raw idea and turn it into a thought leadership article. There is a lot of thinking required that a content writer can’t just do on their own. Before content writer starts writing, they need a lot of context and substance.
They are the pillars of content marketing operations. If the overall content marketing fails, they are responsible for it.
4. Content Editors
Content editors’ main job is to ensure the quality of the content. They are a very essential part of the entire content creation process. They give feedback to writers.
If you look at the profiles of most content writers, they are not from a writing background (especially in India). They are engineers (or from any other field/domain) turned writers. Hence, they don’t know the techniques of writing.
Even when someone says they are experienced writers, it means they have been writing for a long time, but writing techniques would be the same as those of beginner writers.
Why does this happen? Because they are not getting the feedback. Writing practice is a different thing than working on the techniques of writing.
For example, content editors help improve clarity. Help create a better narrative. But when writers don’t work on their techniques, their feedback is limited to improving the word choice and sentence structure. In the best case, they would work on improving the paragraph structure.
But great editors who have learned the techniques of writing will ultimately help you improve your communication, not just proofread your articles.
Examples of a few writing techniques:
Parallel structure
Cohesion and coherence
Active/passive
Types of sentence
Editing is a science because there are techniques involved. Most writers working on the company’s blog claim to be creative writers. But if you are working in content marketing, you need to be analytical as well. This is a very important skill for anyone working in the content team—content writers, editors, strategists, and marketers.
SEO, social media marketers, email + HARO + paid ads
Word choice
Jargons, word make sense to the audience
Understanding of channels
Sentence structure: simple, compound, complex
Communication with other teams: product, sales, support, customer success
Audience + technical + product
Paragraph structure
Choice of arguments
Outreach + writing for outreach
Good command over the writing, grammar
Good command over the subject matter
Requires command over the channel
Content writer
Content Strategist/ Editor and Manager
Content marketer
Customer research
Market research
Elements of A Content Marketing Team
Supporting Roles that will Jeopardize Your Content Marketing if Ignored
Whatever roles we have discussed till now would be working full time on the content marketing team. There are a few others that play an equally important role. We are calling them a supporting role because they are not involved full-time in content marketing.
1. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
SMEs provide substance. Here we mean SMEs in a general sense, not necessarily someone who has experience working in the industry (or they themselves are the part of target audience).
That means anybody and everybody in the company that has consumer and market insights is SME for the content marketing team.
Weekly meetings with them are required, at least for the first few months. SMEs play the following roles:
Make content relatable to the target audience, by providing jargon and relevant examples that help in gaining audience trust
Prevent inaccuracy (in many fields, you will find different, sometimes opposing points of view. So, so content writers can’t just write based on online research)
SMEs may write too for content marketing if they are interested in writing but their main job is to provide inputs (by giving interviews, pointing to right resources, connecting with the right person, etc.)
If they are doing webinars or podcasts for the company, that content can also be repurposed for the purpose of content marketing.
SMEs also include people & teams who have the data or information that will be useful for the content marketing team, like salespeople and people in the customer service/support and success team.
People in the product and engineering team can also act as SMEs as they can have unique and deep insights into the product, customers, and market.
You don’t need to hire SMEs just for content marketing; just need to act smartly and work with other teams in collaboration. At Product Led Content, we develop our own expertise over time, but there is a good dependency on SMEs in the beginning.
2. Graphic Designers
Content marketing doesn’t mean just written content. There is a good amount of images required. Thus designers are an integral part of the content marketing team. The reason we include them in the supporting role is they may be working with other teams as well.
Designers start working on the image once the idea is conceptualized by the content marketers. They make images for blog posts and their distribution.
Now, you can’t use free stock images on your blog posts directly. You need to customize it to convey your message.
For images, we suggest buying access to premium stock image sites that aren’t available for free for everybody’s use (a good way of differentiation), for example, Shutterstock, iStockPhoto, PixaBay, and Evanto.
3. Developers (Frontend and Backend)
Here the main thing is to provide developers resources to your content marketing team when required. When there is no marketing buy-in from company founders, content marketing suffers whenever you need to make any changes to the website.
CTO has authority over developers and usually, they don’t allocate resources toward marketing. Therefore, it’s the job of business founders to make sure that the content team gets the necessary developer’s help as per requirement.
Usually, developers’ help is required for the following tasks:
For on-page SEO
UI improvements (adding a table of contents, relatable posts, featured posts, posts categorization, making improvements to overall blog design for differentiation, blog posts width, changes to font, etc)
Loading times
Making 301 directs
Options to download and collect email
Schema implementation
Setup for other tools like marketing automation, Google Analytics, GTM, etc.
These people—CMO or founder marketer—don’t take part in the day-to-day operations of the content marketing team.
Their job is to:
Solve bottlenecks
Give strategic direction (High-level monthly meetings)
Approve budgets
Founders also have good insights into the product, customers, and market. So, they are almost always the SMEs as well.
Why Most Startups Don’t Have These Roles?
After talking with so many founders, I feel the core reason why startups struggle to build a content marketing team is because of a lack of awareness of content marketing operations.
I’ve seen people struggle to build a content marketing team are of these roles:
Startup founders with no marketing background
Someone in the leadership role but no marketing experience
CMO (GTM head or a senior marketer) but not from content background
In all these situations, the common issue is no first-hand experience running a content operations.
Moreover, whatever advice you see on the internet is mostly obsolete information that doesn’t work in the current scenario. That’s why most startups just hire writers to run their content marketing.
So, there is low awareness about these roles. The main problem is not about money. We have seen even the funded startups making this mistake. There is no reason why they won’t invest. Content marketing is a key channel for B2B SaaS startups. It also acts as insurance in case of funding winter or any other negative market scenario.
At Product Led Content, every piece of content passes through at least one person other than the writer himself for quality purposes. This is because you cannot eliminate all errors by yourself. You need another pair of eyes for that.
For self-editing, our writers leave that piece for a week and start working on other things so that their mind is occupied with other things and they get a refresh. Then they can see the article with a fresh pair of eyes.
Writers can only perform when they are given support. Just like, foot soldiers can win or lose a battle depending on the leaders who make strategy, and provide equipment and morale, the same applies to foot soldiers of the content team.
This is our approach to content marketing at Product Led Content. When working with us, you get all of these things.
These Mistakes Only Lead to a Waste of Time and Money
Just hiring a writer and thinking you will achieve the same results you heard a unicorn startup got will only lead to disappointing results.
To get the best results, you need to hire the right people and empower them to do their job. Support them in all ways. It is not cost-saving thinking you just need a writer. In fact, it is time wastage as well. This is similar to hiring a backend developer to do all the jobs.
The cost of a writer running your entire content marketing is very high. This is not obvious to many founders in the early stages. Only after a few months or a year, do they think that content marketing is not generating enough value that they have expected. By the time, you reach your growth stage; you need to have at least one marketing channel working that you can double down on.
At the seed stage, this pain may not be visible because you need a few clients that you can get via other channels, like paid ads or word of mouth, or references. But these are not highly scalable. They reach a plateau after a while and don’t help you much post series B and C growth stages when you actually need them.
Content marketing could be that channel. But if not taken the right approach, it fails.
Content marketing is a good channel, the one that will definitely work even if other channels fail. But it requires seriousness (involvement) from the founders to get the best from it.
