Chapters & Episode Notes
0:00 – Introduction
1:12 – What Is Product-Led Growth (and Why It Works)
6:03 – What Makes a Feature PLG-Friendly
9:42 – From First Use Case to Full Content Strategy
16:23 – How Do You Talk to Non-Technical Buyers?
21:04 – Finding Content Angles on the Fly
29:05 – How Do You Measure Product-Led Content Success?
35:58 – Attribution: How Content Converts Into Signups
39:20 – The Four Pillars of Content Distribution Strategy
42:56 – Technical Documentation vs. Product-Led Content: Understanding the Difference
46:03 – Outro
Transcript
Tom: Let’s look at product-led content very prescriptively. It’s how does our product solve a problem and how are people learning about how to solve this problem, and really just embedding content into it in the form of screenshots, in the form of, you know, educating people on how to do something differently, challenging the status quo, all that jazz.
Patrick: Today we’re going to be chatting with Tom Watley about product-led growth.
Tom: So it’s essentially either showing people how they can solve problems with your product or getting your product in front of people who are kind of researching solutions.
Patrick: And how to develop content that puts your product center stage in a way that it sells itself.
Tom: So it could be content repurposing, paid amplification, link building, and influencer collaboration.
Patrick: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of plugin.fm. In today’s episode, we’re going to explore what is product-led growth, what is product-led content, and what is the difference between the two, how you can highlight your product in a customer-focused piece of content, and how to measure the effectiveness for this type of marketing. With all that said, let’s get into the episode. Welcome to the show, Tom.
Tom: Patrick, an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Patrick: Awesome. I am so excited to talk about, uh, product-led growth for a couple of reasons. We’ll define the term in just a second, but I think the main reason I’m excited to talk about this is almost everyone who listens to this podcast has a product. So, like, this is—you know, a lot of people don’t know anything about affiliate marketing. They might not have a Mailchimp account for email marketing. There’s lots of stuff they don’t have. Almost everyone who listens to this has a product. So let’s get started with, like, what is your take on product growth? What is it? And I guess, why does it work? Let’s start there.
Tom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think it’s the antithesis of how the SaaS and the software, uh, world started, right? You needed to book demos in order to get your hands on a product. And nowadays, depending on the problem that you’re solving and the product, people can really get their teeth stuck in without having to speak to salespeople. And of course, there are, you know, still sales-led motions when it comes to some of those platforms, depending on, you know, size of company. But let’s say, for example, I am a technical founder of a SaaS company myself, and I wanted to jump in and start playing around with, I don’t know, creating SEO and traffic reports in SEMrush. I don’t have to talk to anybody. I can just jump in and do it. And that’s the beautiful thing about product growth. It’s kind of the natural progression of where the software-as-a-service industry has kind of gone. And of course, there’s still a place for, you know, the sales-led approach, but it’s kind of, you know, where it’s naturally emerged, so to speak.
Patrick: Okay, we definitely talk about—there’s lots of products that have, like, free trials. Is any product that has a free trial a company that’s doing product-led growth?
Tom: Interesting question. I think yes, to an extent. But I think where some misconceptions often come in is those types of companies don’t necessarily need to be exclusively product-led. Again, you may have an enterprise plan, and therefore speaking to a salesperson and having some kind of solutions-driven element is key. I keep coming back to Semrush because they are a prime example of this. They have a very low barrier to entry to using the product, but they also have an incredible suite of products that, you know, may require some customization, and that’s where some of that comes in. So is every company that has a trial or kind of like a premium element to it product-led? To an extent. But it’s not a apples and oranges thing.
Patrick: I guess a question I have is, sometimes when I think of product-led growth, it’s about a specific feature in a product that hooks people. I think the example I’m thinking of is Hotmail ages ago, where you could get a free Hotmail account, but then they—I think it was like a built-in signature that said anyone, you know, there’s X million users using Hotmail, you can get your free account now. Something like that. Do you need to add a, you know, is a feature like that the thing that you kind of need for product-led growth or something like that?
Tom: I think what we’re talking about here is growth hacking, right? That Hotmail example is kind of that, and Dropbox is poster children of the growth hacking movement. That’s more kind of a viral—like a virality element, right? And, you know, you kind of see that with Dropbox. For example, I create a file or share a file via Dropbox, there is an element of “hey, you can get this thing too.” It all depends on the platform. For example, with Slack, there is an element of, you know, the more users you get in, the more revenue you earn. So I think those two things are a little bit, you know, different. Qualaroo is another example—you know, little surveys on your website. You could, you know, fill out a survey and it would have “powered by Qualaroo.” It really depends on the platform. So growth hacking and product-led growth— a little bit different, if that makes sense.
Patrick: No, that’s very helpful. It’s very—and very helpful to think about. Virality is a thing you can add on, separate, that also synergizes with it, but it’s separate.
Tom: Exactly.
Patrick: So the good news, the things we’re talking about today anyone can do, right? Like anyone that has a product and has a software product can do this?
Tom: To an extent. If you have an incredibly complex or perhaps high-ticket offering like Salesforce—again, like, you can get started on that, but they have, like, a team of consultants and solution engineers for a reason, because it’s so complex. So just because you have a product doesn’t necessarily mean the right thing to do is just ungate it and let anybody go gung-ho, because you also need to think about how people get to value within the product. And if it’s too complex and I start playing around, I’m going to feel overwhelmed. I’m going to feel the friction, and I don’t want to use it. We’re kind of getting into the weeds here, but there are caveats.
Patrick: Oh, good to know. Okay. Well, let me ask you this then. So I think let’s get into a couple of the weeds. Um, so what sort of features are good for product-led marketing?
Tom: Interesting. Anything that, if I can do, I get an immediate output from or I start to get some value from. And obviously, you know, it’s not kind of like an input-output, depending on the process, depending on the job to be done and the type of thing I’m trying to solve. But if there’s an immediate aha moment—whether that is my problem is solved or I’ve taken the first step into solving my problem—then that’s kind of like a really good way of thinking about it. If the time to value and the friction between me signing up for a thing or being aware of the problem in the first place to “oh, oh, this is a really interesting way of doing it” or “ah, this is great, the output is incredible”, these are the kind of features that kind of lend itself well to it.
Patrick: Got it. Okay, what I think is weird is—do most products or, you know, product-led companies have a free tier, or is it like a free trial? Because I feel like we’re approaching like a free tier and then there’s always the discussion of how much do you give away of your software for free so people get value immediately and they understand the value of the product without them never wanting to pay.
Tom: This one’s a tricky one because it depends on your revenue model, for example. So I think where you see folks like Semrush have a little bit of a privilege is that they’ve been in the business for years, and they probably created a free tier after seeing, “Oh, the more people use the product, the more that they invest in it. So why don’t we reduce that barrier to entry?” So freemium works, but a trial works too. And it all really depends on your audience, the value that you’re delivering, and really if people need to commit to the product in order to get that long-term value, which is where a trial works. Oftentimes it’s like, “Okay, I’m getting into the weeds, I can see how this works.” Let’s take Pipe Drive, for example. It’s a CRM platform. They have a 14-day free trial but not necessarily a free tier. I think they may have one, but it’s very limited, obviously. In order to really get the value from a CRM, I’ve got to be committed. But 14 days gives me enough time to be like, “Okay, these features solve these problems that we’re having. Let me go and speak with the rest of my buying committee—you know, my manager, my boss, my CEO—in order to make a business case for this, because I’ve had a chance to figure out how this would work within the intricacies of my organization,” if that makes sense.
Patrick: Yeah, it does. Okay. There—a lot of it sounds like a wide definition in a good way. Like there’s a lot you can do. It could be free trials, could be a free tier. As long as the product itself convinces the user to buy it, that’s product-led growth.
Tom: 100%. Essentially, it’s a simplified way of putting it, but as long as you’re getting or reducing the time to value and offering aha moments, then it doesn’t really matter. And it all depends on—
Patrick: I love—I love aha moments. That’s great. And if your—if your—if your—if your software doesn’t deliver aha moments, it might just be like a—
Tom: It might be a shit product, Patrick.
Patrick: Well, I was going to say a boring utility, but yes, yes. It may not have that much value.
Tom: Right.
Patrick: I appreciate that we answered that differently. That’s funny. All right.
Patrick: Let me pivot a little bit into the product. We were also talking before the show about product-led content. So can you give us an idea of what product-led content is and how that may intersect with this idea?
Tom: Yeah. So depending on the format—again, very much an “it depends” answer—but essentially it’s creating content, educating people how to solve problems on topics that are directly related to your product. So this can come in—let’s talk about a blog as a kind of tangential example here. I might search for “how to create an SEO report” and there’s an article by SEMrush, and it covers how to create one, how to get data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, create them in spreadsheets, but you can also do it with SEMrush. And here’s how. Step one: sign up for a free trial or a free account. Step two: do this thing. So it’s essentially either showing people how they can solve problems with your product or getting your product in front of people who are kind of researching solutions. So it could be “Slack alternatives,” it could be “best CRM software”—incredibly competitive, but a good place to start and prioritize if you’re creating product content.
Patrick: Got it. I’ve done a bunch of marketing in the past, and I think I understand this, but I think what maybe some people get hung up on is they think—especially like technical founders—they can only think of one piece of content. So I bet everyone listening to this can think of one. It’s like—I can think of the exact one use case I would use this for. They write up the blog post and they’re good. But if you want this to be like a marketing strategy, you kind of need to cover it from different angles. So how would you do that—where it’s a scheduling app—how would you cover that from like different angles other than “hey, do you need a scheduling app by ours,” right?
Tom: It all starts with speaking with your customers, right? Why have they used the product in the first place? And also, who are they? A scheduling app—I could be a founder, but I could also be a sales leader using this platform or using a scheduling app. If you have, say for example, a very broad—obviously we’re talking in horizontal terms here—scheduling apps, Airtable, that kind of thing—horizontal terms—but oftentimes, especially as a startup, you inevitably have a very narrow audience that you naturally attract. If we’re starting there, I would want to speak to these people. I’m going to use sales managers as an example, or let’s say sales leaders that are 80% of my audience for this scheduling app. I want to understand why they use the app and how it solves those problems, first of all. Because I can think of topics in a vacuum, but I don’t necessarily know if they’re going to add value to my audience.
So for example, I might speak to a sales leader and a bunch of things that, you know, they’ve managed to automate or improve the efficiency of is actually getting people to, uh, book appointments and turn up to those appointments, because my scheduling app has a bunch of follow-up features, for example. So now I can obviously create content around “best sales appointment scheduling apps,” for example, that kind of thing. But I can also create content around, “how to improve show-up rates at, you know, sales calls” or “how to increase the conversions between requesting a demo and actually scheduling something in the calendar” because I’ve spoken to my audience and those are the things that, you know, they’re trying to solve and this is how my app has added value.
You create the content—there’s obviously going to be a tremendous amount that you can talk about within these topics. You know, the way that you communicate, the copy that you use in your follow-up emails, etc., but also “use my scheduling app to also do that,” you know, if that makes sense. So it all starts with really speaking to your customers, understanding their pain points, understanding why they came to you in the first place, and reverse-engineering what you talk about and the value that you deliver and the ideas that you share.
Patrick: I think sometimes technical people—I’m including myself in this—can be very—we can only think of the one main use case that we wrote the software for. What’s good about that is you can get the first—let’s say it has to be good, you know, you can get the first 10 customers that way, maybe through your network or Twitter or whatever. Then you can get them on it, then you can interview them, and then you might discover—even if you don’t know what the other use cases are, the edge use cases are for your product—your customers might. You might be able to interview them, learn more about, “Oh, you can also use the scheduling app for this and for that—wow, I didn’t even—I didn’t even think about that.” And then you can start turning to content.
But you can start with just the one specific—you know, the developer or what—whatever it is that bugged you to write the—create the product in the first place. You can start with just one use case, get a handful of customers in the door, start interviewing them, and then really start expanding. And this is good for interviewing your customers because then you learn more about the product. You can expand the product. The product can be better. You can write about how the product’s getting better. This, to me, just seems like—I’m a big fan of product-led growth. It seems like it naturally encourages the business to focus on the product, and I love that.
Tom: Yeah. And it’s interesting. You’ve just pointed something out really well. You know, creating content, speaking to your customers—you’ll realize that, you know, who your audience is. And this is actually a key component to fueling product-led growth, which is having product-market fit in the first place.
I’ll share an example of where creating content as kind of like a cart-before-the-horse has shot startups in the foot. There’s a Notion competitor that focuses on kind of data modeling and analysis. And they created the product and started creating content for product managers. Naturally, that’s where they came from. But about 6 months in, they realized—and I hate to use this audience again—they were attracting a bunch of sales leaders because they were using the product to create, uh, ROI models and things like that. So six months’ worth of content kind of went down the drain simply because they weren’t really listening to who was coming into the door in the first place, and then they had to pivot.
So I think a prerequisite to product-led growth is product-market fit. And that’s why a lot of people do start with kind of like a demo-led or a sales-led approach, because you get to speak to more customers and you figure out where those kinds of triggers—those aha moments—lie and who your audience really is. If that makes sense. I don’t know if that’s the question you asked me.
Patrick: No, I like it. Let me ask one other thing here. So again, I think people getting started—I think we can write on a technical—again, a lot of people who listen to this are technical founders—and we can write technical blog posts. Here’s the—the LCP, you know, core web vital metric when you use our software. Great. How do you talk to—so here’s my question: how do you talk to a non-technical buyer?
Tom: Yeah. If they don’t care about a thing, you don’t talk about it. If they should care about a thing, you educate them why they should care. But you make the barrier to entry to caring about that thing—UTC times, for example—you know, I know it’s just an arbitrary thing, but like within the product itself it’s like, whatever, select your time zone, let’s move on kind of thing.
If we’re talking about something that’s a little bit more technical and we’re talking to a non-technical audience, then you’ve really either got to kind of educate them on why it’s important, but then show them. Oftentimes—this is just one very specific example that came to mind—is show them how to communicate with their technical teammates about how to implement this thing.
So it’s educating why they should care. It’s educating them how to communicate about this thing internally. You’ve got to try and, you know, get the time of other, you know, technical folk within an organization—which is a whole box of frogs in itself. There are so many elements. It really depends on what you’re trying to make them care about and how it relates to, like, those aha moments, the triggers that get people to invest in a product in the first place.
Patrick: I guess here’s my question. Are there things you look for when creating content? Like, I’m thinking of like the hero’s journey—it’s like there’s these phases that you go through to make—to complete a story. Is there something like that for product content?
Tom: Yeah. Let’s start from, like, a high level and go down into the weeds.
So first of all, it depends where they are in the buyer journey. Are they product aware, or are they solution aware? Are they problem aware? You know, what are—what are they trying to figure out?
If they’re problem aware, they’re going to be looking for how to do a thing. And the way that kind of more practically translates to content is educating them.
A good way at high level—it could be strategic. If you’re speaking to the C-suite or senior decision makers, they’re probably not going to really care about the actionable stuff. But if you’re speaking to individual contributors, showing them, you know, exactly, “Here’s how you build a process around solving this problem. Here’s what your messaging should look like. Here’s how you communicate, and here’s how you use our product to do it as well for this specific thing.”
If it comes down to something—you know, again, if they are solution aware and they’re looking for, you know, tools on how to do it, again, the format might be, uh, for example, “top scheduling apps,” “top sales scheduling apps,” and you’ve kind of got to, you know, position yourself as the best one, but you’ve got to give them other options if it’s got a chance of ranking and really delivering value to your reader—which is the most important thing.
It all comes down to delivering value to your audience, right? Whether, you know, your product is the right way for them, and being quite transparent about whether or not it might be. It’s not, you know, “Here’s how you do a thing; here’s how you do it with our app,” but you should only use it if, you know, this is the problem that you’re trying to solve and these are the type of organization you’re implementing it for.
Practically, the way that weaves into content—oftentimes it’s with step-by-step instructions, screenshots, making it really easy. We work with a client in the MSP space. They work with a bunch of IT service providers. And while their audience is technical, they’re speaking to operational leaders, and they really—they just want to implement this thing and get on with it. And sometimes that means implementing code. It means creating—
So they’re a CSAT platform, right? So they—customer feedback. So I am a—I don’t know—a pizza shop, and I have a—a IT problem. I speak to my IT service provider, they solve it, I get a survey. Sad face, middle face, happy face kind of thing. And they, you know—MSP leaders just want to implement it. They don’t think about—they don’t want to think about what they should include in these surveys.
So within our content, we not only show them, “Here’s how to get started,” “Here’s a copy-and-paste template that you can just use when sending these surveys out.”
So there’s a couple of things here: depends on who your buyer is, how sophisticated they are, you know—if it’s a technical solution that you’re offering—but also where they are in the buying journey. What do they need right at this moment?
Patrick: Fantastic. Love it. I did something different on this podcast—I surprised our guest with an imaginary product and asked him on the spot to come up with several different angles to cover this product. It’s a pretty interesting process. Take a listen.
I wanted to do a thought experiment. So I want to give you a product feature. And the product feature is—let’s say it’s a piece of software that organizes all the media files on, let’s say, your business website. Okay—give me, give me like a list of angles that you might take to incorporate that feature into multiple pieces of product-led content.
Tom: Okay. Couple of questions for you, and this is important to figure out what we’re going to write about, how we’re going to deliver value. First and foremost—managing media files on my website. So, for example, WordPress—we’re managing assets: videos, images, etc. Correct?
Patrick: Among others, yes.
Tom: Of course. Who’s our audience?
Patrick: So here’s my thought. This is a technical person who was annoyed at his media library organization and optimization, and so they wrote a thing for themselves, and now they’re trying to sell it. So audience is TBD.
Tom: Why were they annoyed?
Patrick: They couldn’t find the file they were looking for.
Tom: Okay. And as this founder, what were you trying to do? Were you running a business? Were you working in-house? What’s your role?
Patrick: I’ll give my background. I’ve always been—in the past, I’ve always been a side hustler. It’s like, hey, let’s see if this has legs, let’s see if this can grow into something. I almost always have had a day job, but I do love launching little products to see if they have traction. So let’s say that it’s past Patrick.
Tom: Okay, cool. So, solopreneur. You’re building a website, managing these files. They’re, you know, cumbersome. And is it taking a lot of time?
Patrick: Yeah, taking a lot of time. Taking a lot of time is probably the main issue. Correct. Taking a lot of time is the main issue, and also doing things that—like it’s inconvenient, right? It’s like maybe you have to download stuff and then optimize it and then re-upload it. Or, you know, or the file names aren’t changing right because of the way WordPress saves files or something like that. Stuff like that.
Tom: Okay, I’m going to make some assumptions because it’s going to get very boring for your listeners if I continue asking questions.
So let’s say, for example, we’re spending a load of time, you know, uploading things and finding them. So asset management could be a part of this. It could be making sure that your website operates properly—well optimized. These are kind of like some of the problems. And I will embed my product into some of these specific problems.
It could be “media management plugin for WordPress” as well. I could be searching for something like that—again, knowing that I have this problem and what the solution looks like. And Patrick’s app is going to be top of this list, but I’m going to, you know, share some others.
I think a lot of this comes down to the amount of time spent on building websites, you know, managing them. Like, I built my very first website on WordPress. I know how cumbersome it is to find that image and make sure it’s well optimized.
So again, if I want my website to perform well and convert well, it needs to perform well. And therefore, some of these things need to be—need to be done.
So it could be a broad topic where I’m talking about how to improve my page speed. And part of that is making sure that images are well optimized, making sure they’re accessible—alt tags and whatnot. And it just so happens that you can do that really easily in my media management app.
Those are just a few examples.
Patrick: So I wrote down four things here. I wrote down “web designer,” and that was more—maybe like if you’re the single person who builds your own website, like a solopreneur or freelancer—that person would find it useful.
A web developer at a larger agency would find it useful, where they do actually care about the space on the server. It’s like, wow, we have 10,000 images—we need to optimize them. We don’t want to download 10,000 files, put them into Photoshop, optimize them, and re-upload them. That’s crazy. Let’s save 200 hours by using this plugin.
Yeah—SEO is… and you know what? SEO is interesting here, because that is not the intended use, but it is a huge benefit, right? So, like, you can write content for not the intended benefit, but still—websites need to load fast. By optimizing everything that gets uploaded to WordPress, to your website, it’ll naturally help SEO in some tiny way.
If you’re also really good at organizing, then maybe you can even give access to your photographer. The photographer uploads—you have a new set of… maybe a photographer doesn’t usually work with digital businesses, but let’s say it’s a physical business, and a photographer works for you. A whole bunch of new photo shots, and they can upload the 50 best directly to the website, and then other people can take it from there.
Anyway, the SEO one really stuck out to me, because that is not the intended use case, but it is still a massive feature, and something people are definitely willing to pay for.
Tom: This is a really good example—or kind of like an analogy—of what I was talking about earlier. Because you gave me this challenge and I immediately went to, “How do I make sure my website converts?” and “Search” and SEO were big, because those are my biases. Search is a big part of what my agency does.
And you’re saying, “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” So this is why speaking to customers, understanding who they are and why they use your product in the first place, is important—rather than leading with those biases.
Even if, you know, this example is kind of born from Patrick scratching his own itch and solving his own problem, you really have to speak to your customers and understand: Why do they use the product? Why would they? What problems are they trying to solve?
Patrick: I think that’s just really interesting from a business perspective—this whole topic. Because you may create—again, you’re a freelance web designer and you just help people make their own websites. I don’t know, is that a… do people still do that now that we have Squarespace? I don’t know if people still do that.
Tom: Oh yeah. I literally helped my friend build a Webflow website for his electrician business a couple of weeks ago. So they still don’t want to do it themselves, is my point.
Patrick: All right—so they still exist. But you may scratch your own itch, you may build it for freelancers. But then, of course, what’s super interesting about business is—sometimes you realize that you’re… like SEO is such a good example.
Every business I’ve been in has obsessed about it. And some amount of obsession is probably healthy. But I feel like, in some businesses, it’s been an outsized obsession.
And they might be—everyone might be willing to spend a hundred bucks a year on a little SaaS tool that organizes their media files for them and optimizes it for them. Whereas the solo freelance web designer might not be willing to do that.
And then what’s interesting is—then your product shifts, and then you start adding more SEO features. Right? That’s a really good way of looking at it.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know—managing alt tags, maybe having an AI element that looks at those 10,000 images you have across your WordPress website and says, “These 5% of your images are not optimized for accessibility—and therefore SEO.”
Here are some alt tags you could use—click a button, generate it, whatever. Obviously, you need to tweak it, make sure it checks out and whatnot, but again, that’s just one example of where the product can steer in that direction based on the pain points and where the market is already going.
Patrick: All right—this has been very fun. Thank you for… thank you for entertaining me with a thought experiment. I don’t normally put guests on the hot seat to come up with ideas.
Tom: I’m more than happy. I know I’m going to come up with some ideas after we’ve had this podcast, but I’m happy with where we went.
Patrick: Let me go back to product-led content, because I think “how to solve a problem, mention your product” is like the archetype of blog posts. If you want to start investing in that, you create—let’s say you want to create four different pieces of content, maybe one every two weeks. So in two months, you’ll have four pieces of good content, or four totally different topic areas, or something like that.
How do you know that they’re performing? And maybe just for metrics—how do you know which one’s the best, and which one to double down on, and stuff like that?
Tom: Attribution is a bit of a touchy subject among us marketers. It’s really tricky to directly attribute how your content is contributing to revenue and signups.
Honestly, for a lot of our startup clients, for example, they just use self-attribution, which means when someone signs up for an account, they’ll put in their name, email address, password, and then: “How did you hear about us?” Oftentimes that’s an open-ended text field or a dropdown—so it could be “blog,” it could be “search,” whatever. Some people might put “other” and then add qualitative stuff like: “I love your articles, I’ve been reading them for six months.”
We found that for a client in the asynchronous communication space, 33% of people who were self-attributing during signup came from the blog—because they were learning about how to run meetings asynchronously. Just so happens that’s what the platform’s used for.
And it’s probably not accurate, but it gives you a good litmus. It gives you a barometer in terms of: Oh, is this actually working? Is this contributing?
So measuring performance—it really comes down to your business model. It comes down to what you’re trying to achieve and which channels you’re prioritizing.
If it’s search, for example, you want to see: Are we ranking for terms that are really related to our product? And if not, how do we improve our topical authority in the space, i.e., how do we show the world—and Google and whatnot—that we have expertise here? And the best way to do that is just to continue creating content around a narrow use case, or a narrow industry or audience.
Patrick: Let me re-ask this in a slightly different way—because I’m a big fan of “you don’t know what marketing channel is right for you until you try it.” That’s my bias.
So let’s say, as a business, I want to experiment with this marketing channel for, let’s say, three months. For three months, we’re going to do a really good job—we’re going to create a bunch of content, we’re going to launch it on the site.
I guess I don’t care about individual performance right now. How do I even know if it’s a green light to keep doing this content? Like, even just—is there a threshold? I think I’m looking for a go/no-go.
Tom: Ah, interesting. It depends on the channel.
So, for search, three months isn’t going to be long enough. And it probably should be a priority anyway.
Let’s say, for example, though, it’s email newsletters as a distribution channel for owned content. The metrics that you measure are going to depend on the channel.
If I’m going to create content on LinkedIn, I can test that for three months. And while I may not see any direct correlation between doing that and revenue, I might see leading indicators—like more of my target audience starting to see my content, instead of, you know, recruiters and other founders, for example.
I think it’s a matter of measuring those leading indicators and not necessarily treating it as a go/no-go, but more like a red-amber-green.
Right—so do we have an amber sign here? Okay, let’s continue testing this on a small scale, and then figure it out in another three months as well.
It comes down to the channel, and which metrics you should be kind of measuring at the same time.
Patrick: Man, I wish I could give people—the listeners—a map, you know? A guidepost of: “How do you know this is working?”
Let me ask: okay, so with no data—how would you guide someone on creating… we talked about the buyer’s journey earlier—how would you guide someone on creating different content in different stages?
Like, would you create one piece of content for each stage of the buyer’s journey? Would you focus on the beginning? Would you focus on the end?
Just to get started—how do you even think about that with your content?
Tom: Yeah. So we’re talking about prioritization here, in a sense.
Patrick: Yeah.
Tom: Okay. Using some of the examples we’ve talked about today—I would start right at the bottom of the funnel.
Think of the top and the bottom of funnel—forget the middle. You’re capturing demand, right? That is my ultimate priority. I want to get my—
Patrick: Sorry—just quick question for clarity: bottom means they’re very close to converting?
Tom: Exactly. They’re looking for what you offer, but they’re evaluating their options, right? We call these in-market buyers. You’ve got demand capture and demand creation. Content at the bottom of the funnel captures that demand. People are looking for your product, so you create content that gets that in front of them.
Now, people could be searching for things like “best scheduling apps,” or “Calendly alternatives.” You’ll see the search volume behind this and whether or not it’s worth prioritizing. If there are 100 people searching for Calendly alternatives every month, it’s probably a good sign to create a piece of content.
Depending on the competitors in the space as well—if you’re going up against the likes of HubSpot—you still want to create that piece of content because people will find it in other ways. But forget about search, for example. I think you really want to focus on the bottom of the funnel and capturing in-market buyers.
Patrick: Yeah. And demand creation is ultimately what expands the Total Addressable Market (TAM), right? But, man, that is a long process, right? That feels like something you do later. But just get all the people whose wallet is out—the credit card isn’t out yet, but the wallet’s out, and they’re really close to buying. Get all those people, and then move your way up the funnel. That seems to be the right call most of the time.
Tom: 100%. And often times—and this is one thing I would say don’t do right now—are these top-of-funnel articles or top-of-funnel topics for the purpose of search, unless, again, it directly relates to your product and the problems it solves.
Going back to our sales audience: if they’re looking for how to increase show-up rates to introduction or discovery calls and you can use your scheduling app to do that, then that’s a bottom-of-funnel piece. But if I’m HubSpot or a CRM platform, that’s quite tangential. So it comes down to this notion that one marketer’s or one founder’s or one brand’s top of funnel is another brand’s bottom of funnel.
Patrick: Interesting. Do you have any examples of something that you’ve created that’s done really well? You know, just a piece of content?
Tom: Yeah. I’m going to go back to this asynchronous meetings platform that I mentioned earlier. The founding team had a tremendous amount of expertise in the world of remote working, so we started creating content around asynchronous communication and how to create a remote culture.
It didn’t rank very well, didn’t perform very well. But when we created content around daily stand-up meetings, retrospective meetings—things that aren’t directly related to asynchronous communication or remote work but are related to meetings—it ranked very well.
That’s when we started to see 33% attribution from content to trial sign-ups. They already had authority in the meetings space. They were writing about meetings just by being in the space. They positioned themselves as experts. And so what we did in that content is: “Here’s how you run an effective daily stand-up meeting, and here’s how you do it asynchronously with our platform.”
Patrick: So I can see the huge benefit of that: you’re solving a general problem, and here’s how you do it with our specific product. Once you get that… So, number one: How do you know that was successful? Sorry—let’s start with that.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So again, we found that it would rank on page one incredibly fast. They had topical authority in the space—one. Okay, attribution: people were actually reading this content, and from that, they were clicking on the “Sign up for a demo” button. That was an indicator. And then, third of all, was the time on page, the engagement—the amount that people were reading that content was a lot higher than those topics related to remote work broadly.
And just for people who haven’t ever looked at your time-on-page stats, people don’t read much. So if you can get people to read, it’s shocking. Like, when people are on your web page for three minutes, it’s like, “What are you doing, dude?”
Tom: Yeah. Sometimes we look at the stats from our blog posts, and people are on it for like two and a half, three and a half, four minutes on average. I’m like, “Holy shit.”
Patrick: Okay, they’re actually reading. This is shocking. I love it.
Tom: As long as you’re delivering value, people want to read long-form content.
Patrick: Yes, man. That’s a separate conversation—maybe a separate talk someday—about shortening attention spans, but I agree.
Okay, so once you have that success, can you apply it to the same clients? Can you try to repeat that same blog post in a different format or for a different audience? No, it depends, again, on the audience and the business model. It depends on how people are using the product, why they’re looking for the problem, and the problems that you’re solving. Because sometimes, you can have an incredibly valuable product, but it could be solving a very complex problem that people don’t necessarily know they have yet.
So, you might be playing the long game. There’s a whole load of “it depends” elements to it. If we’re looking at product-led content very prescriptively, it’s about how does our product solve a problem and how are people learning about how to solve this problem? Really just embedding content into it in the form of screenshots, educating people on how to do something differently, challenging the status quo, and all that jazz.
Patrick: Marketing to a technical audience can be tricky. They’re savvy, and they can smell marketing tactics from a mile away. Tom and I dig into how to talk to this audience. That’s coming up… Any thoughts?
Okay, so you, again, I’m going to go back to this person, this theoretical technical co-founder who spent a couple of months creating some of these pieces of content. What is your advice on getting it out there? So, you’ve written it on your blog. Let’s say they’re all on your blog. How do you promote and distribute that content, especially to different audiences?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So, distribution should be baked into your content production process, your content strategy, from the get-go. Search is a channel, but then you might find that there are communities where your audience is really active—maybe subreddits, Indie Hackers, for example. Distributing that content isn’t going to be a simple matter of just dumping your link onto these communities. A better way to approach it is the distribution of your message and ideas rather than the distribution of the content.
For example, if I’m going to repurpose a particular unique idea in a blog post for LinkedIn, then I want to make sure it performs well on LinkedIn. But it just so happens that you can learn more about this in our in-depth guide on the blog here, kind of thing. Includes a link in the comments. So, distribution really comes down to working within the context of each channel, distributing your ideas and your message, and the value that you’re bringing to the world, and then driving traffic second. It’s getting a lot harder to use these platforms as distribution channels for content.
Patrick: I think this is something that I keep forgetting: creating the blog post is really the first version of the piece of content. And then, you’re right, for LinkedIn or whatever, you’ll recreate it, or you’ll cut out— you’ll only talk about point one, and you’ll cut out points two, three, and four because that’s what someone in this group asked or that’s what someone on your personal LinkedIn feed asked. And so, you can say, “Oh, actually, I’ve kind of already covered it; here’s two paragraphs, and then here’s the full blog post if you want to read more.”
But I guess I forget that creating the piece of content—that’s the most work—but then you do need to recreate, like, you know, recreate parts of it, pieces of it, angles of it for different platforms. And I guess I still forget that—you really need to do that. You can’t just post the link somewhere.
Tom: Yes, exactly. And like to your point, you know, you’ve created content around point one and you’ve forgotten about two, three, and four. Hey, man, you’ve got four pieces of content you can distribute and create on these other platforms as well.
Patrick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any process for helping find influencers or experts that you can then quote and maybe also share your content?
Tom: Absolutely, I’m so glad you asked. Our distribution approach kind of is built on four pillars: content repurposing, which we’ve just talked about; paid amplification; link building; and influencer collaboration. There used to be this practice in the content marketing space, way back in the day, where you could quote an influencer in your content, and when it goes live, you share it with them and they’ll share it with their audience. Banner blindness, the law of shitty click-through rates, right? It became ineffective the more people used it.
A better approach is to collaborate with those experts throughout the content production process, making them a key voice throughout, and then encouraging them to share it after the fact. It’s better to collaborate with them from the very beginning of the content production process and make it as easy as possible for them to share it with their audience, rather than just saying, “Hey, I mentioned you. Here’s a link. Can you share it, please?” Collaborative over just spray and pray.
Patrick: Many of the people that listen to our show are building developer tools. Any last advice on how you can apply this to people who are developers and generally building tools for developer tools?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re already a technical founder speaking to another developer audience, you’re going to speak their language. If you’re not, man, developers and technical folks can smell a charlatan from a mile away.
Patrick: Yes, they can.
Tom: So, it’s kind of like when you think about content, a lot of content marketers, marketers in general, have a bad habit of mollycoddling—talking down to their audience. Sorry, that’s a British term.
Patrick: Okay, yeah, I don’t know that.
Tom: Talking down, like kind of handholding their audience, which is good to a certain extent. But if you start talking down to your audience as if they’re idiots, they’re going to feel the friction of that, and they’re going to go away. It’s again about speaking your audience’s language and meeting them where they are. How sophisticated are they really?
If I’m speaking to a developer who has 10 years of experience, I don’t need to define or tell them what SharePoint is, for example. So, speaking their language and then making implementing the thing as easy as possible. You could give them code snippets within your written content that they can copy, paste, and tweak, etc. You know, that kind of thing. Again, it really depends on the product that you’re offering, but it really does come down to making life as easy for them as possible—showing them how to solve their problems. It could be step-by-step instructions on how to use your product. It could be copy-and-paste code.
Patrick: Got it. One other technical thing here that I’ve been thinking about is, for software, you generally need to write documentation. Is there overlap between technical documentation and product-led content, or should those remain as two separate silos?
Tom: Yes, 100%. Right, so going back to this MSP client that I talked about earlier, technical documentation is critical because I just want to know the step one, two, three—do this thing. Product-led content, when it comes to educating people, is kind of almost like you’re embedding the technical documentation within the context of a broader blog post in a way. You’re showing them how to do something, but they have two very different purposes. You could see it as repeating yourself, but the context of why people are coming to that content is very, very different. You need both.
Patrick: Yeah, I guess documentation is, “Here’s all the ways you can do this one thing that you need to do, and here’s all the settings you care about. Like, here’s every setting if you want to know the details of every setting.”
Tom: Precisely.
Patrick: Whereas product-led content is, “Here’s a story: you’re this type of person, how do we solve your problem?” which may be the same feature that you’re covering, but it’s a bit more… it just feels like it’s maybe technical documentation in context, in a way.
Tom: Yeah, that’s a really good way of putting it. Yeah, and you know, you don’t have to get into the weeds of those settings, for example—they’ll figure it out later. You just want to get people into the product. That’s the priority.
Patrick: Got it. Tom, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your thoughts.
Tom: It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Patrick: Awesome. And thanks to the listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, like, subscribe, and tell your friends so we can carry on enticing awesome and influential guests to join us and share their remarkable journeys. And if you subscribe through the plugin website, you will get early bird access to our future content. plugin.fm is brought to you by Freemius, your all-in-one payments, subscriptions, and taxes platform for selling software, plugins, themes, and software as a service. If you’re struggling to grow your software revenue, send a note to [email protected] to get free advice from Freemius’s monetization experts. My name is Patrick Rauland, and thanks for listening to plugin.fm.
