Global annual e-commerce sales pushed past the $6-trillion mark in 2022, creating strong competition headwinds for online sellers. Couple this crowded ecosystem with the fact that 80% of consumers find paid ads annoying, and it becomes clear that you need a creative approach to showing off your products.
Fortunately, as much as customers aren’t fond of traditional ads, they dig content that presents them with a solution to a problem.
You can leverage your content team’s skills to craft product marketing content aimed at solving customer pain points while highlighting your product as the best answer — without using pushy sales tactics.
However, to be successful, you need to create a strategy specifically for this type of content marketing. Don’t worry; we’ll walk you through the process so you don’t enter new territory without direction. If you have a product-led content strategy, use our tips to help you craft strategies that clearly define how to include products effectively within your content and improve performance.
What’s the Difference Between Product Marketing Content and Content Marketing?
Before devising a product marketing content strategy, it’s important to know the difference between content that markets a product and content marketing. There’s a difference, you ask? Yes, it’s subtle, but knowing what differentiates one from the other is critical to your success.
Product-centered marketing is a subset of content marketing. Your blogs, emails or newsletters, and social media content serve multiple purposes, including establishing your brand as a thought leader, increasing brand awareness, and maintaining a loyal customer base.
On the other hand, the primary driver for creating product-led content is to increase sales. You use your content to let your audience know how your product fills a need. However, the trick is to integrate mentions of your product naturally into the narrative and not come across as an infomercial.
How To Develop a Product Marketing Content Strategy
Your content strategy forms the foundation for every asset that moves customers through the customer journey. It’s no different for product-centered content. These seven steps will help you create a solid plan for your product marketing content.
1. Do Your Research
Before creating relevant content, you need to know your target audience’s needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Not only that, but you’ll also need to understand the pain points for each customer persona.
Understanding needs from a customer’s perspective allows you to create content focused on solving their problems. Providing helpful content is primary, but you can position your product as the solution by showing how its features alleviate specific pain points.
Image Source: Salesforce
By working within a content platform like Divvy, your team can segment content according to buyer personas, buying stages, and topics, which helps ensure proper coverage across all facets of your market.
2. Establish Clear Goals
Your product marketing content strategy should include content goals. However, you should also establish goals for your new customer acquisition and sales lift. Aligning the goals for all aspects of product marketing content ensures your teams have a clear direction as they move an asset from ideation to publication.
3. Encourage Collaboration
Creating content is a team sport, and never more so than in product marketing.
Your brand’s product specialists may be able to rattle off all the unique features and benefits of each product while simultaneously playing Call of Duty online. But can they craft a compelling story?
Conversely, your creatives might not have the in-depth product knowledge needed to convince prospects that you can solve their problems.
Content collaboration is essential, and you need to make it easy for multiple players to put their heads together and generate product marketing content. Divvy provides a simplified, centralized platform that increases collaboration efficiency by eliminating the need for various technologies to get the job done.
4. Weave Product Marketing Content Into Your Content Calendar
No one wants to be inundated with product marketing content, no matter how well-written or valuable it is. Make sure part of your strategy includes a big-picture view of how this content type fits in with the rest of your content.
Weave your product-centered content into your content calendar so it is dispersed among other topics aimed at the same audiences. Your team should be able to readily identify when they are saturating a segment with too many product-led assets.
Screenshot: DivvyHQ Calendar Interface
5. Create With the Customer in Mind
Even though your goal is to sell your product, your team should still focus on the customer when creating an asset. In other words, you don’t want your team asking how to craft a blog post to sell a product.
Instead, they should prioritize creating relevant, engaging content that addresses audience pain points. However, you don’t want to tell viewers why your products are the solution to their issues without telling them how to get that solution. Make sure you include a compelling call to action in your content.
6. Diversify Your Content
Your product marketing content strategy should specify content formats. There is more than one way to present product-led content, and you should incorporate as many of them as you can, including:
- Blog posts
- Video testimonials
- Case studies
- How-to videos
- Infographics
- eBooks
Creating content in multiple formats allows you to reach more people on various channels, broadening your reach and increasing your target audience’s access to helpful information.
Image Source: The CMO Survey
7. Track Performance and Revise
Content strategies aren’t static. They evolve with changing needs and more information. Content analytics should inform your strategy. To determine whether an asset’s performance is up to snuff, analyze traffic and conversions, revising your plan as needed.
Did you involuntarily shudder at the prospect of generating reports? We get it! Content analysis is even more frustrating than other marketing metrics, so we developed a simple analytics tool that aggregates data for you and generates easy-to-interpret reports that you can share with your marketing and C-suite teams.
Simplifying the Product Marketing Content Process
Creating a product marketing content strategy is an important step in generating content that is both helpful to customers and drives sales. At Divvy, we exist to make your marketing life easy. Our platform places the tools your team needs at their fingertips and houses them all in one location.
Request a demo to see how we simplify every aspect of product marketing, including: content strategy, planning, collaboration, production workflow, and performance analysis.
