How to make product-led content interesting and helpful

Ben: Alright, welcome to the Content Amplified Podcast. We're so excited to have Megan here today. Megan, thank you for coming on the show. Megan Pratt: Thank you for inviting me, excited to be here. Ben: wonderful. So Megan is an expert when it comes to product marketing and content marketing. Super excited to have her. Megan maybe go over just one, two minutes about your background, your experience, and your passions in marketing. Megan Pratt: Perfect. Yeah, so I've been in marketing for a little over a decade at this point, and most of that has been spent in product marketing. The last couple of full-time in-house roles that I had, I was the first product marketer on the scene. So I was responsible for really getting in, assessing the situation, and then implementing product marketing best practices, like product launch strategy, messaging and positioning. And then I think the key part is really just figuring out what does it look like to bridge the gap between product marketing, sales, content, all of these different things that need to happen. Product marketing's really the bridge between those. These days, I do that on a fractional basis for a lot of different clients, and I find myself fitting in that intersection between product marketing best practices and actually bringing those best practices to life. And the best way to really start doing that, in my not so humble opinion, is content. Thinking about what does this look like on our website? How are we expressing this in blog posts, sales enablement content, webinars, all of those different tactical things that we can do to start bringing the messaging, positioning, and product launch strategy to life. Ben: I love it, that's awesome. So today, and again, this whole podcast is about actionable insights to make your content better, tactically things you can take each and every episode and really apply it to your marketing. Megan has come with an awesome subject that in emailing back and forth, I thought this was really clever, super helpful, I would have loved this earlier on in my career. But mainly these three main tips. on how to make your product-led content interesting and helpful. So I'll let Megan take it from there, but again, this is super fascinating, how to make your content more interesting, especially the product-led stuff. Megan Pratt: Yeah, exactly. I think it really helps to kind of set the scene for what the goal of a good product launch and content strategy is. In my opinion, the real goal of those things is to connect your customers and potential customers with your product. So keeping that kind of North Star in mind, there are really three things that I recommend. And I think these three things. really center around how does a great content marketer or product marketer keep a foot in both worlds, the product world and the content world. You kind of have to span the gaps between, gap between what are we doing with our product? What are our goals? And what does our customer want? What is our customer trying to do here? If you do that correctly, it can really be a great catalyst for a lot of different things internally. But specifically speaking to content, Uh, the first thing I would recommend that either a content or a product marketer do with their product led content is just take a step back and think about the product launch process. And the reason that I say that is if you don't have enough notice, if you're not embedded in that product launch process, if you don't maybe have the, um, the finger on the pulse of what's being launched at what time, you don't have enough space and time to be creative. You can't think about anything other than. This thing launched yesterday and I just found out about it. So now I have to write up a quick brief and throw it on the blog, which maybe isn't the best way to do product led content. It is probably the most common way, but maybe not the best. So. If there's a way that you can maybe even just have a quick 30 minute meeting with your product manager, the, your product counterpart and say, Hey, this is what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to connect our customers with our product here. I'd like to do that through better content. I can do my job better if I have a few weeks of notice in order to be creative. What can we do here? Is there a roadmap that I can get access to? Do you wanna do weekly meetings, bi-weekly meetings? How can we work together? Because I know we have the same goal. I know you want people using your product and I do too. So let's work together to make that happen. And then I think that leads me to the second tip there, which is use that extra time, the time that you've just bought yourself. to think about the entire customer lifecycle. I think when we think about product-led content, we a lot of time think about what I just described. This is what this thing is, here's who it's for, here's how to use it, here's a link to some help documentation, throw that on the blog, link to it on your social, check product-led contents done. But there's so much more that you can potentially do and so many more ways that you can weave your product messaging into everything that you do. So if you've got a little bit of extra time now, maybe even just a week or two, you can think, all right, what do I want my customer to know before they purchase? What do I want them to know during the selection process? And how can I give them that information? And there's a lot of ways you can do that. You can, you know, now with that extra time, you can connect with customers who are in the beta period and say, what are you liking about this? Can we do a case study? Would you be willing to come on our launch webinar and talk about what you like about this? Maybe you create. If you're thinking about the selection process, you create like, here's a checklist of best practices and things to look for. You're guiding your customers through that selection process. All of that I would describe as product led, but it doesn't necessarily, it's not necessarily just like a product brief per se. And then I think the third thing, and I alluded to it a little bit at the beginning, because I believe that a great product or content marketer... really needs to be, have their feet in both worlds, the product world and the content world, you have to be constantly in touch with the customer world. You have to be constantly in touch with what's on your customer's minds today. How are we answering those questions? What are their biggest pain points? How is that changing over time? And it doesn't have to be super complicated. For instance, my usual workflow is that every Friday, nobody seems to wanna meet with me on Fridays anyways. which is fine with me, I block out maybe an hour on Friday, listen to some gong calls, do a keyword search on LinkedIn, maybe I connect with a webinar that happened this week in a industry conference or whatever it might be. I spend that time really getting into the hearts and minds of my customer and then that time, that one hour of time or 30 minutes if that's all you can spare, really yields like 10X in terms of. The ideas that you'll be able to generate, the feedback you'll be able to bring back to the team, and the way you'll be able to say, I'm creating this specific type of content in order to answer this specific pain point that's on customers' minds. And it really just kind of helps to center your strategy on the customers and not just your product, kind of like I mentioned, bridging the gap between the two. Ben: I love that, that's amazing. I love how you talked about following the customer journey. In my career, I had this awesome consultant that came into a business I was working for. And what she insisted was not having like a digital version of the customer journey. She made me actually like print it or hand write it on papers, reserve a conference room and tape them up on the wall. And when she came into the office, we took step by step. we would stand next to the different stages of the customer journey and talk about them and go through them. I think that would be a really cool exercise to actually have your customer come in and do that with you and say, okay, cool. Here's how we imagine your journey. Here's how we do it step by step, but what am I missing? What are we doing here? And it's cool because then you could take notes and like you were talking about, where are the hiccups? Where are the headaches? Where are the problems? Where are the issues? And then all of a sudden you can kind of start to understand and empathize with that customer a little bit more. And there is something about like that physical walking step by step kind of a mentality. That's kind of a unique way to have your brain look at it in a different way for sure. I love this. Megan Pratt: Yeah, for sure. I love that strategy. That sounds like a great strategy. I think another thing that I sometimes do is I'll meet with our sales team and just say, what are the questions that most commonly come up around our product? Whether that's in the discovery phase or the renewal phase. And then I'll craft content specifically around those, answering those questions or reframing those questions earlier on. So not only does that give. The sales team, something to use when that question comes up, they can say, I've got a blog post just for you. Let me send it over in our follow-up. But it also helps to bring customers into that phase a little bit easier with maybe a little bit more of an informed opinion. Ben: I love it. That's fantastic. Awesome. Well, it feels short because we're again, trying to keep these short and sweet and help people get some tactical advice. Megan, thank you so much for coming on. Quickly, how can people find you and connect with you if they wanna work with you or just say hello? What are the best channels to get ahold of you? Megan Pratt: Yeah, I love chatting. I'm always posting things like this on LinkedIn. I try and keep it really tactical, really actionable, one or two things that you can do today. So find me on LinkedIn, Megan Pratt. If you want more information about working with me, you can also go to productmarketinghouse.com or just DM me on LinkedIn, either one works. Ben: Perfect. Well, Megan, thanks again for the time. We're so excited to have this, and these are great tips on how to make your product-led content even more interesting. Thank you so much. Megan Pratt: Yeah, thank you, Ben.