B2B companies today are all about “product-led growth”, but very few are aware of “product-led content marketing”. If done right, product-led content can do wonders for your brand aka building topical authority and generating leads.
Here’s our story on how we implemented a product-led content marketing strategy to generate quality traffic and boost user acquisition for a B2B SaaS productivity tool that is a Slack application.
About the SaaS Productivity tool
The SaaS company is a time-tracking productivity tool used by companies to track the attendance of its team members, contractors, freelancers and other human resources. The core feature allows integration with Slack to monitor the working hours, removing the need to manually punch in and out times.
The Challenge
At the time, the product had only two features: attendance and time tracking. Since the tool had limited capabilities, it was difficult for the brand to establish authority in its industry. Moreover, the market was filled with similar productivity tools with greater functionality, which made building brand awareness much more complex – especially during the COVID when teams went remote and everyone was targeting similar companies.
So instead of taking the broader approach to talking about productivity like everyone else, we built out a product-led content marketing strategy that focused on highlighting the features to the fullest – deep diving into each one of them to explore untapped opportunities and use cases.
Our Approach
After thorough market research, keyword gap analysis and competitor analysis, we decided to streamline the number of content pillars we set up for the strategy. Given that the product had two distinct features, we built content pillars around the following:
- Time tracking
- Attendance tracking
This involved creating problem-aware content addressing the challenges companies face with time tracking and attendance for their remote team members, contractors and freelancers.
For the next one year, we decided to dedicate each month to tackle the two pillars in a 50-50 manner, covering topics that were decided based on core intent of users working from home during the pandemic.
Here is a glimpse of the content strategy we used:
- Understand the requirements of their target audience and ideal customer persona
- Shortlisted 100 intent-first keywords under each pillar
- Created a content calendar with 10 long-form blogs per month (5 for time tracking and 5 for attendance tracking)
- Refreshing content pieces per month to include broad match keywords
- Refreshing content pieces quarterly to include FAQs and PAAs
Each content piece was deeply focused on solving the target audience query, narrowing it down to make it relevant and contextual to their industry, use case or problem.
This led to a massive spike in organic traffic because we strayed away from creating generic listicles as found online and prioritized satisfying true search intent.
As we saw an increase in the organic traffic, we moved to the next stage of their B2B SaaS content marketing strategy – Content repurposing.
We identified the best-performing content pieces and converted them into condensed ebooks based on the purpose they solved. Focusing on distribution more than re-writing the content pieces, the ebook made its way to platforms like Product Hunt.
Since the content resonated with many start-up founders who hired contractors, our approach yielded several qualified leads and doubled user acquisition – all organically!
The Results
The SaaS company could generate high-quality leads and establish authority despite the limited features in a sea of productivity tools that offered all-in-one solutions. They organically built their sales pipeline thanks to fluff-free intent-led content.
