is your content actually marketing?

Hey there,

I spent about half my work time in the SaaS/tech world, which means I hear a LOT of buzzwords and jargon.

Most of the time, it doesn’t really mean anything.

It’s just a fancier way to say something simple, used because the speaker/writer thinks it makes them sound smarter (it doesn’t).

But in some rare cases, I come across a piece of jargon that makes me go, “yeah, actually we do need a phrase for that.”

There are two specific examples of that I want to talk about today: product-led content marketing and conversion-oriented content marketing.

When I first head these phrases, I thought “so just a longer way to say content marketing, then?”

But over the past few years, I’ve realized that as much as I wish qualifiers like “conversion-oriented” weren’t needed for content marketing, they are.

It’s unfortunately, necessary jargon.

Why just “content marketing” isn’t enough

Content marketing means a lot of different things, depending on your business model and marketing strategy.

But unfortunately, for a lot of businesses, there is no strategy.

For them, content marketing simply means “publish content.”

Not necessarily strategic content, not necessarily content that moves any legitimate business goals forward. Just…any old content.

I’ve worked with so many businesses where the majority of their past content cannot remotely tie back to a business goal, let alone a sale or booking.

It was just something the business owner or marketer “felt like writing” or “thought people would be interested in” (Which people? How likely are they to become a customer?)

This is probably because of how much content marketing advice for online business owners basically tells you to just pick content “buckets” or “pillars” or topics, without thinking about how they relate to the marketing or sales process in your business.

As a result, a lot of the content I see published by online business owners can only loosely be called “marketing.”

(Random sidebar: my theory is that this has to do with how many of the online business influencers giving content advice started out as personal bloggers or lifestyle influencers. In that business model, the audience members aren’t their customers/clients, sponsors are, so content doesn’t need to be about moving them through a sales process.)

But if you want to use content to sell products or services, you have to think about the customer journey.

Where product-led and conversion-oriented content come in

This differentiation between publishing content, and using content to create customers, is why I like terms like product-led content and conversion-oriented content.

They highlight where the focus should be with your content strategy for anyone who needs the reminder.

The term product-led content became popular in reaction to how hesitant lots of content marketers were to even mention, let alone promote, their business’s products in their content.

In the early days of content marketing, there was serious fear of taking away from the value and education content marketing is known for by selling.

But legitimate concerns about balancing value and promotion were taken a little too far, and now it’s all too common to read a piece of marketing content and have no idea what the business even does.

In contrast, product-led content focuses on weaving the business’s product or service into the value and education, instead of trying to separate the two.

If you’re interested in learning more, Ahrefs’ blog post about product-led content has some great examples of both B2B and B2C product-led content (and happen to be one of my own favorite examples themselves).

The phrase conversion-oriented content is less popular than product-led content, but I feel like it can appeal to more business models, like service-based businesses, that have a longer customer journey or sales process.

Product-led content mostly seems used by companies like DTC ecommerce and self-serve SaaS, where someone might go straight from reading a blog post to a sale.

But sometimes it’s bettter to point someone towards a pit stop instead of going straight to the main destination.

In this case, conversion-oriented content thinking can come in handy.

Because conversions aren’t always about the final sale of your product or service.

A conversion can just be joining your email list, filling out an inquiry form, booking a sales call, or whatever else the next step in your customer journey. You don’t necessarily need to “lead with your product” or service, just with the next step in your customer/client journey.