What Your Product Needs The Most? Hint: It’s Not Another Feature
Product adoption is hard. In fact, it’s so hard and so mysterious that there are teams of people devoted to trying to figure it out.
Product Managers spend a huge amount of our time and effort thinking about what to build, and why, and then making sure what is built is the right thing... then end that process with a simple release note on GitHub. If we’ve built the right things, at the right time, people will come. Right?
WRONG.
There are so many products that are half baked, and sort of suck, who win the market. And they all have one thing in common.
Content.
This is the gorilla in the shed, the “rest of the iceberg” under the waterline that is going to sink your boat — the lack of awareness and focus by product managers on content.
The Launch and Content
No product is complete without a launch. No Launch is real without content. Tattoo that on your forearm. Part of the launch plan must include key messaging, various pieces of content to say what you’ve built, what’s its value, what problem does it solve, how to get it, what it costs. Ideally repeatedly, across multiple assets. A singular blog post is not enough.
Longer Term Content
Once your launch has passed, you still need content to market your product. On a semi-regular (weekly) cadence, you’ll need to have new content. This content should ideally reuse/regurgitate your previous content, and do things like:
- explain what the product is
- tell people what problems it solves
- and let them know how to get it, right now, for free
Then, place the content where your most likely potential users are reading and hanging out. Whether that’s reddit or facebook groups on knitting, you need to educate your potential users and tell them your product exists.
What Type of Content Do you Need?
Now that I’ve convinced you to have content for your product, the question is what constitutes “content”. A lot people, including product marketers, simplify content into a single blog post, placed on our own website, and then an email to a mailing list. This is probably because we need to think differently about what content could be.
(There’s actually a whole push about thinking about Content As a Product, which I think is definitely worth reading up on, but that’s a post for another day…)
This is the most helpful resource I’ve seen: a brainstormed list of potential content from the MKT1 Substack:
Content should be built into your product roadmap upfront — what kind of content do you need (opinion articles? code examples? tutorials? podcasts? templates? release notes and documentation?) and where to place it (ads? dev.to? stack overflow blog?); depends on your users and your product and your goals. Be ambitious but reasonable.
Whose Job is it Anyway?
If you have a dedicated content marketing team, that’s great news. It’s their job. But if you don’t (I don’t.) then ask yourself if anyone is doing this for your product right now. If not, then content marketing is probably your job. It’s not very hard, but it is very necessary, and then sooner you get started, the better.
