Picture it: Your brilliant product team has just unveiled a whopper of a container orchestration solution, and you can barely contain your excitement. (You voice this sentiment and receive a chorus of groans.)
Naturally, you want to start churning out blog posts, videos, and podcasts about the wonder of The Orchestrationer 3000. But the marketing team quickly reminds you that you must find a willing audience before you can broadcast to it (and they even more quickly beg you to stop pitching product names).
Instead of bombarding new readers with a sales pitch, your publication must attract them with helpful content. That is the content strategy dilemma. So, how do you strike the perfect balance between emphasizing the product (name TBD) and addressing industry topics and trends?
You could adopt a haphazard “see-what-sticks” methodology, like throwing spaghetti on a kitchen wall. Or, instead, keep reading to discover why a thoughtful, balanced approach is most likely to yield the best results — and learn how to determine the exact recipe to make all your content appealing.
The Importance of a Balanced Content Strategy
Ideally, your product would sell itself. Realistically, it competes in a market awash with similar offerings and splashy ad campaigns. So, it’s not just your flagship product but your content as a whole that shapes your brand’s image, credibility, and authority.
Meticulously crafted content invites potential customers into your company’s unique ecosystem. Mediocre content that’s overly broad or too narrowly focused invites them to click out of the browser tab. Even worse, talking too much about your product triggers the reader’s ingrained ad-block response.
A balanced content strategy helps boost your company’s credibility, portray a positive brand image, and establish you as an industry authority.
Assessing Product Emphasis in Content Strategy
When discussing your product, hit us with the selling points, but don’t hit us over the head.
The Risk of Over-Emphasis
It doesn’t matter how much confidence you have in your offering’s value. If you drone on endlessly about it or squeeze in a mention wherever it might fit, your brand comes off as single-minded, salesy, and one-dimensional. This type of aggressive marketing is a surefire way to alienate potential customers who have just popped in to investigate your company.
Sometimes, the best way to give credence to a product’s value is to demonstrate your company’s awareness and interests outside of what you’re selling. Discussing industry-specific topics and drawing insights from the latest trends will garner consumer attention and help establish your brand as an authority on relevant subjects.
At the same time, you don’t want to overcorrect by underselling.
The Pitfall of Under-Emphasis
Overemphasizing your product may hinder your brand’s appeal, but underemphasizing it is just as costly. If your content becomes a catalog of industry trends and conjecture about the next tech revolution, you reduce your brand identity to a vaguely recognizable logo — and not much else.
More than that, you’re missing an opportunity to underscore what makes your product unique, why it’s valuable, and how it can be a game-changer for potential users. You’re excited about how your product will shake up the tech sphere, so tell us why!
Approaches to Content Strategy
Good content tells a story. Great content maintains a cohesive narrative throughout every article, blog post, and video you release. It’s the story of your brand and product offerings and — most critically — what makes you stand out in an increasingly saturated market.
As you produce unique content, the optimal content approach maintains an equally distinct balance between broad and product-centric information.
Broad Content Approach
When you’re writing about your product, you undoubtedly should be an expert in it. But staying too product-focused is a missed opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of your brand’s expertise. A broad content approach gives you the space to establish your brand as an industry thought leader — a trustworthy entity with intrinsic value beyond what it sells.
You can raise your company’s profile by producing high-quality materials highlighting industry trends, overviewing best practices, and offering step-by-step guides to building projects or solving problems. Showcasing your organization’s relevance, accessibility, and personality may provide the necessary boost from anonymity to renown.
That said, you’re unlikely to convert visitors to users if you only discuss the best JavaScript frameworks and analyze the trendiest tech. This content builds trust, but to sell your product, you need to sell your product.
Product-Centric Approach
Your offering needs ample time in the spotlight, too. A product-centric approach focuses on your product’s features, benefits, and applications. Here, you’re targeting readers further down the sales funnel. They want detailed product information, realistic use cases, and potential integration timelines.
But be cautious — the tech audience is exceptionally wary of marketing pitches. Drive home what makes your offering spectacular, but focus on the facts and skip the fluff.
As you draw in an audience via your broader expertise, that trust is fragile, and pitching too aggressively can shatter it.
Finding the Balance: Hybrid Content Strategies
So, how do you find that perfect equilibrium that piques interest and converts where it counts? Be organized, be organic, and always remember who you’re talking to.
Segmenting Content
Proper organization can move mountains. Start by categorizing your content as educational or promotional, then decide where to publish each type.
The answer might be different platforms — like using the company blog purely for informational content and keeping your social media product-focused. Or you might maintain separate sections on your website.
Regardless of your choice, well-implemented segmentation helps you deliver the right type of content to the right audience. It also helps set the expectation of the kinds of information each platform contains. A reader looking for more general information will feel confident knowing your blog doesn’t include one sales pitch after another. Meanwhile, someone in the decision-making phase knows where to find the product specifics to help make that final leap into ownership.
Interweaving Product Mentions in Broad Content
There’s another less-anticipated phenomenon associated with broader content. Even when you’re showcasing industry expertise and authority in your general pieces, readers may question why you cover so many topics not directly relevant to what you’re selling. So, integrating product mentions into this content can be a boon to your brand’s appeal.
How-to tutorials are a great way to slip your product into helpful articles. Here’s how to use a neat Python trick, and oh, by the way, you can deploy your finished application using the Orchestrationer 3000 (err, I mean product name TBD). It’s an opportunity to showcase your product’s benefits without making it all about you.
Case studies represent an ideal strategy, organically integrating product focus with a more expansive and nuanced approach. They help avoid the hard sell while showcasing what makes your offering a standout solution. Moreover, case studies re-emphasize your awareness of the industry and experience in delivering tangible results without assuming an overtly salesy tone that undermines the surrounding content.
Audience Persona Targeted Content
Have you ever walked into a shoe store and been greeted by a salesperson asking how you’d like to pay for today’s purchase? Neither have we.
Whether crafting broad or product-oriented copy, recognize where your potential customers are in their buyer’s journey. Hounding curious first-timers with catalogs of specifications and selling points is spectacularly ineffective. Similarly, you don’t want to play too cautious and coy with those on the cusp of making the purchase decision.
Recognize who your audience is and meet them where they are, adjusting your product emphasis accordingly.
Monitoring and Adjusting Your Strategy
Content strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. Striking the perfect balance takes iterative testing and constant monitoring. More than that, it requires adaptability: The industry changes, and staying relevant means evolving alongside it.
Employing Feedback and Engagement Metrics
The beauty of web platforms is that they provide more data than you’ll know what to do with. Numbers often tell the tale. Use analytics to measure how effective your content is and how engaged your audience feels.
Which pieces get the most attention? Where do your users click after reading an article? Never underestimate the insights these metrics offer.
Performing Iterative Testing
A/B testing is an iterative approach to fine-tune your content balance. By running two versions of the same content sets, you can identify whether more product mentions alienate potential customers or if your readers disengage from content that is too expansive.
Keep testing to find the optimal combination.
Adapting to Industry Changes and Trends
Few things evolve as quickly as technology. It’s essentially a cliche to mention it. But if you don’t acknowledge this reality, you won’t be prepared when the Next Big Thing starts making waves.
Today’s perfect balance of content will only remain perfect for so long. Maintaining a polished content strategy takes staying flexible, adaptable, and open to adjusting to each trend.
We’re not saying you should be wishy-washy. Your company’s ethos should be consistent and identifiable. However, your approach to delivering content requires understanding how the industry affects consumer expectations.
Next Steps
That majestic, elusive, ideal blend of product-based content and broad information doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. Although it’s challenging to accomplish and varies with each brand, it’s well worth the effort.
The right combination is synergistic — you gain the authority and trustworthiness that gives potential users confidence in your solution, and your product elevates your brand into an industry mainstay. That’s a win-win.
Looking for content that perfectly balances product information and broader insights? Trust ContentLab to craft content that informs and sells.
