♾️ Product-led content ≠ Blog posts

You’re reading The Content Loop — a 5-min read on how B2B SaaS marketers can use original research and product-led content as a growth lever.

Did someone forward this email to you?

I’ve been knee-deep (or more like neck-deep) in planning a new series of product-led experiences for a client.

We’re already doing product-led content in the form of blog posts and social content—but I want to ramp it up to pull more of the right people into our world.

But as I was looking for inspiration, I kept hitting the same wall. Most product-led content defaulted to blog posts or demo videos of sorts. Nobody was really:

• Bringing in their brand’s true personality

• Creating an interactive (or in-depth) experience

• Truly ungating their product with context

The companies winning with product-led approaches aren’t just writing about their products. They create experiences that let prospects interact with their solution before booking a demo.

Here are three companies doing this right:

1. Incident.io: Brutally honest competitor comparisons

Most SaaS comparison pages are glorified feature tables with cherry-picked testimonials.

Incident.io’s PagerDuty comparison page doesn’t mess around. At all. 😆

Instead of the usual “we’re better at everything” approach, they start by explaining why PagerDuty isn’t the right fit for their ideal customers. They use actual phrases customers have shared about PagerDuty’s limitations.

“Trusted for alerting, but stops short—leaving teams to manage chaos across disconnected tools.”

They’re not trashing their competitor—they’re acknowledging what PagerDuty does well while highlighting the specific gap that matters to incident responders.

This feels like talking to someone who understands both products instead of reading marketing copy written by someone who’s never used either tool.

But that’s not the best part. The whole page is an experience of its own.

Right from using the customer’s VoC to showing the app’s UI differences and hitting on the right differentiators, it’s a masterclass. Highly recommend the page to understand what good BOFU content looks like.

2. Appcues: Documenting their own messy experiments

Every B2B company creates “playbooks” now. Most are generic step-by-step guides that could apply to any product.

Appcues takes a different approach. They document their internal experiments and turn them into detailed playbooks for customers.

You know those moments you’ve signed up for a tool and suddenly have these micro moments where you know the app can solve a problem, but you’re not sure how? That’s the problem this play solves.

For example, its “When Growth Gets Messy” piece breaks down exactly how they handled customer overages using their own product.

They show the specific in-app slideouts they created for different plan types—the workflow email series they built. The Salesforce automations they set up to track opportunities.

This isn’t theoretical advice from a consultant. They solved a real problem with their tool, documented with screenshots and step-by-step processes.

Their customers face hundreds of growth challenges. Instead of leaving them to figure out solutions on their own, Appcues shows them exactly how they solved similar problems internally.

3. Storylane: Building tutorials for tools they don’t even sell

Storylane wanted more website traffic. Instead of creating more content about demo creation, they built interactive tutorials for other tools their audience uses daily.

Need to learn LinkedIn Sales Navigator? They have a 30-second interactive walkthrough.

Want to master a specific HubSpot workflow? They built a tutorial for that, too.

Every tutorial is created using Storylane’s demo platform. They’re teaching you to use other tools while showing you what their product can do.

It’s a content strategy that genuinely helps their audience while demonstrating their platform’s capabilities.

That’s a significant time investment and a tricky balance to maintain. But it works because it’s solving real problems while showcasing their solution in action.

If there’s one thing I’d like you to take from today’s edition, it’s this. Ask yourself:

That’s the question most teams should be asking themselves.

P.S. If building a solid product-led library is top of mind for you, I’m launching something next week. Stay tuned. 👀

P.S. Liked the issue? Share it with someone who could benefit from it.

That’s all for today!

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, hit “Reply” and let me know. 😄