How to Create Product-Led Content Without Sounding Like Sales (7 Examples)

Most marketers—myself included—are suckers for a good framework. For content, the ToFu/MoFu/BoFu model is a classic that most teams still stick to. But is it working for you? 

For most companies, it’s not. Rigidly sticking to intent stages means we leave product-led content as a footnote at the bottom of the funnel. Meanwhile, we pour time and resources into ToFu content, often with little connection to what’s actually driving revenue at the bottom.

What if your product wasn’t just an afterthought at the bottom, but a natural part of the conversation from the start? What if the data you collect from your BoFu content could help inform your work at the top of the funnel?

Some marketing teams are already rethinking the role of product-led content to engage buyers throughout the journey—not just at the end. Let’s explore what’s holding most teams back, and how the best are moving forward.

The problem with BoFu and product-led content in 2025

The main problem with bottom-of-the-funnel is that the B2B buying journey doesn’t look like a funnel—and it probably never has.

This illustration from Gartner of the B2B buying journey has been circling the internet for a few years, and while the complexity of it might trigger a laugh, it’s probably more accurate today than when it was originally published.

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But if we as marketers know this is a problem, why is product-led content at the so-called “bottom” of that nonexistent funnel still not getting any better?

Challenge #1: The focus is wrong. For companies stuck in a product-oriented mindset, it’s easy to fall into the trap of letting the product be the star of their content. On the surface, this makes sense—after all, the goal of BoFu content is to get conversions, right? But according to Growth and Product Marketing Advisor, Nicole Silver, “I’ve always taken the perspective that the customer is the hero, not the product, and that’s why it’s successful—not the other way around.” 

Your audience will react when they see themselves in the stories your content presents. By over-prioritizing product features in their content, many companies are alienating potential customers.

Challenge #2: More PMM teams are working in silos. In many SaaS companies, product marketing teams have been embedded with Product departments. While this makes sense on paper, it isolates these teams from the broader marketing and content strategy. 

“Some companies are going to have a harder time because PMM is getting further removed from content,” says Sam Brenner, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Close. “Many product marketers see content as someone to submit requests to, when it should be a very collaborative relationship.”

When product marketing treats content as a task in their GTM checklist, they’re missing out on an opportunity to genuinely engage with their audience.

Challenge #3: Most SaaS companies hide real interaction with the product behind a sales CTA. With PM teams disconnected from content marketing, audiences are also being distanced from the product they’re trying to buy. When your audience’s only exposure to your product is a 30-second sizzle reel with generic value props, how can they truly understand what your platform does for them?

Take a look at most SaaS websites, and you’ll see the same pattern in their content: a basic informational blog post or generic ROI guide, taking a sharp detour to end with “Book a Demo” because their product can “streamline workflows” and “unlock exponential growth.” 

Instead of giving users a tangible way to experience the product—like an interactive demo, sandbox environment, or guided walkthrough—companies force them into a sales call before they even know if the product is a fit. That’s like making someone sit through a timeshare presentation just to see a floor plan. Most companies miss the opportunity to create great ungated content that leads to direct interaction with the product, using that as a stepping stone to a sales conversation.

As Sam Brenner explains: “Your audience’s eyes glaze over when they see CTAs. They’re thinking, ‘Oh, this company is always putting their trash in the CTA box, but the advice is good. Just ignore the product.’”

Blatant CTAs that lead to gates upon gates are not the way to win over prospective customers. As Brooklin Nash says: “The problem isn't product-led content; it's product-focused content with veneer instead of value.”

Maybe the typical buyer’s guides and boring case studies worked in the past—or, to be quite honest, maybe they didn’t. Now, in a moment where your audience is inundated with marketing messages and a hundred products to solve every challenge, you need to take a different approach if you want your content to engage readers while still promoting your product.

So, how do you do it?

How to set up the foundation for better product-led content

Building the foundation for a product-led content strategy starts with a mindset shift: your content isn’t just a sales tool, it’s a way to connect with your audience on their terms. Let’s talk about how today’s most successful PMM and content teams are working together to build content that highlights their product without compromising on value.

Build a working system for collaboration between PMM and content

For product-led content to resonate with your audience, PMM and content teams need more than a loose handoff—they need real collaboration.

“PMMs often know everything about the features, the product, who we’re selling to, and the GTM strategy,” explains Sam Brenner, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Close. “Meanwhile, content is over here being wonderful experts in all things content but not really deeply understanding what the feature is, who it serves, and the value it brings.”

The solution? A working system where PMM and content teams communicate openly, share insights regularly, and support each other in creating value-driven narratives.

Here’s how to do it: 

• Define product pillars and verticals together. As Sam says: “It’s about defining what the product does, what challenge or problem it solves, and how it addresses that problem. Figuring out what those pillars are, and ideally doing that together, is key.”

• Set up workflows for consistent communication between product marketing and content. To move away from a transactional relationship, Sam suggests a collaborative relationship between PMM and content with “nice, respectful workflows built in.” She adds: “There has to be some form of consistent touch base, whether it’s a recurring sync or just a really strong async relationship.” Think voice memos on Slack, shared spreadsheets with content themes for the year, or casual brainstorming sessions.

• Build cross-team exposure. PMM and content teams need to immerse themselves in each other’s worlds. “For PMM, it’s about educating the content team on the audience—who this feature serves, what the ICP (ideal customer profile) looks like, and the tangible benefits it brings,” says Brenner. “When the content team thinks that way, they can go beyond, ‘I’ll make one blog post,’ to realizing, ‘Oh, this is actually six different articles for each pain point, along with various formats.’”

Breaking out of silos isn’t easy, and requires buy-in from both teams to work. But the result is audience-specific messaging that plays to the strengths of these two teams.

Get more than a bird’s-eye view of the pain points your audience is trying to solve 

You can do so much more than building a flat ICP, or sifting through surface-level insights. 

Here’s a personal example: At one company, I was tasked with creating content for a completely new ICP. I had no understanding of this persona, how they worked, or how our product solved their pain points. Since the ICP was new, there was very little documentation available. So, I started listening to recorded customer calls. That allowed me to step into their world and see things from their perspective for the first time, including the challenges they were facing in their businesses and how our product was helping them.

As Bani Kaur said recently on LinkedIn: “There’s a big difference between writing about a product and writing for the people who buy it.”

So, how can you dig deeper into the pain points of your audience before you start writing content for them?

• Review existing documentation. Starting by combing through any available research, customer surveys, and historical data. Your company’s documentation can offer a baseline understanding of your audience and highlight trends over time. After you gather those insights, summarize them and store them somewhere you can refer back to.

• Talk to Sales and Customer Success leaders: The teams on the front lines with customers will give you the most up-to-date insights. Ask them which personas and pain points are currently the highest priority, and find out if recent interactions have shifted these needs. Their point of view can reveal nuances that might not show up in your standard reports.

• Analyze customer call recordings: Call recordings with real customers give you the opportunity to understand their world from a much better perspective. Instead of static data, you can capture the emotions of your audience and learn the language they use to describe their situation. Then, you can create content that speaks directly to their real-world problems.

• Lean on internal folks who match the ICP for your content: In most cases, your company includes people who are the ideal customers and users of your product. If the opportunity exists, lean on these people. Talk to them about how they use the product, the pain points they face, and how your product makes their lives better. 

So far, we’ve discussed the steps you can take on an internal level to set up better product-led content. Now, let’s use that foundation to build the next piece of your strategy: how you address your audience. 

Build a strategy for value first, recommendation second

Every piece of content you create should provide real value upfront, and should be able to stand on its own based on that value.

Sam Brenner explains it perfectly: “Give advice, a strong point of view, and value. Help them solve the problem they came here to solve with your content first, then maybe add recommendations for a product. Give folks the option to engage with that second part without overshadowing the first.”

Here are three steps to build a value-first strategy for your content:

• Offer multiple solutions to a problem. There is no end-all-be-all solution to every customer’s problem. That completely removes individuality from the equation and reduces your audience to a singular, two-dimensional persona. As Nicole puts it, “To be a good resource, you want to be a friend to your reader. So, how would you advise your friend? You’d want to give them everything you can, not just one solution.” Offering multiple options allows you to focus on genuinely helping your audience, not just pushing your own agenda—which, in turn, helps you build trust with your audience.

• Be honest about your product’s strengths and weaknesses. Honesty is valuable to your readers, but it’s also valuable to your company. “A good product marketer is honest about strengths and weaknesses,” says Nicole. “If you don’t do that, you end up leading marketing and sales in the wrong direction and acquiring customers that are a bad fit. And who does that serve?” Instead of cramming full feature descriptions into obnoxious CTA boxes, use smaller call-outs to plug specific features or customer proof where it fits. That way, you can genuinely recommend the product in a way that ties in naturally with the conversation.

• Create content from the perspective of a person, not a brand. Want to be more relatable to your audience? Take a step back from the brand and focus on the people behind it. As Sam says, “For us, it’s thinking less about what Close could publish, and instead thinking, ‘What might Liz, our Head of Customer Success, have to say about this topic?’” Working alongside in-house SMEs gives you content that’s written from a perspective of individual expertise rather than a faceless brand. That makes it feel more like a conversation than a sales pitch. As Sam puts it, “Humans are more engaging, and we like talking to each other.”

When focusing on value first, your content is starting off at a position of higher quality. As Preeti Gupta, Founder and Growth Consultant at Packted, says, “SaaS brands that succeed treat their content like a product rather than a marketing channel. This means going through processes like ideation, development, feedback, testing, and refining.”

Remember: genuine, actionable advice is the cake. Product recommendations are simply the icing on top.

Set the goal of making each piece of content actionable for the reader

Being “actionable” means your content is more than a sneaky product promotion disguised as advice. Actionable content empowers the reader, giving them the tools or steps they need to solve a problem, improve a process, or take the next step in their journey—without asking for anything in return.

In practical terms, this means taking a step back from each piece of content and thinking:

• Could someone read this and walk away with the information they need to complete an action or take the next steps toward their goals?
• If a friend asked me this question, would I recommend this piece of content to them as a resource?
• Am I asking the reader to give me something—their time, email address, or money—before I give them advice they can actually use?

For example: a case study featuring one of your biggest success stories may seem on the surface like a great promotional piece. But look deeper—what will the reader get out of this story? Are the results this customer saw replicable for the average user? Is their situation relatable to the rest of your audience?

On the flip side, why not create playbooks based on real customers who have seen success with your product? This focuses on the narrative of “How we overcame the challenge and did the thing”, and showcases real, specific action that the reader can also take to overcome their own challenges. The fact they used your product becomes a natural part of the narrative, not the main plotline.

Nicole sums it up perfectly: “When content is set out from the beginning to be a helpful resource, it doesn’t come off as salesy.”

Using creative content formats to talk about your product (ideas and examples)

So, you’re ready to create content that goes beyond the basic feature-release blog post or overpoweringly positive case study.

It’s time to mix it up. 

Turn real platform data into insights your readers can use

SaaS companies have a homefield advantage when it comes to data and studies. After all, your customers are doing work inside your product every day, and you can use those insights to find real data that is helpful to your audience.

The point: knowing which questions to ask.

For example, let’s say you’re an advertising platform. You can look into how customers are using your platform and ask:

• What’s the average click rate of ads with AI-generated images vs other types of imagery?
• What’s the average CTR for ads in a certain industry?
• What’s the conversion rate for ads on one platform vs on another?

These are just examples—the key is to think about what data would actually help your audience with a specific pain point or challenge that they’re facing. What information do they need to help them take action?

Real-world examples: Gong Labs and OKCupid

Gong, a sales call analysis tool, has data from millions of calls made by salespeople stored in their system. Which is why they can write content about whether or not salespeople should leave voicemails, or which call openers are the best and the worst, and have it be based on real data. Their analysis articles are always tied to the data from their platform, and weave in a clear opinion and result from the data (plus, the graphics make it easy to digest).

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On a completely different topic, dating app OKCupid uses in-app questions to match people, meaning they have literally billions of responses from people over the past 20 years. They regularly publish data on dating trends, like how daters who stick to a budget get 25% more matches, or how daters who watch women’s sports have 42% more conversations on the app.

The key to success when using platform data to create content? Turn that data into real actions your audience can take to overcome challenges or reach their goals.

Spend time talking to customers and draw out stories that resonate with your audience

Let’s face it: most customer stories are boring. Nobody cares about how a random company they’ve never heard of saw a 5x return by using your product. 

As Nicole Silver says, “Success stories and white papers are generic, boring, and uncreative.

“Instead, good customer stories focus on how they live their lives, how they run their businesses—then, how they use the product becomes a natural part of the story. That’s really powerful and impactful because it subtly nudges the product but focuses on the customer and the relatable part of their story.”

Real-world examples: Square and Metadata.io

Square went far above and beyond your typical customer stories with their video series: For Every Kind of Dream. 

The best part? Square is hardly part of the story at all. Instead, they use these mini-episodes to elevate the incredible humans that are using their product to accomplish their dreams. Here’s one example:

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Of course, not every SaaS company has the production budget for something like this. But it’s a fantastic example of what’s possible when you think beyond the outside the box.

On a smaller scale, Mutiny does a great job of showcasing relatable, actionable stories with their playbooks. They treat the content like a scientific experiment, outlining the problem, the hypothesis, and the solution. Whether or not the playbook is product-focused, each story emphasizes the customer or persona rather than the platform, showing before-and-after screenshots, real metrics, and other BTS-style content.

The best part: they’re subtly showing how their product solves real-world problems, without making the reader feel like they’re sitting through an unsolicited sales pitch.

Build content that builds up to your product

Once again, the aim here is something that your audience can use right away to help them reach their goals. This might include:

• Templates (the kind that are actually useful)
• Checklists
• Playbooks
• Free tools

Nicole believes that free tools are a huge opportunity for non-salesy product promotion. “If you have a sliver of your product that you’re willing to offer for free, that’s a great way to market your product in a different format. You can then build content around how to use that free tool, or why it’s important.”

Real-world examples: Riverside.fm and Miro

As part of their podcast recording platform, Riverside does a quick check of your webcam and microphone before you record. But they’ve also made their webcam and microphone test available outside their product as a free tool.

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This may seem like a simple thing, but it’s an easy way for them to promote what their product does while still offering something valuable to their audience. 

Another great example of a free tool or resource is the library of free templates from Miro. There are templates for everything from UX design to content strategy, Kanban frameworks, meeting agendas, and more. And while you will need to log into their product to use the templates, they’re available for free for anyone to use.

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A word of caution about free resources: Choose carefully which templates and resources you’ll create. It makes more sense to devote time to creating a truly useful and helpful resource for your audience (and closely related to your product), rather than creating hundreds of mediocre templates. Otherwise, you could end up with an overwhelming abundance of resources that hardly anyone will use. 

Build content that shows instead of telling

“If you want your content to feel non-salesy,” says Sam Brenner, “give it in a format that’s free and open, and doesn’t require any engagement with sales to interact with it.”

This could include live training sessions, tutorials, courses, and more—it’s all about showing what you can do with the platform, without selling it directly.

One format that fits the bill here? Interactive product demos. “These are an ungated introduction to our product,” says Sam, “so our audience can interact with the product and see if we’re an interesting solution. Then, if they want that human touch, they can reach out to us. Our sales team then become advisors, rather than gatekeepers.”

For example, any how-to content you write on your blog can be turned into an interactive demo. As Sam explains, “Our content team was working on a blog post about how to set up a workflow to manage inbound leads. When I saw it, I realized this post could have an interactive demo. It took me an hour to take the written content and turn it into a demo, and now the reader can see exactly what that looks like, step by step, in Close.”

Content that showcases what your product is capable of, without being a sales pitch, is a fine line to walk. But when done right, it can be a truly outstanding experience for your audience. 

Real-world example: Storylane

Storylane is a tool to create interactive demos, and part of their strategy has been to create an entire library of hundreds of tutorials to show how to complete a task in a product their audience was interested in. 

For example, Storylane has content about how to sync Better Proposals with Google Sheets using Zapier, how to organize dates by week in Excel, how to animate in Webflow, or how to use Boolean search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator..

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Madhav Bhandari, CMO of Storylane, recently explained on the Ahrefs Podcast that this strategy took them from 25k to 220k monthly organic visits in just six months, outranking all of the major domains even of the tools they were featuring. So yeah, it works.

This team has created a library of content that solves their audience’s needs, while also showcasing what their product is capable of.

As Sam Brenner explains it: “It’s product content that isn’t about your product, but leads folks to your product.”

Final thoughts: Why your content doesn’t need to be boring to be product-led

Truly great content isn’t limited by an intent stage. Instead, it’s open to meeting the reader wherever they are in their journey, with the information they actually need. And while weaving product mentions into content might sometimes feel risky or self-serving, it doesn’t have to be. When done thoughtfully, it can elevate the piece while still helping you reach your goals.

At its core, great content is about creating an experience. For product marketers and content teams who work together, there is an opportunity to go beyond structures and systems and actually converse with their audience.

Let go of the need to force content into ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu buckets, and you’ll open the door to content that resonates, builds trust, and drives action, all at the same time.