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Use Your Corporate Blog to Provide Value, Not Self-Promotion

When writing a company blog, it’s easy to focus on your product features and provide tips, tricks, or simply highlight what’s new. Instead, Heather McCloskey, Content Marketing Manager at ProductPlan, decided to write an article supporting the roles who are likely to use their product. In the article “3 Reasons Product Managers Quit (and How to Prevent It)”, Heather provided a lesson in talent retention and motivation. Not once does she try to cross-promote ProductPlan’s toolset, but rather focuses on delivering value to its market and users. By providing value and guidance to product owners and managers, Heather can reach future customers while enhancing the value of ProductPlan’s brand.

Heather identifies three key reasons why good product managers would leave for a better opportunity: The Team, The Manager, and The Product. The articlethen goes on to provide several suggestions for organizations on how to retain their product management talent. The post is genuine, not preachy, and speaks directly to their core demographic.

Why is this important? For some companies, the corporate blog is a communication tool for existing users. Using your blog to promote enhancements and partnerships is a valid and important strategy. However, in her article, Heather created a valuable message to ProductPlan’s target users that does not come across as a sales pitch. The content stands on its own and is ready for readers to share across all their social platforms. ProductPlan using this strategy is creating valuable content that strengthens its brand, positioning the company as supportive, thought leaders, and in tune with user needs. Isn’t this the message we want to convey for our products?

Our Take

• Start with WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Determine what your target audience cares about and what they think would provide value.
• Be honest and sincere. Readers will be turned off by self-serving content or masked attempts to sell a product.
• Align your blog to your company and product vision, positioning, and strategy. With endless WIIFM topics to write about, chose topics that reinforce your brand.
• Make the post share worthy. Most people don’t want to forward an ad to their network, however, an article that delivers value is shareable.

Want to Know More?

ProductPlan provides a collaboration platform to help Product Owners gather feedback to help build and manage their product roadmap and backlogs. Download our product management research to help define what is important to you and your product.

• Build a Better Product Roadmap
  • Create a roadmap that suits your objectives, the characteristics of your product, and the environment it lives in.
• Build a Better Backlog
  • The quality of your product backlog is key to realizing the benefits of Agile.
• Build a Better Product Owner
  • Strengthen the product owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.
• Transition to Product Delivery
  • Stop delivering projects. Start delivering products.