There's a special kind of content marketing that can't be faked: using your own product, in public, and publishing what you learn. BuzzSumo — a tool that analyzes what content performs — does exactly that, and it's worth studying.
Why product-as-marketing works
When your product surfaces interesting data, every analysis you publish does three jobs at once:
- It's genuinely useful content — readers learn something about their own world.
- It's a product demonstration — but one people choose to read.
- It's proof of capability — the analysis itself is the evidence the product works.
The discipline behind it
This approach only works with editorial restraint. The moment every post becomes a sales pitch, the audience leaves. The teams that pull it off write like analysts first and marketers second: lead with the finding, let the product stay in the supporting role.
What you can steal from this
You don't need a data product to apply the idea. Ask: what does our business know or see that our audience would find valuable? Support tickets reveal patterns. Sales conversations reveal objections. Usage data reveals behavior. Any of those can become content that only you could publish — the most defensible kind there is.
