Writing product-led content for Exceed SEO

I write B2B SaaS content for Exceed SEO. For two of their event software clients, my job was to create comparison content, listicles and practical how-to guides that explain how the products help with their ideal customers’ jobs-to-be-done.

For that, I use the briefs, customer and sales calls, SME interviews, the product documentation and competing articles to understand what needs explaining. That includes the product’s limitations and where it shines the most (which is the case with these software products). They target a very small part of the market, and getting that right means they can rank for highly specific queries and also be mentioned on AI platforms. And that’s what I optimized for.

Researching what someone needs from an event app

For one of my articles, I researched apps for hybrid events, where some people attend in person and others join remotely.

The goal of the article, however, wasn’t to compare the client’s software using the same metrics as other comparison articles about tools for the same job. The goal, as I doubled down on what matters, was to show that there are a bunch of hybrid event apps, but event teams running B2B events for customers or partners need hybrid event software without the baggage of enterprise event software that’s mostly designed for external events and also has features they won’t need (because it wasn’t designed for internal events in the first place).

That also means recognizing that an organizer who already uses Teams or YouTube for their livestream might just need an app where every guest can follow the agenda, ask questions and participate in polls. A team that also needs the software to produce the livestream has more to account for, and I had to distinguish between the two so I could set a good premise for the article.

And that was what I did. I was able to give a reader a way to narrow their options before working through the features of each product I reviewed in the article.

For the client’s product, I explained how they could use it alongside existing livestreaming software. I also made clear that it wouldn’t replace the software needed for the live broadcast (although they can embed the link in the software). Someone considering it could then understand what it would help them do and what they’d still need to arrange, while achieving their eventual intent, which is to find a hybrid event app to show the agenda, get people to participate during the event and finally sync attendance and engagement to their CRM.

For another article, the angle was a bit different.

Showing how a product helps with the work

I wrote a how-to guide on how to manage guests for corporate hospitality events. These are events where a company hosts clients or prospects, so deciding who gets an invitation matters as much as filling the seats.

The event team doesn’t want to fill seats. They want to invite the guests whose business they can reliably improve, and that’s what I had to explain, as well as a way to do that. And also, introduce how my client’s tool can help them with it.

I explained how a team could choose which clients to invite, decide who should contact them and keep track of their replies.

One detail worth explaining was who the invitation came from. An account manager may already know the client, while Marketing handles the event and needs to see who has accepted.

The software had a feature that allowed Marketing to manage the invitations and reminders (to keep messaging consistent) while keeping the account manager as the sender. I explained how that worked and included screenshots. This way, someone reading could see how they could personalize the invitation while giving the team a shared view of the replies.

“Personalised invitations” alone wouldn’t have explained that.

The research behind those explanations

The Exceed SEO team interviewed SMEs and the product team. We also had access to customer call transcripts, all of which helped me really understand where the product shines and how to articulate the problem it solves in our articles.

I also found a bunch of information in the help and support pages, which really helped me find where current buyers were stuck when they started, how the product is used, as explained by their support team, and the limitations of the product.

For these articles, that meant explaining which part of a hybrid event an app handles and how an invitation workflow works across Sales and Marketing.

I worked through the drafts with Exceed SEO’s editorial team. My content strategist, Lateef Maleek, is one of the most brilliant people I have ever worked with. And about me, he says:

“I love the level of specificity and how you research these tools down to the exact functions we want to cover.”