tl:dr - curious for where y'all draw the line for sales messaging in longform, editorial-style thought leadership pieces. background i work for a b2b saas company in healthcare technology and we recently went through a merger with two sister companies that hold pretty diametrically opposed views from me on content marketing. imho, any content presented in our thought leadership in format (i.e., longform editorial-style article) should be product-agnostic, regardless of where it lives. if you want product specifics, make a product sheet. but, i just edited a BOFU article with 15 mentions of our company in it -- and i almost threw up. again, i'm strongly in the product agnostic camp for our thought leadership, but my product marketing counterparts argue that if it's paid, gated, on a landing page or printed as a pdf for our sales team, it doesn't matter what the format is.

If you're writing an editorial thats nominally neutral for a publication, sure, use a light touch. Got gated content or landing pages you're driving potential customers to? I think focusing on how your own products solve the customer's problem is not just fine but necessary.

it depends (which I know is an annoying answer). if you're publishing a thought leadership article on a common challenge that your readers face, and your product helps people solve that challenge, I think it's fair to mention that and make it easy for them to find more information, whether that's linking to a product page or including a Demo Request CTA embedded in the article.

Personally, I'm a big fan of MOFU and BOFU content that's technically product agnostic. E.g. Gong Labs, Outreach on Outreach, How Notion Builds Notion, etc. They give you tactics/strategies/frameworks that you could use anywhere... but they demonstrate it in their product. It's a good way to empower readers while showing off your product.

For Particle, I've tried to ensure our thought leadership is more aligned with our overall product messaging and positioning rather than sales-y for specific products. It's more like "we are experts in this industry, and here's how our point of view on where things are going informs what we build." The idea is to be educational and thought provoking without it being a direct sales pitch. That said, for SEO-focused content, I don't think it's a horrible thing to be more solution-oriented and feature your product. Ultimately, the reader is probably aware they're on a company blog that's going to try to persuade them to buy into a specific solution/vision of a solution. A lot of great content-first companies weave their products into their content, like Ahrefs, Podia, etc. I think we're seeing content teams hit a good middle ground between flagrant self promotion and "helpful content that doesn't even mention the product or ask the user to take an action"

Yo! I worked in B2B healthcare SaaS 5 or 6 years ago on the plan side of things & recently did some consulting on this. Whitepapers = product agnostic But otherwise I agree with your product marketing counterparts. The compromise could be to conclude with a section about how your product solves for XYZ as presented in the article

I draw the line at anything more than an overview paragraph at the end of the piece and in the CTA.