How to improve your writing competency | Emily Dumas, ZoomInfo

What It Covers

Emily Dumas, Content Lead on ZoomInfo's 15-person product go-to-market team, explains how strong writing and storytelling elevate product marketing. She covers content strategy, competitive differentiation, go-to-market alignment, and the skills required to build effective content that connects products to buyers across multiple channels and internal audiences.

Key Questions Answered

• •Lead with value, not features: Product marketers consistently make the mistake of opening content with feature lists rather than establishing customer empathy first. Effective content should first acknowledge the buyer's problem, demonstrate understanding of their situation, and only then introduce product capabilities as the solution — without naming specific features upfront.
• •One core message, multiple formats: Maintain a single central value proposition across all content types — blog posts, ad copy, social, email — but adapt the framing to suit each medium. The underlying message stays consistent while the presentation shifts. This approach preserves brand coherence while meeting audiences where they consume content most naturally.
• •Meet customers where they are: Investing in the wrong content channel wastes resources regardless of content quality. Before committing to video, podcasts, or social platforms, identify where target prospects actually spend time. Allocating budget to LinkedIn when buyers aren't on Facebook, or avoiding TikTok for B2B audiences, reflects this channel-first thinking in practice.
• •Bake content into GTM from day one: Content is frequently treated as a post-launch afterthought during go-to-market planning. Instead, content requirements — both internal (sales enablement, onboarding) and external (prospect-facing assets) — should be mapped at every stage of the launch process. This creates a repeatable launch framework that scales across future product and feature releases.
• •Competitive differentiation without naming competitors: In saturated markets, content must lead with a strong brand narrative and clear value differentiation rather than direct competitor callouts. Product marketers should craft messaging that highlights unique positioning and tells the brand story through the product, making the differentiation self-evident to prospects without requiring explicit competitive comparisons.