How to improve your writing competency | Emily Dumas, ZoomInfo
Episode
27 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Investing, Marketing
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓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.
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.
Notable Moment
Dumas challenges the common startup belief that having no competitors is a viable position. She argues that every product operates in a competitive landscape, and marketers who ignore this when building content strategy leave prospects without the differentiation signals needed to choose their solution over alternatives.
Episode Transcript
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of the Product Marketing Insider podcast. My name is Lawrence Chapman, and I'm a copywriter here at Product Marketing Alliance. This week's episode is brought to you by Appcues. Have you ever launched a new feature that went unused? Waited days or even weeks to get that user data you requested? You're not alone. We're still way too dependent on developers. That's why product marketers around the world are calling Appcues their new favorite product marketing tool. Appcues empowers product marketers to measure and improve product adoption without a developer. Brands like Amplitude, Privy, FullStory, and Lyft use Appcues to track feature usage and engage users with in app onboarding tours, feature announcements, and surveys with no code required. Visit appqueues.com to start your free trial today. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Emily Dumas. Emily is currently the content lead on the product's go to market team at ZoomInfo. And before joining the company, she spent three years at Crayon, where she was responsible for scaling their content program and billing the customer community. Thanks so much for joining me, Emily. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Oh, no. It's, an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time out to chat. So, to start, can you just please explain your current role at ZoomInfo, please? Yeah. Of course. So my role at ZoomInfo is is unique, definitely. I'm a content marketer by trade, but I'm actually on the product marketing team at ZoomInfo. So, I report into the product organization as all of product marketing does at Syminfo. And my role is really to help the product marketers get content, to the market. So to support them throughout the sales cycle, creating data sheets and pitch decks and FAQ docs, case studies, anything they really need to support their product going to market, my team is is responsible for building out for them. That sounds amazing. As a copywriter myself, it just sounds like brilliant. It sounds like and, obviously, I know that content is just such a big part of, product marketing. But, to have a to have a content specific role, I've never actually heard of that before. So sounds great. And then what is it necessarily that made you want to become, a product marketer or part of product marketing in the first place? Yeah. So, I actually didn't really have any product marketing experience until I joined the team at Crayon, three years ago. So I was at Crayon for, yeah, three years or yeah. Three years at Crayon. Sorry about that. But I was there for three years working on content. And one thing that I did there for the blog was I launched a series where I interviewed product marketers and competitive intelligence professionals. So not only was I providing content for product marketers, but I was actually learning a lot about their careers. And it was …
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