4
min read
Sitting on useful data? Publish it.
If your SaaS product generates data your market cares about, you have a content asset most companies would kill for. And if it doesn't, here what you can build instead.
Sofya Leonova
Co-founder + Marketing Director
The most powerful content asset — the kind that generates leads, attracts co-marketing partners, earns press coverage, and positions your company as the authority in your category — is a data report. Better yet, a recurring one.
If your product generates aggregate data that your buyers would find useful, you're sitting on something most companies would have to pay a research firm six figures to create. And if you're not publishing it, you're leaving your single highest-leverage content investment on the table.
What this looks like in practice
At Liftoff, a mobile advertising platform where I managed marketing, we realized we were sitting on user acquisition benchmark data that the entire industry wanted but nobody was sharing. Cost per install by vertical. Cost per action by season. Retention trends across app categories. The data existed because it was a byproduct of the product, but it was gold to the marketers who were our buyers.
We started publishing quarterly reports, each one timed to seasonal relevance. A report on finance apps ahead of tax season. E-commerce apps before Black Friday. Dating apps ahead of cuffing season. Each report was thirty to forty pages, with original data analysis, trend narratives, and practitioner quotes.
The production process was rigorous. Three months end-to-end per report, managed through a detailed work-back schedule. The data scientist would pull aggregate trends. The marketing team would analyze the data: what was interesting, what was surprising, what the audience would care about. Then a copywriter would shape the narrative: what's the most compelling story in this data? She'd produce a first draft. Multiple rounds of reviews. Meanwhile, the design team built out the report template, the landing page, the promotional assets, the LinkedIn ads. We'd write blog posts pulling out the most interesting findings. We'd share the report early with customers to get quotes.
By the time a report launched, it wasn't one piece of content. It was a whole campaign — the report itself, the launch blog, two or three derivative posts, the landing page, the social promotion, the newsletter feature, the LinkedIn ads, the co-marketing partner's promotion, and the sales team's outreach using the report as a conversation starter.
Those reports ran quarterly for years. They became the company's marquee content asset. Co-marketing partners wanted to collaborate specifically because of the audience those reports attracted. The press covered the findings. And the reports were gated, so every download was a lead.
You don't need proprietary data to do this
Here's where most founders check out: "We don't have that kind of data."
Maybe not. But you can still create the asset.
Loom, the video messaging company, published a series of research reports on topics their audience cared about: how remote teams communicate, the productivity costs of communication overload, how to build resilient workspaces. They didn't have all the data internally. They partnered with research firms to conduct original studies. The reports carried stats like "72% of office workers are frustrated with their digital communication tools." Data that was useful, quotable, and relevant to the people Loom wanted to reach.
Equals, a SaaS tool for financial reporting, took a different approach. Their founding team had previously worked at companies like Intercom and Atlassian, so they produced "The Ultimate Guide to ARR," a digital book pulling from decades of experience standing up revenue reporting at major companies. It wasn't a report full of charts. It was a comprehensive guide, published as an interactive microsite with chapters you could click through. It put Equals on the map.
The common thread: each company identified a topic their audience was underserved on, found a credible way to address it, whether through proprietary data, commissioned research, or deep practitioner expertise, and produced something substantial enough to be worth a prospect's time and attention.
How to figure out your version
The best starting point is the question your customers keep asking that nobody in your market is answering well.
If you have proprietary data: what aggregate trends would your buyers find useful? What benchmarks are they guessing at that you could quantify? Even anonymized, aggregated data can be valuable if it helps your audience make better decisions.
If you don't have proprietary data: what topic could you commission research on? What practitioner expertise exists among your team or your customers that hasn't been compiled into something comprehensive? A well-produced guide based on real experience can be just as powerful as a data-heavy report — sometimes more so, because it's actionable rather than just informational.
Whatever the format, a few things matter. It needs to be actually useful, not a thinly veiled product pitch with charts. It needs to be recurring if possible, because one report is a moment and a quarterly report is a franchise. It needs to be well-produced, because the quality of the asset signals the quality of your company. And it needs a real distribution plan — the report is just half the work. The launch, the derivative content, the co-marketing, the paid promotion, the sales enablement. That's the other half.
The compounding effect
The thing about a recurring data asset is that it compounds in ways a blog post never will. Each edition builds on the last. Your audience starts to expect it. The press knows to look for it. Co-marketing partners plan their calendars around it. Your sales team uses the most recent edition as an opening in cold outreach. And over time, you become the company that publishes the report in your category. That's not just good content strategy. That's a competitive moat.
