When Your Product Is the Answer, Content Has to Make the Case: TechSmith

Your products solve a real problem. Your team knows it. Your best customers know it. But your content tells a different story, or worse, no clear story at all. Multiple teams producing output in different directions, a brand voice that changes depending on who posted last, and a competitive window that won't stay open forever.

That was TechSmith. Two flagship products — Snagit and Camtasia — that could genuinely change how teams communicate at work. A content operation that wasn't keeping pace with the opportunity sitting in front of it.

The Challenge

TechSmith wasn't starting from nothing. Snagit and Camtasia had real user bases, strong product reputations, and genuine customer loyalty. The team was producing content — a blog, tutorials, social, email programs, and an academy. There were real assets, real audiences, and real engagement.

The problem was that everything pointed in slightly different directions.

Each product had its own audience, its own messaging needs, and its own internal champions. Marketing, customer success, and the product teams each had ideas about what the content should say and who it should reach. The result was a content operation that was busy without being coordinated — output without a shared strategy connecting it to what TechSmith was actually trying to achieve.

Meanwhile, the market was moving. Remote and hybrid work had created an explosion of interest in async communication tools. Loom, CloudApp, and Vidyard were claiming territory in the "replace your meetings" space. TechSmith had products that could do everything those tools did (and more), but their content didn't reflect it. They were sitting on an enormous opportunity without the story to claim it.

There was also a structural shift underneath all of this. TechSmith was transitioning toward a B2B SaaS model, which is a fundamentally different content challenge. B2B SaaS buyers research more sources, involve more stakeholders, expect content that supports them at every stage from discovery through adoption and renewal, and switch tools faster than ever. TechSmith's content strategy hadn't made that shift yet.

And on the website: quick friction points that were costing them every day. The free trial offer appeared in organic search results but was buried in the header on the actual page. Value propositions led with features instead of outcomes. Messaging that was easy for competitors to imitate because it didn't say anything they couldn't also say.

• Multiple product lines (Snagit, Camtasia) with different audiences but no unified brand strategy
• Content produced across teams without coordination or shared editorial direction
• Direct competitors (Loom, CloudApp, Vidyard) claiming the async communication space while TechSmith's content stood back
• A shift to B2B SaaS that hadn't been reflected in how or what they were publishing
• Homepage and key pages creating friction for visitors most likely to convert
• No original data or research to differentiate from competitors producing similar content

The Shift

What had to change was the frame. TechSmith wasn't a supplemental screen capture tool. They were a workplace communication platform with enough depth to become the resource for teams figuring out how to work better in a hybrid world. That's a fundamentally different story — and it required content built from a unified foundation, not assembled by whoever had bandwidth that week.

Two things had to happen. First, TechSmith needed a strategy that connected both products to a single narrative about what modern workplace communication should actually look like. Second, they needed original data. In a crowded market where competitors were matching features fast, the one thing nobody could copy was the research TechSmith had done itself.

They had a unique opportunity: an internal experiment where the whole company would go async-first for a month using Snagit. Most companies would run that experiment and learn from it internally. TechSmith wanted to go further — turn it into original research that told a story their audience needed to hear, and their competitors couldn't tell.

That was the full arc: get clear on the strategy, fix what was broken immediately, and then build thought leadership from the inside out.

The Work

The engagement ran in two connected phases: a content strategy with quick wins, followed by a full original research project.

Phase 1: Content Strategy and Quick Wins

Discovery and competitive research

Started with deep discovery: stakeholder sessions across TechSmith's marketing, product, and customer success teams to understand the full content landscape. Reviewed existing content across blog, tutorials, social, email, and the TechSmith Academy. Benchmarked against direct and indirect competitors — Loom, CloudApp, and Vidyard for Snagit; Prezi, Adobe Premiere, Movavi, and Descript for Camtasia — to map where TechSmith stood in the conversation and where the gaps were.

• Stakeholder sessions across marketing, product, and customer success
• Competitive content review: content mix, organic keyword positioning, tone, platform presence
• Audience analysis: distinct profiles for Snagit users (project managers, software engineers, IT teams, instructional designers) versus Camtasia users (sales, marketing, customer success, training professionals)
• Social listening to identify which conversations TechSmith could own versus where competitors were already leading

Quick wins

From the discovery work, a set of immediate, low-effort changes surfaced — things that could reduce friction and improve conversion without waiting for the full strategy to roll out.

• Homepage and key landing pages: moved the free trial CTA out of the header and into the hero section, matching the offer presented in organic search results to what visitors actually found when they clicked through
• Value proposition reframe: shifted from feature-forward messaging to outcome-forward messaging — what does work actually look like for the user when they use this tool?
• Search-to-page alignment: identified specific gaps between what organic results promised and what landing pages delivered, with copy recommendations to close each one

Full content strategy

Built the full strategy: unified brand voice, content pillars connected to the real problems Snagit and Camtasia users have, editorial approach by audience segment, content atomization framework, channel strategy, governance model, and measurement framework.

The central challenge: TechSmith needed to talk about async communication without saying "async communication" — because that's not how their audience searches or thinks. The conversation they needed to own was about specific, daily problems. Too many meetings. Status updates that eat calendars. Feedback that takes two weeks to get back. Lead with the pain, let the product be the solution that shows up when they're ready.

• Unified brand voice guide covering both product lines and all channels
• Content pillars grounded in the problems their actual audiences face at work
• Audience-specific editorial approach for Snagit versus Camtasia — distinct buyers, distinct use cases, one brand
• Content task force model with proposed roles, editorial coordination, and shared KPI ownership across teams
• Atomization framework: content created once, distributed across blog, email, social, video, and more
• Channel strategy with content priorities by platform and audience
• Measurement framework connecting content KPIs to business goals across acquisition, adoption, and retention

Phase 2: Original Research Project

TechSmith was already planning an internal experiment: a "no meetings" month where the whole company would work async-first using Snagit. The experiment was about more than productivity — it was about living the product's value proposition from the inside and then telling that story externally.

The partnership was to design the research around the experiment: turn an internal initiative into original data that could serve their audience, strengthen their positioning, and produce content that competitors couldn't replicate.

Survey design and management

Designed pre and post-surveys for approximately 250 employees — capturing attitudes, behaviors, and experiences before and after the async-first experiment. Built to minimize bias while gathering both quantitative scale data and open-ended qualitative responses for theme analysis and quote capture.

• Pre-survey: baseline attitudes about meetings and async communication; expectations and concerns going in; what participants hoped to learn or change
• Post-survey: impact assessment; what shifted and what didn't; what people wanted to keep and what they wanted back
• Survey programmed for a focused, one-question-at-a-time experience to reduce fatigue and improve response quality
• Coordination with TechSmith's HR team on distribution to protect employee privacy

Analysis and executive summary

Processed results from both surveys: identifying key themes across quantitative and qualitative responses, surfacing the findings most useful for both TechSmith's internal team and their external content.

What the data actually showed was more nuanced than a simple "async is better" verdict — which made it more valuable:

• Employees who had meetings reduced them overall, and said the meetings they did have felt more important
• Biggest concern going in: isolation and wasted time. Biggest concern coming out: missed collaboration and team erosion
• Most employees wanted some synchronous time back — with clearer guidelines on when async was appropriate and when it wasn't
• Recurring meetings crept back quickly, showing that behavior change requires more than a one-month sprint

eBook production

Produced an eBook from the research findings — covering what TechSmith's internal experiment revealed about async-first work, the specific benefits and friction points employees identified, and what it means for other teams considering a similar shift.

This gave TechSmith a piece of content that no competitor could replicate. The data was theirs. The story was theirs. And it positioned TechSmith not as a software vendor pitching async communication, but as a company that had already lived the thing they were asking their customers to try.

• eBook structured around the pre and post-findings, written for TechSmith's external audience
• Designed using TechSmith brand standards
• Built to anchor an atomization plan: social content, webinar material, short-form video, and email sequences

The Outcome

TechSmith ended the engagement with a content strategy they could execute from, immediate fixes that reduced friction for new users, and a piece of original research that positioned them in a conversation their competitors weren't having.

The content strategy gave the team a shared foundation. Unified brand voice, clear content pillars, defined roles, and an atomization model that meant content created once could live across many formats and channels. Snagit and Camtasia content could stay distinct where it needed to be and consistent everywhere else.

The quick wins addressed real friction immediately — before the strategy was fully built. Homepage visitors landing from search results found the offer they expected. Product messaging led with outcomes instead of specs.

The research produced something more valuable than any thought leadership piece they could have written from scratch: a first-person story about trying something hard, learning from it honestly, and reporting out what it means for other teams. That's the kind of content that builds trust because it's specific, candid, and grounded in actual experience.

And it gave TechSmith a foothold in the async communication conversation that Loom and Vidyard couldn't access. Because TechSmith had done the experiment. They had the data. The story was theirs.

• Content strategy connected Snagit and Camtasia to one coherent narrative about workplace communication
• Quick wins fixed homepage friction and aligned search promises with on-page experience immediately
• Content task force model gave teams clear roles and a shared editorial process
• Original research produced an eBook with data no competitor had access to
• Research findings seeded a full quarter of atomized content across formats and channels
• TechSmith's own internal experiment became external thought leadership — a story told from the inside

The Takeaway

If your content team is producing output but it's not building toward anything specific, the problem is almost never the content itself. It's that the foundation is missing. No shared voice, no clear pillars, no one accountable for making sure what goes out on Tuesday connects to what customers hear on Thursday.

That's fixable. But the bigger opportunity — the one most B2B SaaS companies walk past — is original research. Your customers have opinions. Your team has experience trying things your competitors haven't tried. That's data nobody else has. And data nobody else has is content nobody else can match.

If you're making a product that changes how people work, the most powerful story you can tell is the one where you tried it first.

SaaS growth stalling out because you're struggling to find messages that resonate?

 Let's build the strategic foundation that creates sticky, meaningful messages.