PLG: Building Interactive Content Assets

Teal had built a strong organic presence through SEO-driven content, but the conversion path from blog reader to product user was long and leaky. Visitors would consume content, leave, and rarely return to sign up.

The growth team identified an opportunity: what if the content itself could be the product experience? Instead of writing about job search strategies, they could build interactive tools that demonstrated Teal’s value proposition in real time.

Matt was brought in to design and execute this product-led growth strategy, transforming passive content into active conversion assets.

The primary challenge was technical and strategic. Building interactive content assets required a fundamentally different approach than traditional blog posts — each piece needed to function as a standalone micro-application while remaining discoverable through organic search.

There was also the question of value exchange. The tools needed to provide enough immediate value to justify an email gate or account creation, without giving away so much that users had no reason to explore the full product.

Finally, the team needed to prove ROI quickly. Interactive assets take significantly more development time than standard content, so the business case had to be clear and the first implementations had to show measurable results.

The approach started with identifying the highest-intent search queries in Teal’s space — queries where users were actively trying to accomplish something, not just learn about it. Resume scoring, skill gap analysis, and job search planning emerged as prime candidates.

For each tool, Matt designed a progressive engagement model: users could get basic results instantly (building trust and demonstrating value), with deeper insights available after creating a free account. This “try before you buy” approach reduced friction while creating natural upgrade paths.

The technical implementation used a component-based architecture that allowed the team to rapidly prototype and iterate on new interactive assets, sharing common patterns across tools while customizing the experience for each use case.

The interactive content assets delivered 2.8x higher conversion rates compared to traditional blog content. Users who engaged with a tool were significantly more likely to create an account and explore the full product.

Organic signups increased by 45% within the first quarter of launching the interactive content strategy. The tools also generated substantial backlink activity, as other career sites and blogs referenced them as resources.

The model proved so effective that it became a core part of Teal’s growth strategy, with the team allocating dedicated engineering resources to building new interactive assets on a monthly cadence.

The biggest lesson was that content and product don’t have to be separate functions. When content teams think like product teams — focusing on user tasks rather than topics — the conversion potential increases dramatically.

The progressive engagement model proved essential. Asking for too much too soon kills conversion; providing value before asking for anything builds the trust needed for account creation.

This project also highlighted the importance of measuring the right metrics. Traditional content metrics (pageviews, time on page) were less meaningful than engagement depth, tool completion rates, and downstream activation metrics.