10-min Content Teardown: Figma

Welcome to another content strategy teardown! This week, we're talking about Figma. As always, we'll talk about its business model, then explore all of its content initiatives. To unlock this video, the rest of the series and so much more, check out Superpath Pro.

Hey folks,

I've long admired Figma's product and brand, but never dug into its content until today. I found almost no SEO content. Instead, Figma focuses heavily on thought leadership and product marketing. The articles are long and detailed, written by employees given the freedom to speak their mind, and wrapped in interesting and beautiful design. The content really stands out, and Figma makes it extremely clear that the writing is for their target customer. I'm not a designer and I don't understand a lot of it.

It made me think of Dan Luu's article, How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written. In it, he says:

At a high level, the compelling engineering blogs had processes that shared the following properties:

• Easy approval process, not many approvals necessary
• Few or no non-engineering approvals required
• Implicit or explicit fast SLO on approvals
• Approval/editing process mainly makes posts more compelling to engineers
• Direct, high-level (co-founder, C-level, or VP-level) support for keeping blog process lightweight

It seems like Figma is applying a similar process for designers. Hope you dig this one!

Jimmy

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(0:15) - Jimmy discusses how Figma grew quickly and was acquired by Adobe

(3:16) - Jimmy examines Figma's thought leadership content and notes that they talk about their product a lot but in a non-annoying way

(5:11) - Jimmy looks at Figma's case studies and notes their sophistication in speaking to their target audience

(7:08) - Jimmy explores Figma's Best Practices and Resource Library sections, noting the heavy focus on product education.

(8:51) - Jimmy looks at Figma's "What's New" landing page and blog, noting the cool design and in-depth content targeted towards the right customer

(10:06) - Figma's collaborative design tool has a network effect built into it, making it an obvious tool for product and design people to use

(12:45) - Jimmy finds it interesting that Figma has grown so fast without investing heavily in content marketing, but speculates that they may need to invest more in content as they move up market and target enterprise customers

(13:33) - Jimmy's main takeaway is that a great product will grow itself, but there was still huge energy put into growth through product marketing and design, and it remains to be seen if Figma will make headway on the content side in the future.