Great discussion.
The way I see it there are two types of “content marketing”:
1. A personal brand, personal blog approach. YOU are the voice, the opinions, the personality, the ideas, that your audience connects with. Nathan Barry and Brennan Dunn are great examples of this. They’ve invested in building an audience with a strong relationship of trust / authority. This has allowed them to launch multiple products over a period of several years.
2. “Company” content marketing. This is where a single product company invests heavily in education-based content marketing. Buffer, HelpScout, KissMetrics are a few that come to mind. This involves hiring writers (multiple authors). Editorial calendars, infographics, webinars, and the like tend to come more into play here.
Both are very smart long term strategies IMO. But certainly not easy and definitely require investment of time and money.
To the question of which to build first, audience or product?
I see nothing wrong with doing both. I found that working on my products has given me lots of lessons to blog about 