Product-Led Growth and Marketing: Teach Your Platform to Do the Talking

This business strategy has become increasingly popular in recent years and particularly with many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Simply put, it’s a fast and effective growth model. For, by allowing customers to try out the product for free, businesses remove any barrier to entry and pull a huge number of users into their conversion pipeline.

Crucially, this all happens without significant investment into sales or marketing and means that businesses can focus their resources on what matters most - making their product better. And by focusing on value - and analyzing product performance from the perspective of its users - businesses can optimize their product or service faster while experiencing better user engagement and satisfaction levels.

The product-led growth framework also lowers customer acquisition costs thanks to low-touch onboarding and support. It also increases scalability potential when compared to traditional sales-driven alternatives since businesses give themselves the ability to acquire new users without having to hire more staff - and increase revenue per employee.

This is all great news at a time when startups are becoming increasingly expensive to grow as a result of economic realities and the saturated nature of the modern marketplace. Businesses often respond to such issues by spending more on marketing, but product-led growth offers an alternative that aligns what they do with customer preferences for independence, self-education, and a frictionless product experience.

Anyone researching this business strategy will come across both product-led growth and product-led marketing. And while they’re not the same thing, they’re closely related concepts that center around leveraging the product as the way to drive business outcomes.

However, they represent different aspects of a company’s strategy.

Product-led growth is the overarching business strategy outlined above. In it, the entire company - from sales to development to the coffee pourer - is aligned around building the product as the primary conduit to growth.

By contrast, product-led marketing (alternatively called product-led growth marketing) is the marketing that supports the aforementioned approach. This makes marketing output another arm of the product’s onboarding documentation, with a focus on explaining how the product works, the pain points it resolves for users, and how easy it is to get up and running. Product-led marketing should also push freemium plans and free trials as a way to get new users onboarded, and then they can see for themselves the advantages of upgrading to a paid subscription.

And so in brief, PLG is the overarching business model while PLM works to promote the product’s role in customer success.

Building a product-led growth model requires taking a systematic approach to integrating your product into the center of everything. It means not selling some aspirational dream or associating the product with beautiful models or lifestyle locations, and in many ways goes back to marketing as it was at the beginning: here’s the product, and here’s what it does.

Of course, it’s slightly more developed than that, and you’ll find below the steps that you can follow to establish a product product-let marketing strategy:

• Identify the Core Value Proposition: Clearly define what makes your product valuable and unique. Understand the problems it solves and how it improves the user's life or work processes. This step is crucial for aligning all marketing efforts around what your product actually delivers.
• Optimize the Product Experience: Ensure that your product is intuitive, user-friendly, and delivers on its promises from the first interaction. This might involve refining the user interface, simplifying the product-led growth onboarding process, or enhancing features that provide immediate value to new users.
• Develop a Freemium or Free Trial Model (or Both): Design a freemium model or a time-limited free trial that allows potential customers to experience the core functionalities of your product without upfront investment. This step is essential to lower the barriers to entry and let the product prove its worth.
• Create Educational Content and Resources: Develop comprehensive guides, tutorials, webinars, and blog posts that help users understand and leverage your product. This content should educate users on both the product itself and the broader context in which it can be used.
• Leverage Product Analytics: Implement tools to track how users interact with your product. Use this data to identify common user paths, drop-off points, and features that are most engaging. This information can guide both product development and marketing strategies.
• Encourage Viral Sharing and Network Effects: Integrate features that make it easy for users to invite others or share their experiences. This could include referral programs, social sharing capabilities, or collaborative features within the product itself.
• Iterate Based on Feedback: Regularly collect and analyze user feedback to continuously refine the product and the marketing approach. This iterative process should aim to enhance user satisfaction and address any barriers that prevent wider adoption.
• Align Sales and Support Teams: Ensure that your sales and customer support teams understand the product-led model and are prepared to assist potential and current users in a way that emphasizes the product’s value. This includes training teams to focus on guiding users to discover the utility of the product rather than making direct sales pitches.
• Measure and Optimize for Key Product-Led Growth Metrics: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) such as user acquisition rates, conversion rates, engagement levels, and customer lifetime value. Continuously measure these metrics and optimize your strategies to improve them.

By following these steps, you can build a marketing model that not only supports but also amplifies the natural growth driven by your product's strengths and user experiences.

Whether you realize it or not, some of the best product-led growth examples are platforms that you could well be using everyday. Let’s have a look at four of the more famous ones.

Thanks to this strategy, they were able to reach a $7 billion valuation in just five years. And if you’re a user, you probably started using it after seeing someone you know using it, getting a personal recommendation, or being invited to use it as part of a business collaboration.

Slack has been so successful here because their product just works. It’s so easy to use and we’re fans here at TWIPLA. They’ve got a free plan and just about anyone can download it and work out how it works quickly. And as a self-service product, users receive regular in-app tutorial snippets that allow them to learn as they go.

Of course, they still have a sales team but these guys focus on helping large enterprise organizations that obviously have more advanced requirements. But Slack has succeeded largely by virtue of a product-led approach, and by using analytics to understand user behavior and improve the product in ways they know their users will love. Enough said!

They’re also another example of a company that has excelled using a product-led approach to business, with the features helping users to do their business development on their behalf. Sharing and collaboration is integral to the user experience, while the freemium package and referral bonus scheme all motivate users to basically market the product on their behalf.

Dropbox’s success speaks for itself. They now have over 700 million registered users and have increased their revenue more than four times over since 2015. That’s impressive, and yet it’s rare to see an advertisement from them - this growth is all built on a product that has been developed to sell itself.

What’s more, the platform’s interactive presentation features make it easy for businesses to improve webinars, demos, and other virtual meetings. These are all highly intuitive to use, and this all works to help the company to retain customers and incentivise them to pay for a higher level subscription.

If you’ve been following, then you’ll already have clocked that all these elements form the basis of their successful product-led growth model. Canva prioritizes user experience before anything, with a mission to make graphic design easy for everyone. The company only launched in 2015, but the Australian company attracted over $2 billion in annualized revenue in 2023 - a level of growth that makes them the envy of tech businesses the world over.

The business has been able to set itself apart in a crowded marketplace by building a platform that allows people to easily collaborate, regardless of where they are in the world. This gives Figma inbuilt virality, and means that the company can acquire new customers without any marginal costs whatsoever.

Figma’s product-led growth approach is also reaping dividends. They hit an estimated $615 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of 2023, a 45% annual increase. And while their merger with Adobe has fallen through, expect Figma to continue going from strength to strength over the coming years.

It’s a fantastic productivity app that is popular among tech-savvy software enthusiasts and privacy advocates alike, with advanced customization options, strong workflow automation capabilities, and seamless integration with other platforms.

They’re also a key partner, and are using TWIPLA’s cross-platform analytics to get the insights they need to optimize their user experience across their website and app. They’ve found our session recordings and funnels tools to be particularly vital sources of intelligence, while TWIPLA's granular filtering capabilities and event tracking feature has enabled them to customize analytics to the specificities of their product.

And while still early in the process, we’re excited to see Cal.com going from strength to strength and their impressive growth since 2021 shows that they’re on the right trajectory to join Slack and Dropbox as rock stars in the product-led growth game.

Integrate TWIPLA into Your Product-Led Growth Strategy Today!

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