When it comes to marketing SaaS products, the secret to success is product-led growth.
Let’s take a closer look at the product-led growth model. We’ll also share some product-led growth examples from companies that use this approach to generate awareness and qualified leads.
Let’s get started!
Understanding Product-Led Growth
Here’s a quick summary of product-led growth:
Definition and explanation of product-led growth
Product-led growth flips the traditional growth model on its head, focusing on the product itself to drive user acquisition, conversion, expansion, and retention.
This go-to-market strategy centers on delivering exceptional value through your product. Your goal is to make it so compelling that users naturally want to adopt, use, and spread the word.
Leads sign up for a free trial or freemium model plan, experience the “aha! moment” after using the product—and then upgrade to paid customers without interacting with your sales team. Since users get a chance to test drive your product, it’s easier for them to make informed decisions about plans for upgrades.
Here’s an example of LOVO’s product-led growth-focused home page—which immediately encourages the user to try its free AI voice generator tool:
Benefits and importance of product-led growth
Why use this strategy?
When you sell a digital product in a competitive marketplace, users need to see its value firsthand.
Letting the product do the talking helps your target market picture themselves using your solution in the real world. It also helps them better pinpoint why they should choose your option over the steep competition.
But possibly one of the best reasons to use a product-led growth approach?
It helps you create an automated sales channel that encourages rapid growth.
Some additional benefits of a product-led approach include:
- Invaluable, in-depth feedback directly from user interactions to inform and guide your product’s future development
- Supports the digital customer journey
- Access to vital first-party data
- Improved customer retention
- Lower acquisition costs
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some companies that have succeeded with product-led strategies.
8 Killer Product-Led Growth Company Examples
The following product-led businesses reveal how letting the product do the heavy lifting can drive growth and success:
Slack
By emphasizingease-of-use, “fun,” seamless integration, and viral sharing capabilities, Slack has become the go-to communication tool for teams expanding rapidly without heavy sales marketing strategies.
Hiten Shah, Co-founder of Nira, says:
“The key to Slack’s rapid, consistent growth was how the company approached adoption. Butterfield and his team were keenly aware of the difficulties in selling a product to teams as opposed to individuals.
To combat this, they reduced as much friction as they could from the adoption process by virtually eliminating risk and keeping financial costs to the bare minimum.”
Hightouch
Hightouch leverages the product-led growth model by providing a user-friendly platform to automate workflows without extensive coding and revolutionizing how companies sync their customer data across tools.
Its “easy to predict pricing” encourages product upgrades and gives enterprise companies peace of mind when signing up.
Zoom
Before becoming a household name, Zoom focused on providing a video conferencing tool with superior reliability and simplicity.
Its freemium model and “Make video communications frictionless” mission statement encouraged mass adoption—especially during the pandemic.
This helped drive enterprise sales through product quality and user recommendations.
Dropbox
Dropbox’s product-led growth strategy hinged on a simple, user-friendly interface and a referral program that rewarded both the referrer and the referee with additional storage space.
This approach significantly accelerated its user base growth.
Simplified AI
Simplified AI empowers users with an intuitive interface to create stunning graphics, videos, and other content using AI.
Visitors can generate content using their AI writer as soon as they head to the home page.
Its product-led growth approach focuses on the immediate value users get by simplifying content creation, driving rapid adoption and growth.
monday.com
This Work OS platform facilitates team productivity and project management.
monday.com’s success with product-led growth comes from its customizable workflows, which users can easily adapt to their needs. This demonstrates the product’s unique value from the start.
monday.com also invested in a massive SEO content initiative to bring more eyes to its website and fuel trial users. This increased its digital foot traffic by 1,570%.
Tailor Brands
Tailor Brands uses AI to provide instant, customized branding solutions.
With a product-led growth approach, it hooks users by offering immediate logo creation and branding services for free or at a low cost, encouraging them to explore more comprehensive branding packages.
Its AI logo maker is also fun and intriguing to use, which keeps users on its site longer. Tailor Brands also makes sure to grab lead information before officially giving the visitor its free logo and branding materials.
This helps it build up its sales pipeline and autogenerate segmented email campaigns designed to convert free users into paid customers.
Grammarly
Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant improves user writing across virtually any platform they use.
Its strategy focuses on providing immediate, tangible improvement in writing quality, encouraging serious users to upgrade to more advanced features.
Grammarly also invested in an affiliate marketing initiative in which B2B experts and other users wrote online reviews on its products. This not only spread the word about its plans and premium features but also helped it acquire valuable backlinks—which boosted its domain authority and content rankings.
It also offered special discounts to its partners with large teams or student accounts to boost user adoption.
Service Provider Pro
Service Provider Pro has focused on bottom and middle of the funnel content to convince website visitors that it’s the best solution for agencies looking to scale.
There are different types of content the SaaS company has created in the past months, namely case studies, alternative pages, blog posts, and marketing focused pages (use cases, features, etc.).
Due to the stellar support and feature set of the software, SPP.co is leveraging the support of their own customers, which makes not only case studies shine but also blog posts and marketing pages. Most of them include testimonials that are very convincing.
Close
Close is a CRM that keeps building new products, as well as improving the main one. Their team pinpoints what their clients need, and delivers an entire toolkit to support them.
For example, they recently started creating a set of AI-driven tools for automating and streamlining processes, from writing cold email copy to optimizing the sales funnel with a sales funnel calculator.
These tools are free to use, and they lead the users to a subscription pop-up that expands their access to other perks Close has to offer.
How to nudge prospects to sign up for your free trial or freemium plan
Integrate the following strategies into your product-led growth approach to encourage more free trial users, demos, and product upgrades:
Leverage customer testimonial videos
Collect and highlight as much social proof as you can to build trust with new or skeptical leads.
Add social proof snippets across your website, landing pages, social media content, and ad campaigns.
While written testimonials, app ratings, and positive brand mentions are great, go the extra mile by securing user-generated content videos.
Customer testimonial videos help put a face to a name and can encourage prospects who are on the fence about your solution to finally give it a try.
While many SaaS companies keep these short (around 30 seconds or less), we recommend using longer videos as well—about two minutes or longer. This gives each video a storytelling element, which can act like a case study for your product.
Here’s an example of engaging two-minute-long customer testimonial videos on the Band of Brothers Tours website:
Visitors can quickly spot its customers’ satisfaction with its solution via the still images and pull quotes. Prospects who aren’t in a hurry can then click play on the images to see firsthand experiences, which can nudge them closer to a conversion.
Use contextual advertising
Integrate contextual advertising to draw leads to your free trial landing pages.
Contextual advertising places ads in or near the content your target audience searches for. Content examples might include blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, or industry news.
If your ideal client searches for content about how to solve their problem (and your tool can help), your ad will automatically show up there.
This advertising option can also help you replace your behavioral advertising campaigns when cookies go away in the near future.
Use benefits-focused language that speaks directly to their pain points
Highlight exactly how your solution can solve your audience’s pain points at the top of your website, landing pages, and ads.
For instance:
- “Quickly (a verb followed by a what, i.e., spot bottlenecks in your processes) to (a verb followed by a what, i.e., shorten project timelines).”
- “Focus on growing your business by automating (a pain point, i.e., lengthy bookkeeping workflows).”
- “Save X hours a week with (a really cool feature you offer).”
Implement a serious SEO content strategy
Work with an SEO agency to build an impressive content repository for your SaaS product.
An SEO agency can help you:
- Set up topic clusters and create a resource “hub” around them — i.e., an optimized Knowledge Base, Help Center, FAQ page, and blog
- Attract searchers to your website and landing pages using high search volume and low-competition keywords
- Secure guest posts for link building campaigns
- Create funnel-based content
- Cater to search intent
We also recommend using Breadcrumbs …
How Breadcrumbs fuels product-led growth
Breadcrumbs plays a critical role in powering SaaS teams’ product-led growth initiatives by offering tools to connect and analyze customer data from various touchpoints.
By integrating seamlessly with marketing automation platforms, CRMs, and product usage tools, Breadcrumbs provides a comprehensive view of what drives user behavior.
This holistic perspective can help your SaaS team swiftly trigger actions based on insightful analytics or defined rulesets—ensuring that every interaction is optimized for growth.
Breadcrumbs also offers lead scoring solutions so your sales team can focus on nurturing the best, most qualified prospects. This is an essential value-add if you sell to larger businesses or enterprises.
Conclusion
Integrating product-led growth into your marketing plan is a pivotal step to generating more trial users for your SaaS solution.
Product-led growth initiatives can also help you:
- Streamline the user onboarding process
- Encourage higher conversion rates
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Learn what drives user behavior
- Get crucial customer feedback
- Encourage widespread growth
- Enhance the user experience
- Get access to first-party data
- Improve customer retention
- Track user satisfaction
- Grow your lead list
If you’re ready to create or refine a product-led growth strategy, Breadcrumbs can help.