What Is Product-Led Marketing?

DEFINITION:
Product-led marketing is a GTM marketing strategy, which involves a shift from traditional lead generation and MQLs to helping customers succeed with your product and ultimately help in product-led growth.

💡Understanding Product-Led Marketing

Gone are the days when customers trusted marketing collateral, copy on your website, or blogs that talk only about your brand. 

With so much competition and every SaaS business claiming to be the best in their field, buyers now only trust their own experience with the product. 

This calls for a shift in the way marketing is carried out.

It’s no longer enough to gain marketing qualified leads (MQLs) through lead magnets and downloads just to pitch them your paid service or product. 

It’s time to make sure your current and potential users get the most out of your product.

Users now want to know one thing—how to solve their problems and gain efficiencies with your product.

PLM focuses on just that. It helps turn your product into a marketing tool. For example, a smooth onboarding experience, optimized product interface, targeted guides, and blogs explaining use-cases for your users are some ways you can leverage your product as a marketing tool.

🖋 Takeaway

Product-led marketing is about crafting a great user experience through your product. This ultimately leads to your users becoming your brand ambassadors with increased word-of-mouth and referrals for your brand. 

Not only does product-led marketing help you reduce your marketing costs in the long run but by creating a great customer experience, it also helps you retain customers. So, with PLM, your focus is not only to generate leads but also to retain them, lowering your customer acquisition cost (CAC) as the lifetime value of the user increases.

PLM also gives your sales team enough data to contact score and reach out to leads ready for purchase, at the right time.

What Is Product-Led Marketing?

Product-led marketing ties in with product-led growth and revolves around making your product your finest marketing tool.

You can do this by providing free trials, and demos, and personalizing the entire customer experience to align with different users’ needs. Let’s take an example to understand this better.

Suppose a project management tool wants to market its product to a wide variety of users. While a company might be using it for managing a large team, another might be using it to manage their own time and daily activities. Both these companies have different requirements when subscribing to the product. 

In this case, the entire marketing experience should be different for both companies. Everything from the demo, the content you create, and the tips you provide to the onboarding process should be personalized and cater to their needs and problems. Doing this will result in more and faster conversions and better retention. 

Above all, product-led marketing demands a shift from the old-school marketing mindset that revolves around the fear of losing the lead to focusing entirely on how to best tie your customer to their unique perfect solution.

How To Implement Product-Led Marketing

Here are some ways to incorporate product-led marketing in your product-led growth journey:

Modify Your Marketing Performance Metrics

If you change your marketing model but still stick to old metrics such as measuring the number of leads achieved and the number of leads closed, your sales and marketing team will inevitably be disappointed.

Instead, modify your marketing performance metrics to track daily active users, overall customer satisfaction rate, usage time, net promoter score (NPS), and time to response.

Relating your KPIs to users makes sure your marketing team is focused on customer success rather than having a large lead excel sheet.

Craft Your Content Around User Problems

Learn your ideal users’ problems and then create content that shows the users how they can solve them with your product. This could be through how-to articles, guides, e-books, and even webinars. You can even publish real experiences of how companies used your product to curtail errors or skyrocket growth.

Creating Knowledge Centers

What is that key problem your product solves? 

Increasing productivity, organizing information, managing projects? 

A knowledge base has content that revolves around the key problem or interest of your users. You will offer your knowledge and expertise through content like guides and courses to help customers succeed with your product and create a better customer experience. 

Free Trials And Demos

Activate ways where the user can explore and experience your product at a low cost or for free. Your aim with this is to give as much value to the user as possible, ultimately leading to a paid upgrade.

By crafting a great customer experience for your users and offering them free trials, demos, and freemiums, you can move that user down the sales funnel.

What Does The Product-Led Marketing Shift Mean For Your Company?

Product and customer success tend to be siloed in companies that have a traditional marketing model. 

PLM helps form a relationship between all these functions with the product at its center. Backed with information from all these different areas, your marketing can be even more powerful and effective. 

But this means you need a lot of accurate data at the right time to convert your users. You also need to distribute the data internally among the marketing and sales team in harmony.

Once you know how your product can make customers successful, leverage the collective strength of data and different functions to grow your company and reach the right audience.