Since Apple put unique digital experiences in our pockets with the first iPhone and launched the cloud era, the market and customer dynamics have been floating with B2B products aiming to promise more than an exceptional product experience. Thus, in today’s B2B marketing world the next big moonshot is the customer-centric B2B SaaS products being driven by tech-savvy customers.
As a result, the term “Product Led Growth Marketing” (PLG) has been flying around for a while, keeping B2B SaaS companies excited and inspiring the B2B business market as an emerging business model more than just a go-to strategy.
This new era has turned software into an essential utility empowering our workflows and fuelling PLG companies to join the competition with a product-led growth strategy. Still, PLG marketing is not only here for B2B SaaS companies and software lovers.
Considering all the technical details, product led growth marketing might sound complicated and complex. Still, it is a must-know for every product marketer to keep up with the future.
If you are Googling for product led growth marketing, don't look further. We’ve got you covered with fresh content about the concept of PLG and compiled all the information you need to know. Buckle up, we are taking off!
Let’s start with the basics and explain exactly what product led growth marketing is. According to the Product Led Growth Collective, product-led growth marketing is a business methodology that puts the product and customer experience at the heart of customer acquisition, activation, satisfaction, retention, and scalable expansion processes.
In theory, the product led growth marketing concept aims to bring product and growth marketing into a holistic and strategic methodology by combining the power of sales, marketing, engineering, design, customer success, and product teams. In practice, the product leads all customer journeys by providing a personalised user experience and solution according to the end users' pain points.
Product-led growth marketing is more than just a buzzword. It is a disruptive, bottom-up business model for B2B SaaS companies, and with the rise of PLG companies, it is becoming a current issue for B2B companies that aim to provide sustainable growth.
The secret ingredient of the concept is understanding that consumers–not customers—have a corner in the market. So it is time to impress those end users by providing a unique customer experience with B2B or SaaS products, not their bosses.
Whether you work in a B2B SaaS company or not, it is significant to follow PLG strategies to gear up for the future of marketing and provide sustainable growth and buyer demand with your business efforts.
Let’s take a closer look at the fundamentals of the product led growth strategy to get a better understanding.
It is obvious that measuring the success of your marketing strategy is essential and unavoidable. As product led growth marketing strategies require a shift in which way you position your marketing efforts, you should measure it with the right success metrics to keep things consistent.
Here are the most common success metrics for product-led growth marketing:
A product-led growth marketing strategy is not one of those that you can sit and wait for or expect a quick fix. It is more about changing the whole perspective from a sales-led or marketing-led approach to a product-led one.
This transition brings the power of creating high-quality products that deliver value to the end-user quickly and consistently. In addition, a successful product led growth marketing strategy benefits companies in terms of value, growth, and cost.
According to OpenView, the median enterprise value of product-led companies is two times higher than other companies as product-led strategies trigger users to stick around and refer the product to others.
Also, in the product led growth marketing strategy, most of the resources are funnelled into products, which means lower customer acquisition costs and expansion at a faster rate.
In addition to all of these, the benefits of a product led growth marketing strategy can be listed as
Until now, we have explained the hows and whys of product led growth marketing. Now, it is time to discover the most successful PLG companies and get inspired by them.
According to Openview partner Kyle Poyar, the end user era was just there, and the PLG companies that quickly recognized this dynamic have become the most successful ones.
Let’s check out these PLG companies' stories to discover what they have in common.
Slack is probably one of the most successful PLG companies. The company went from zero to $7 billion in only five years with its freemium, buttons-up, go-to-market strategy. And now, it is worth $27.7 billion. Clearly, the success of Slack was not a coincidence.
Slack built a strong product-led growth marketing strategy and turned the annoyance of internal emails into an opportunity. Nowadays, Slack is one of the biggest SaaS start-ups and a favourite app for most of us.
As a perfect example of product-led creation, Dropbox’s success comes from its product-led strategy that puts referrals at the centre of all marketing efforts. By, lending itself to attracting more customers through reference, Dropbox passed $1 billion in sales in less than ten years.
Dropbox achieved this by providing more than just a software solution. First, the company created an initiative product to meet customers' file sharing needs, then personalised and valued the process by giving customers more credits for each referral.
Built around a simple yet essential functionality, Calendly is one of the biggest freemium SaaS companies that raised $550,000. It is a product-led growth marketing strategy that solved one of the biggest challenges for scheduling haters by simply allowing them to have mutually agreeable meeting times.
In addition to that, Calendly found a way to use the power of referrals by making invites to link the app itself, so that people who use it for the first time can experience it for free and start using it too.
Founded in 2009 by Patric and John Collison, Stripe is one of the largest venture-backed private companies and one of the first successful examples of PLG companies.
The Collison brothers explored a global pain point for financial obstacles and supported their solutions with a strong community-building campaign. They organised developer meetups, sponsored hackathons, and sent packages to raise awareness.
Considering all these trends and success stories, it is possible to say that product-led growth marketing is one step further for all the B2B SaaS companies out there, and most probably, the future dominant power of the B2B market.
The PLG concept sounds complex and can be customised according to business needs and market conditions. Still, there are three common things that these successful examples have shown us. First, find the real pain point; second, turn them into an opportunity; and third, let customers refer your products!
