It’s no longer just the responsibility of sales and presales to deliver a product-led customer experience. Marketing needs to be able to showcase how your solution works as well. But how do you do that with marketing strategies?
Buyers don’t want to interact with marketing campaigns that include nothing about the product. Even if it applies to their pain points, they don’t want to spend time wading through vague messaging to try to figure out if your product will help. Taking a Product-Led Growth (PLG) approach to your marketing strategies gives customers what they want and makes your efforts more effective.
What is PLG?
Product-led growth is a sales methodology in which the product is the primary source of revenue growth. PLG is a great strategy because it demands alignment throughout the entire organization. Everyone is striving to reach the same goal—creating the best user experience possible by creating the best version of your product.
PLG leads to a shorter sales process because it offers customers a better user experience and doesn’t follow traditional sales strategies. If done right, it can also reduce the cost to acquire customers and create users who are super fans of your solution.
PLG for Marketing
While marketing might not seem like a good fit for PLG, there’s actually a lot they can do to ensure that the product is at the center of their strategy.
To succeed with a PLG strategy, you need to have a crystal-clear vision of your ideal customer profile (ICP) and their pain points. This will help you determine what topics you cover in content and how you position yourself in the market. From there, you need to figure out what sets you apart from competitors and what features and services are getting customers to buy. Once you know these, you can create a strategy highlighting these differences and showcasing the features buyers gravitate towards.
The best way to do this is:
- Create content that addresses ICP-specific pain points
- Establish campaigns that address issues or help customers in a meaningful way
- Provide insights, guides, and social proof into how other users were successful
- Map the buyer journey, so you know what information each buyer wants at each stage
- Think about retention and adoption as much as new sales; work with CS to create onboarding materials
You’ll still be doing much of the same work you usually do, but the focus should always be on educating prospects about the product.
PLG Benefits
What makes this strategy so popular is the benefits you get from adopting it.
The benefits of PLG include:
- Lower costs to Acquire customers
- Uses smaller sales team to close deals
- Increased rates of customer satisfaction
- Higher rates of customer retention
When the benefits of your product are obvious, it might feel like it sells itself. Just remember that PLG comes with its own host of challenges as well.
Challenges of PLG
Most of the time, PLG lets customers experience a free version of your product that includes some restrictions. These may include limits on the features customers are allowed to access, different tiers for support they can receive, or users may only be able to use the product for a certain amount of time before needing to make a purchase.
“Freemium” options aren’t always doable for many reasons. Maybe your product is too complex to have a free version, or there are security requirements that make it difficult for individuals to try before buying. Luckily, there are tools out there that can emulate a product test run without you having to give users access.
How Interactive Product Demos Support PLG
Interactive product demos are an excellent way to allow buyers to test drive your product without having to give them access or being forced to maintain a sandbox with a set of dummy data. Tools like Consensus Tours allow you to make an immersive experience by combining live product UI and task-based navigation.
The buyer can explore the product with guided explanations at their own pace, giving them a comprehensive understanding of how your product works. These can be sent to potential customers through email or added to your website’s call-to-action, skipping the need for them to schedule a meeting. Let your product do the talking for you and give buyers the experience they crave.
Why PLG is The Way Forward
Buyer enablement and PLG go hand in hand. If you’ve been following us, you’ll know we’re all about making the buying process as frictionless as possible (if you haven’t, here’s a great place to start to learn about buyer enablement). The philosophy of giving the buyer what they want when they want it is core to both buyer enablement and PLG.
A PLG strategy gives users access to the product earlier in the process rather than at the end and gives customers control over how they experience your product. This helps shorten sales cycles and can often increase deal sizes.
