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Product Led Content Marketing: What It Is & How To Do It Right
Jayakumar Muthusamy
99% of marketing strategies out there are failed strategies—and you know why? It’s because they focus on an aggressive shove-it-down-the-customer’s-throat approach. That would have moved the needle a couple of years ago, but not any longer.
Nowadays, people want what works best for them regardless of the costs. This includes climbing mountains, so long as the solution up there fixes their problem.
So, it doesn’t matter if your ads show up every time they browse the internet. If your main offering is out of line, you’re just wasting your ad budget.
And that’s where product-led growth (PLG) marketing comes in.
In this article, we will explain product-led marketing (PLG), explain why it is preferred over a sales-led approach, and offer a few tips for scaling your ROI with PLG.
Product-led growth marketing, also called PLG marketing, is a strategy that projects your products or services as the focal point of customer acquisition, retention, sales, and overall company growth.
Let’s break it down:
So, technically, your product commands the market—not your marketing budget.
Now, here’s another thing to note. Product-led growth marketing does not mean parading your product’s high-end features and sophisticated add-ons. That will only make you look sale-sy—a big irk for your customers.
Instead, it’s all about figuring out what your target audience or market needs, creating an appropriate solution for that need, and marketing that solution.
Customer: I need an automatic toothbrush.
Company A: Here! We have one. Try it out for free and see if it works.
Customer: “Tries it out” So niceee, it felt so soft on my teeth! How much does a pair cost?
Proceeds to pay
Customer needs → Solution → PLG marketing → Customer needs → Upgrade Solution → Remarket.
The cycle continues that way, and your product continuously adapts to your customer’s needs.
On the opposite end of PLG, we have sales-led growth (SLG) marketing. In this approach, the primary strategy involves leveraging sales professionals to identify potential customers, engage with them directly, and convert them into paying clients via cold calling, networking, and direct sales.
But it’s not so efficient, and here’s why:
If there’s one thing businesses don’t have on blank cheques, that will be capital. Unfortunately, sales-led growth marketing doesn’t care about that. It’s mostly about acquiring expensive sales representatives who can talk heaven into customers and procuring heavy front-end marketing tools until enough qualified leads are acquired
While this looks like an effective approach, it’s extremely cost-ineffective, and SLG investments are never proportionate to results. You spend more to get little. Moreover, there’s no guarantee your sweat-and-blood customers won’t ditch you for another competitor if your offerings don't meet their needs.
Nothing speaks of desperation more than a company that utilizes only SLG tactics. You primarily focus on persistent follow-ups, hard selling, limited-time offers, and pushing for immediate decisions.
Worse enough, this over-leverages your audiences’ fear of missing out (FOMO) on your so-called spectacular offerings.
While this can result in flash sales, at least one in three times, it will also result in a negative customer experience, especially if they feel coerced post-purchase.
Bad customer experience leads to high churn rates, negative reviews, and a dent in your business reputation.
As you would expect, sales-led growth marketing makes it easy to oversell and over-promise while delivering little value. That’s because your entire focus is always on selling instead of meeting customers’ ultimate needs.
And since there’s an expected high churn rate, you have little or no time to collect sufficient customer insights. Limited customer insights on your product and services mean you have little data to work with to improve your offerings. The pattern continues that way until you either go bankrupt or adopt a better strategy.
Most importantly, SLG marketing blurs the line between your sales and marketing team—but in a bad way. If you’re not careful, it gets to a point where you let a single team handle both outreach and conversion.
Eventually, there will be two or more persons within the sales team doing better than others when it comes to nailing a lead. Once these people leave, your whole business strategy comes crashing down, and then you need to spend tons of resources scurrying to employ another.
Why? Because your product sucks and barely fits in as a lead magnet by itself. Otherwise, it’d have been your focal marketing point, not a sales rep.
We’ve said quite a number of things about why you shouldn’t use a sales-led growth marketing strategy in silo. But you can instead combine it with a product led growth model for astounding results. And here’s why:
Product-led marketing aims to meet people’s ultimate needs in the most efficient way, making it much easier to focus on customer success by developing the best solutions and delivering them appropriately to their doorsteps.
Developing the best solution means accounting for every feature that could affect your customers, including software design, service dispensation, solution-solving capacity, customer support, and so on.
All these considerations, in turn, improve customer experience and retention. High retention leads to lower acquisition costs, especially since most of your existing customers will likely become loyal brand advocates. This results in a high customer lifetime value.
Take Dropbox as an example—more details on their success journey later. The product led company used a freemium offering that lasted a few years to gain hundreds of thousands of leads. But that wasn’t the main goal.
The real deal was to accumulate sufficient data about its cloud software usage, the problems users encounter, how to best solve them, and how to make Dropbox a strong competitor in the market.
Sure enough, the product led strategy was successful, and the firm has over 700 million satisfied users already.
In short, product-led growth marketing focuses on product-customer interaction and information from this interaction can be used to improve your product. Once your product is well-polished to solve demands, it easily becomes a lead magnet, even after you start charging customers for use.
The traditional way of business involves building a product and then recruiting a bunch of marketers to create publicity around it. Sure, it works, but the results are just as inefficient and disjointed as in a sales-led marketing strategy. You’re basically shoveling anything down the throat of your audience, whether they like it or not.
Alternatively, product-led growth marketing fosters product-customer interaction, which yields useful decision-making and product development data. Marketers use this data to streamline their target audience, while product developers can use it to build a better solution that meets these targets.
So, technically, PLG serves as a converging point for both teams, integrating them into a customer success team with a dramatic focus on customer acquisition process and on the customers’ final satisfaction. A satisfied customer is a loyal one.
For a quick recap, product-led growth marketing revolves around your product on the surface, but it’s more of a product-customer interaction. And this interaction ensures you can develop a better solution for your audiences’ problems. This solution ultimately becomes your most powerful lead magnet and a marketing focus.
Sounds like a great method? Let’s explore a few tips to do it below.
Over the course of this article, we’ve reiterated the importance of your customers for effective PLG marketing. You built a product solution to solve their problems, not the other way around—customers were not built for your products.
So, before you can put your product at the forefront of marketing, you have to ensure it solves a problem no one else is solving or is solving it more efficiently.
Do market research on your target audience, highlight their common queries, note the solutions available in the market, and see which gap your product solution can fill.
If you’ve already launched your product, you can send out a public survey and ask people what problems they would rather you help them solve and how. Integrate this feedback into your product.
You can’t release a minimum viable product on a paid subscription and expect to improve it over time without first seeing how it performs on the market. You risk losing valuable reports and criticism that could have improved your final product.
Moreso, when starting out, your focus should be on building your customer base and reputation, not the quick money. The latter is always achievable so long as you have a solution to offer and a customer base to sell it to.
To rapidly build your customer base and also improve your offerings with critical data, invest in product-led growth marketing strategies like free trials and other freemium models. Give customers the option to experience your service or product live without paying at first.
This builds an instant positive impression about your brand, and if your product delivers, then you’ve easily gotten yourself a long-term lead generation source.
When customers are satisfied by a product’s effectiveness and ease of use, they consciously and subconsciously advocate it to their friends and families. This is a common marketing psychology.
But you can take a step further and personally encourage them to refer others in return for value. This includes introducing incentivized referral programs where users get an extension in the subscription period, discounts, cash rewards, and so on for onboarding others.
Payoneer does the same. First, the payment platform built a cross-continental solution for individuals, freelancers, and agencies. Now, it encourages loyal users to refer others with a cash incentive of $25 per referral.
But as we previously mentioned, simply providing subscription discounts or extending subscription periods will do.
Here’s the thing: your brand advocates are 70% more likely to influence a purchase than any of your marketing tactics. The reason is that we, humans, naturally take people’s personal purchase experience with a handful of salt—not a pinch.
So imagine dozens of your existing users sharing their positive experiences using your product on their social media handles. That’s social proof with an infinite value compared to website reviews and testimonials.
Since UGC is based on customers’ successful interactions with your product, you can safely introduce it within your circle of users. Ask them to share their best experience using your product on their social accounts.
To build sufficient momentum and unify your efforts, provide a common hashtag for everyone to use. It should be simple, memorable, and evoke a sense of camaraderie.
You might also need to provide incentives to encourage maximum participation. Depending on your marketing budget, this could be a full-month subscription to a discounted checkout or other incentives.
Repeating this again: The driving factor of a product led growth strategy is customer-product interaction. That means your product needs to continuously evolve and adapt to the needs of your customers dynamically in order to provide seamless interaction.
To do that successfully, you should use the freemium strategies previously mentioned to collect enough data on product usage, lags that need fixing, loopholes to fill, and features that could be added to improve solution effectiveness.
You should encourage your users or customers to drop feedback or reviews based on their experience. Then use the report to refine your MVP into a perfect lead magnet and lead retainer.
You might still be wondering if PLG actually works. That's not a problem. Let's go through a few product led companies that have implemented the same strategies we discussed.
Freightify is a logistic SaaS company for freight forwarders, providing tools to procure and compare freight prices, streamline logistics operations with a customized storefront, and track vessels in real-time from over 30 ocean carriers.
While Freighty boasts a feature-rich unified product, freight forwarders can only access it after making financial commitments. This prevented Freighify from fully tapping into the available demand market and efficiently reduced lead generation.
And that’s where we came in. Our team assessed Freightify’s product and tied it to the needs of its potential customers. We realized that most of these leads would ultimately become buyers if only they could interact with the product directly without having to pay a dollar at first.
We proposed a freemium model that involved two to three-time free use of Freightify’s container shipping rate calculator. The aim was to create a good impression on leads, help them see the benefits of using the product’s full package, and eventually make conversion much easier.
After implementing this strategy, Freightify’s user engagement and lead acquisition skyrocketed, boosting overall ROI and customer lifetime value.
ChatGPT is perhaps one of the most revolutionary software programs of the past century. In late November 2022, OpenAI released this chatbot to act as a virtual assistant and automate several mundane tasks across all industries.
As you would expect, it gained much momentum and rapidly scaled in size. However, what contributed most to its success was its product led approach. OpenAI introduced a free-to-use model during the early period of release, and people could use ChatGPT for free
In return, OpenAI got valuable data from people’s interactions with the bot. This data was used to improve ChatGPT, alongside other resources, to become much smarter and more efficient at solving user problems.
Although ChatGPT is now offering other paid and advanced models, the previous freemium model helped scale its customer base to over 100 million users. Currently, the bot has over 200 million users, with over 3.9 million paid users.
Dropbox is a file-hosting service similar to Google Drive. At the early stages of launch, Dropbox needed a better growth strategy, to compete against existing hegemons like Google. It did that by offering a hybrid subscription method—freemium with premium.
Users could use a limited amount of storage space—2GB—for free, but they needed to pay for more capacity if necessary. This allowed people to experiment with Dropbox’s features and compare them to other competitors without any financial constraints.
But that’s not the catch.
Dropbox went a step further and introduced an incentivized referral program. Users could get an additional 500 MB of space for each friend they refer, which turned on the referral frenzy for more storage capacity.
Did it work? Yes!
Dropbox has over 700 million users as of this writing and recorded over $2.5 billion in revenue in 2023.
There’s more market competition than ever before, and relying on your big pocket is no longer a sufficient approach to gaining an edge. If you want good results, you need to show, not tell, potential customers that your product can solve their problems.
And the first way to do that is by prioritizing your customer needs first. Build a product they need, not some unnecessarily sophisticated tool. Secondly, offer a freemium to allow them to test the product out and make an impression. Leverage viral loops like referral programs, incentivized invites, and social sharing to boost retention.
You should also utilize user-generated content and other in-app messaging features to improve the user experience. Lastly, optimize your product to become a better lead magnet, integrate your sales and marketing teams into customer success teams and invest in customer support.
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