Imagine spending thousands of dollars and months building your product only to have it flop. You may have to spend even more time and money on an advertising strategy.
Fortunately, product-led growth can help you avoid that fate. Using your product to sell itself requires some work up front, but it can lead to success in the future.
Read on to learn more.
What Goes Into a Product-Led Growth Strategy
A product-led growth strategy uses your product as the main channel of customer acquisition. You may use social media, email marketing, and other methods, but the product is central to all of them.
Instead of company executives buying products for teams to use, team members can use the product. This works great if your product has a free trial or a freemium model.
End users can then upgrade or convince higher-ups to purchase the product. That makes the product itself the best sales representative for your business.
Consider how to achieve product growth using the product itself.
Deliver Value
One of the most vital parts of growth marketing strategies is to deliver value first. When you want your product to drive growth, you have to show users that the product is valuable.
Of course, you can do this with social media marketing and other strategies. However, your product itself can also showcase the value when the user signs up for a free trial or the free version.
If your sales process involves sales representatives, you should prioritize customer success over sales. On the other hand, if someone can sign up themselves, the signup process and the trial needs to be easy to understand.
Some products may involve some setup, in which case you'll need to offer documentation to users. Marketing departments should work with developers to answer common questions in these documents.
Design for Users
Marketers aren't usually in charge of design, but it's essential for product-led growth. Your marketing team should work with designers to offer a fantastic user experience.
A good experience will help provide value to new users and convert them into paying customers. A marketer will most likely understand the ideal user, so they should collaborate with the designer.
That way, the designer can create a product that your target audience will enjoy using. Marketing teams can use surveys, polls, and other measures to get feedback from users to help make the product better.
Go-to-Market Intent
Marketing and development teams can also work together to make sure the product is ready to hit the market. While there will be a lot of work at first, that work decreases after the product is available to customers.
You should focus on product data and find ways to track information, such as signups and payments. Then, the marketing team can track that data to learn how to improve the marketing.
The company should invest in acquiring and converting users, and it helps to have a growth team. That team can focus on making the product sell itself more easily to promote expansion and growth.
Benefits of Product-Led Growth
When comparing growth marketing strategies, you should consider the advantages of product-led growth. An overall focus on the product can work with various marketing tactics.
Then, you'll be able to find the best ways to promote the product so that it can sell itself. Not only can it help you increase sales and conversions, but it may be a better choice than other options.
Consider how product-led growth and its elements can help your business.
Shorter Sales Cycle
You may find that using product-led growth strategies shortens the sales cycle. In many cases, product-led growth can involve some amount of self-service, such as setting up the product.
When that's the case, your sales representatives won't have to speak to every potential customer. Instead, the product can convince people to sign up for a free trial or the freemium version of your product.
As they use the product, they may start to see how it can help them. Then, they may upgrade to a paid tier or pay for the product after their trial ends. Depending on the length of the trial, a customer may start paying within a week.
Higher Lifetime Value
You may also enjoy a higher retention rate and a higher average lifetime value per customer. When users get to test the product for free, they can make sure it's the right software for them.
After they learn to love it, they may upgrade and pay to use the program month after month. They won't feel like they need to try out your competitors' products to know if they made the best choice.
Because of that, you can keep your customers on a paying subscription for longer. You can still work on acquiring new customers to grow your business, but you won't have to work hard to keep people.
Easier to Become Profitable
Because of a shorter sales cycle and a higher lifetime value, you might find it's easier for your company to make a profit. You won't have to spend as much money on a massive sales team.
Instead, you can invest your profits into fueling more growth. Then, you'll be able to retain those profits for yourself and any other owners or shareholders.
Since your product can help market itself, you don't need to spend a lot of money on advertising. Even if you have a marketing team or hire a new marketer, you can cut costs.
That will also help you turn a profit in your business. Developing products can require a lot of money, but product-led growth may help close the gap in your business finances.
Will You Use Product-Led Growth Marketing Strategies?
Product-led growth may not seem like an easy strategy. However, it can be well worth the effort once you get the strategy to work because it can save you time and money later.
Be sure to work with the product developers to make sure the product can sell itself. Then, you'll be able to let the product fuel its own sales and growth.
What is the virilaty of your product? How do people feel when they use it?
Cheers,
Keegen