What is Product Led Marketing? | Examples and Strategies

It can be tough to get your marketing strategy just right.

You want to make a good impression and attract attention, but you don't want to overspend or waste time on marketing techniques that don't work. With so many options available, it's hard to know where to start.

And in today's B2B space, people are pickier when investing in a product. If you want to break through the clutter and market your products effectively, you need to gain their trust and prove that your product is the solution they need.

But how?

That's where product led marketing comes in!

It's not about pushing a sales pitch down someone's throat but creating content that educates your prospects and helps them decide.

In this article, you will learn more about product led marketing and how to kickstart your product marketing efforts.

Let’s dive in.

What is Product Led Marketing?

A product-led marketing strategy puts the product at the center of the customer experience and other marketing functions. This approach allows marketers to further differentiate their brand by creating a unique value proposition instead of competing on price or features alone.

And this is why product led marketing strategies have become a priority for many B2B SaaS companies. In fact, the survey from Productled found that 58% of businesses are using product-led growth strategies.

Typically, this strategy means that your product offers a free trial or allows users to experiment with its features for free before making a purchase. Instead of limiting prospects to evaluating your tool only by its features and price, this approach gives them more freedom to select your product.

Principles of Product Led Marketing

Product led marketing starts with the product and its features. The most successful brands in this approach understand their customers’ needs, the problems they face, and how their products can solve those problems. They use this knowledge to create value propositions that attract customers and differentiate them from competitors.

Here are the five principles of product led marketing that help you implement yours:  

1. Data-driven strategies 

Product-led marketing uses data analytics to plan go-to-market strategies. You can monitor and learn from user behaviors to make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts. To do this, you can use user behavior analysis with your software to measure, understand and predict user actions.

This can give you a better understanding of how users interact with your product and provide insights into their needs. Analyzing these behaviors allows you to identify patterns and trends that will help inform your go-to-market strategy.

You can also use this data to identify the activation points most responsible for driving product usage and conversions so that you can improve messaging and adoption motions across the customer base. 

2. Solve prospects' pain points

In product led growth marketing, you have to focus more on your prospect’s needs. You should market your products in a way that focuses on solving real business problems, with a strong focus on simplicity and usability. 

You can develop your strategies around the needs of your customers and the problems you are trying to solve for them.  

To ensure your growth in the long run, you have to iterate and improve your products based on customer feedback. 

3. Prioritize the value 

It’s not about the features anymore. Your product led growth marketing should focus on the value it brings to your customers rather than marketing only about the features. 

To do this, you can leverage the use of interactive product demos that allow your customers to try out your product and see how it works for themselves. When they feel the value it brings, they are more likely to become customers.  

4. Focus on the benefits before sales

For convincing your prospect about the value of your product, you need to focus on the value that your product brings and how it will benefit them.  You can do this by providing them with a trial period or an interactive demo so they can try out your product and see if they like it. This allows you to qualify leads and helps build trust between both parties.

5. Appeal to the end user

When you consider the end user’s needs, other opportunities for improvement become clear.

According to Christy Roach, Head of Portfolio and Engagement Product Marketing at Airtable “Whoever can understand the pains of their users most clearly will always have an advantage.” 

If you can get your customers to love your product and market it for free, the business will see an increase in sales. Understanding your target end user's pain points and desires is the best way to attract them with a value proposition. You can even use a product demo in this scenario as it helps your end user to experience your product firsthand. 

Best 3 Examples of Product-Led Marketing

To give you a better understanding of what product led marketing looks like, here are some examples of companies that have successfully used this strategy:

1. Dropbox 

Dropbox created a simple solution for people to share and access their files anywhere in the world. At its core, it was a tool for people to ensure they never lost essential documents.

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Dropbox distinguishes itself from its competitors with a virality-focused approach to growth. If users want more storage space, they need to share the referral page—with their peers generating new leads that fuel Dropbox’s sales engine.

This is a great way to attract new users and keep existing ones engaged with your product.

When you look at how Dropbox has succeeded in building a product-led strategy, it is clear that effective engagement with users' products is critical. 

2. Slack 

Slack is a communication platform that helps teams collaborate. It’s designed for internal use, but external teams and individuals can also use it. Slack has become a popular tool among startups and enterprise companies because it allows users to have real-time conversations via text or call.

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They also used their own product as a tool for growth, which helped them make new connections and onboard new users.

The product led strategy that Slack has adopted is based on the principle of "freemium" - users can sign up for free and enjoy limited features, but if they want access to all the bells and whistles, they need to pay.

This model is attractive because it allows businesses to explore the product's features before purchasing. It also gives users a taste of what Slack has to offer, which increases their likelihood of becoming paying customers.

3. Toplyne

Toplyne creates an easy-to-use platform that lets PLG (product-led growth) companies identify their best prospects and focus their sales efforts on those.

They educated users about PLG marketing, why they are important and how you should utilize them. And by doing so, a top ranking in Google searches for “PLG marketing” or whatever term their customers were using to describe the product.

They offered advice on how to solve people's problems and showed them how Toplyne could help.

Although they clearly had a solid commitment to providing the best possible user experience, and although their premium features certainly helped them gain popularity quickly, it was still clear that their marketing team had done an excellent job at incorporating Product-led content marketing into all of its products.

How Storylane Helps to Build Your Product Led Marketing?

Product-led marketing aims to make customers understand the value of your product rather than marketing it as a commodity. This approach not only helps brands attract customers but also keeps them. It is not just about selling a product but also about creating a memorable experience for users and getting them excited about the product.

This is precisely what Storylane does. Storylane helps your company to use the potential of product led marketing and enjoy:

• More personalized and relevant experiences at scale
• More informed decisions due to better analytics
• Fewer sales pitches, more product experience
• More loyal customers and better relationships

After using Storylane’s interactive product demo, Toplyne saw growth in its product-led marketing with an increase in trial signups. With Storylane, you can switch your marketing efforts from sounding salesy to engaging and educating your audience. It allows you to create a compelling product tour that will enable them to dive deep into the product’s features and the value it brings to the table.

To take your demo to the next level, this tool has an auto-personalization feature that helps your team roll out personalized product demos every time. And with the advanced metrics, you can always understand how your demo is performing and how to improve it.

To help you supercharge your product led marketing, it allows you to use your demo in multiple forms. You can either share your demo in your emails or embed it on your website to capture leads. This way, you can ensure that your pipeline is filled with quality leads.

With Storylane, you can shift from a sales-led growth strategy to product led marketing and thus reap more sales. Want to see how it accelerates your sales efforts? Schedule a free demo now. 

Also explore the best product marketing examples.