B2B decision-makers are too intelligent not to fall for the same old sales pitches.
Instead of finding new ways to drive product conversions, you should spend a significant amount of time fine-tuning the product promotion strategy.
Wondering how to do that?
Enter – the concept of “Product-Led Growth (PLG)”.
PLG is the solution to some of the biggest SaaS roadblocks like three-month-long sales cycles, huge expansion costs, and savvy buyers who prefer self-education over sales reps feeding them product information.
Brands like ClickUp, Hotjar, and Slack have already mastered the art of PLG.
As a content marketer in 2024, if you are not aware of PLG or not confident enough to execute PLG, we’ve got your back!
To help you out, we’ve prepared an in-depth guide, breaking down the PLG strategies from the best SaaS brands.
What is Product-Led Growth?
Product-led growth is a business strategy where the product becomes the sole advocate of your brand and is responsible for driving customer acquisition and retention.
If you have ever used SaaS tools like ClickUp or Slack, you would agree how smooth the entire process of signing up to product training was without any guidance/intervention from a customer success executive. These tools are nailing their PLG strategies with product-led resources like guides, videos, and templates at different stages of the buyer journey.
The core idea of product-led growth is to have an alternative (and effective way) to cut short your “book a demo” sales funnel. These tools let you explore the product through the free trial or freemium plans.
In sales-driven companies, the sales reps and customer success professionals handhold the prospects and customers in achieving their desired goals.
In a product-led company, the entire growth strategy revolves around the product. Once the customer signs up for a freemium or free plan, it is up to them how they want to leverage the product to their advantage.
Basically, the “show, don’t tell” framework is the fundamental motivation behind any PLG strategy.
10 Examples of SaaS Tools Nailing Product-Led Growth
PLG is not a one-dimensional strategy. Different brands approach it differently, with a common goal – to win over the customers (or prospects) by showing them what the product is capable of.
We segregated the product-led growth examples into three categories:
Product-led content – Product-led content refers to any such content where the product and its benefits are strategically introduced within the narrative. It doesn’t sound like a random or forced sales pitch. Instead, it shows the readers actionable ways to use a product to solve their problems.
Brands like Hotjar, SurferSEO, and Datadog are pro at creating product-led content.
In-app growth – Brands opting for in-app growth strategies offer self-service trials, and freemium plans, allowing prospective customers to explore their product independently, fall under this category.
ClickUp, Miro, Notion, and Slack are some SaaS brands doing in-app growth right.
Product-led SEO – Product-led SEO is when the foundation of your brand’s search engine optimization strategy revolves around user data and significant product attributes. Instead of following search engine algorithms blindly, product-driven SEO focuses on integrating insights from multiple teams across the organization to create content that matters to the users and boosts organic traffic.
Webflow, SparkToro, and G2 are killing it with thoughtful product-led SEO strategies.
Let’s dive more deeply into the PLG strategies of these SaaS brands:
Product-led Content Examples
#1. Hotjar
At the core of Hotjar’s content strategy is its product and how potential and existing customers use Hotjar to address their key challenges.
If you head to Hotjar’s resources section, you’ll find a great combination of:
- Articles that talk about real problems faced by Hotjar’s target buyers (product marketers, UX designers, and content marketers) and nudge them towards using Hotjar in the most passive way possible
- The Hotjar resources target both potential and existing customers. Each blog targets a specific use case and provides actionable strategies to solve the same using Hotjar’s features
Let’s take this Hotjar guide as an example – User feedback 101: the complete guide.
On a broad level, it is a top of the funnel asset, and frankly, so many brands have written on the same topic.
But Hotjar stands out because:
- We all know what user feedback looks like, but they go the extra mile with a short video of how user feedback looks like. For users who prefer videos to understand a topic, this serves a great purpose
- The popular types of user feedback forms we are familiar with, like emojis, Likert scale, and tick boxes are shown as a GIF
- Customer testimonials from Hotjar users builds the reader’s trust
- Screenshots from the Hotjar prioritization survey give you more context about the product
- Lastly, the CTA at the end makes it easy for interested readers to sign up for Hotjar from there itself – saving them the time and effort of searching for the free trial
Hotjar’s product-led content strategy is not restricted to its blogs only. Their “Resources” section is filled with product-led guides, learning documents, product updates, templates, and webinars to equip you to self-learn the product and answer your queries.
📚Pro tip: Don’t assume that “my audience knows this, so I can keep it brief” when creating product-led content. Go that extra mile to help your audience understand underlying significance and application of different concepts and best practices that make your content actionable.
#2. Datadog
Some critical elements of product-led content are – educational elements, brand awareness, and product adoption driving factors. As you read the Datadog blogs, you’ll find how all these elements are injected into the narratives of the blogs.
Let’s take this blog as an example – Best practices for CI/CD monitoring.
Here’s why it passes all the criteria of product-driven content:
- There are ample examples and screenshots that simplify the technical concepts like CI/CD system, trends, and issues
- The product screenshots help you understand more about Datadog’s CI/CD monitoring capabilities
- The blog links resources like Datadog’s dashboard, applications, and Gitlab integrations throughout the piece, encouraging the users to check out these documents for better product understanding.
The underlying purpose of product-led content for SaaS is to drive user adoption. A common conflict here is – how to connect your content ideas with the product-led approach to prioritize product-led content.
A great way to approach this is by using Fio’s framework. In this framework, Fio suggests content marketers score their content ideas on a scale of 0 to 3, 0 being content ideas that are not aligned with the product and 3 being content ideas that address the critical product-related questions of the readers.
Note that this model prioritizes product over traffic and keyword volume. That means, when prioritizing your content ideas or keywords, your goal will be to pick topics with a minimum content score of 2.
If your distribution method is SEO, this will mean picking long-tail keywords with lower volume, but that is alright, considering you want to generate high-intent traffic and not random users who are not your ideal customers.
📚Pro tip: Prioritize content that aligns with your product goals. Gone are the days when stuffing a piece with keywords would help you rank. Your goal should be to attract high-intent audiences who find value through your content. Use the prioritization framework above to create product-led content at scale.
#3. SurferSEO
SurferSEO is a great brand to look up to for learning product-led content strategy.
Here’s why SurferSEO is part of our PLG examples list:
- Each content published on the SurferSEO’s blog has a Content Score sneak peek. This nudges new users to try out Surfer’s Content Editor to optimize their content with relevant keywords and phrases
- Surfer Academy is a great learning resource. The best part is, apart from sharing product tutorials, this academy also has informative content related to technical topics like in-depth keyword research, SEO writing, building a content strategy, and more
- Surfer’s blogs are highly insightful. Take this blog as an example – 11 Effective Writing Principles To Supercharge Your Content Efforts. Note how effectively the author has explained each writing principle with examples. This shows the brand’s genuine efforts to educate the target audiences, which goes beyond product plugs and upselling
📚Pro tip: Use calculators, content score checker, and similar resources to build audiences’ interest.
Product-led growth examples
#4. ClickUp
The productivity tool ClickUp opts for the freemium PLG model.
As a first-time user, you can sign up to ClickUp for free and get access to some of its key features:
- Assigning unlimited tasks
- Collaborative docs, whiteboards, sprint management, Kanban boards, calendar views
- Real-time chat with your team
- In-app video recording
For startups and small marketing teams, these features are enough to begin with and are free forever. The free features allow you to do the basic project management tasks to streamline your operations.
With over 175000 global SaaS companies, the competition is huge in this space. That’s precisely why the freemium model makes a big difference as your product speaks for itself and gives users a sneak peak of the capabilities, which works better than overselling.
📚Pro tip: While the freemium model is an excellent choice to trigger SaaS PLG, to make this strategy work without encountering financial loss, ensure you add limits to your free plans.
These limits could be related to features, usage, integrations, or support. The idea here is to offer the customers enough so they are impressed with your product and for more features they upgrade to paid plans.
#5. Miro
Although Miro’s journey started as a collaboration tool in 2017, during Covid, its overall user base scaled from three to 10 million.
What prompted this exponential growth? Let’s dig deeper.
In-depth user research conducted by the Miro team showed that, despite projecting Miro as a collaboration tool, many of Miro’s users didn’t know how to use this tool to collaborate with their team members. This was when Miro came up with the concept of “Robo-collaboration,” which led to incremental growth.
The idea was to onboard users with in-app user onboarding experiences without losing the human touch. The brand further launched Miro Academy and added recorded videos, walkthroughs, and collaborative sessions to help the users leverage Miro to their advantage.
Miro’s website is now filled with collaboration templates and resources that help the user get started instantly.
We love how Miro’s templates are segregated based on use cases and buyer persona. This helps first-time Miro users to pick their desired templates quickly without getting confused. Miro’s learning center has tutorials and educational resources.
Miro has a lot to offer to first-time users. As you log in to the platform, you can access Miroverse – a pool of Miro templates for different roles and use cases. The best part is that most of these templates are user-generated, so the relevancy is high. You also have the option to submit your templates to Miroverse.
📚Pro tip: Make user onboarding frictionless and simple. Empower users with multiple workflows and templates so they don’t depend on you to leverage the product.
#6. Notion
Knowledge-management platform Notion quickly became a cult favorite among content marketers, project managers, and product marketers for its exceptional product-led growth strategies.
Here are the key areas of Notion’s PLG to look for:
- Notion’s user-led, self-service onboarding doesn’t require any interaction with the customer success team. The intuitive user interface and simple product overview guides the users throughout the set-up process. It also has a dedicated section of onboarding guide for users to refer, based on their use cases
- Notion’s excellent collaboration features and the ability to add multiple team members to view, edit, and make real-time changes in a document, even in the free plan, makes it a favorite among small and large teams. By making collaboration a core feature, Notion encourages users to add more team members and associates to this platform, driving organic growth and increasing its free plan user-base
- Notion’s Freemium pricing plan strikes the perfect balance between features and usage limit. The generous free plan offers almost all the core features of Notion to tempt the users to opt for the paid plans to unlock additional features like advanced analytics, adding more team members, and automation.
📚Pro tip: Make your core feature the star of your Free Plan. Make it easily accessible to everyone with usage limits, so they are tempted to upgrade to a paid plan.
#7. Slack
Launched in 2013, Slack has redefined remote communication for global, distributed teams.
What contributes to Slack’s enormous growth? The answer is – this brand’s product-led growth initiatives.
Here are the pillars of Slack’s PLG marketing:
- The slack freemium model comes with a twist. The free trial period of Slack lasts three long months, where users get access to most of the features, coupled with frequent nudges for accessing more features by signing up for the pro plan. With this strategy, Slack has created a viral loop among users and gained millions of pro users over the years
- Slack’s customer-centric user onboarding also accounts for the success of its PLG strategy. When a user signs up, Slack automates the onboarding process with messages, prompts, and tutorials which helps increase user adoption rate
- Suppose you are an individual contractor working with a client that uses Slack. To ease communication, you’ll be bound to sign up for Slack. This way, Slack creates a chain reaction where one user motivates two to three new users to sign up for the tool
- Whether you are a large team or a one-person team, integrate any tool of your choice, starting with Notion, ClickUp, Trello, Jira, Loom, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and more, to create a compact workplace
📚Pro tip: Add relevant integrations to your application so the users don’t have to switch between multiple apps and eventually pick your product and opt for the paid plans.
Product-led SEO examples
#8. G2
G2 is a review forum of SaaS software solutions. B2B decision-makers and marketing professionals use G2 when searching for products that match their needs, read user reviews, and compare products in the same category to pick the best-suited one.
G2’s product-led SEO strategy comprises of:
- Thousands of SEO pages targeting product-driven keywords like “X alternatives”, “X reviews”, “X pricing,” “Best X software”
- Each of these SEO pages is carefully written and includes product-led comparisons of different products, raw user reviews, pricing information, etc
- G2’s product-led SEO strategy provides users with the information they need to shortlist the most suitable solutions and sometimes even pick one
Some of the top-ranking organic keywords G2 is ranking for are:
The highlighted keywords above represent the searchers’ transactional, informational, and commercial intents. This shows how they are using G2 to gather information related to their purchase.
📚Pro tip: Target high intent keywords that your audiences search for the most. Provide sufficient information through your content so the prospects keep coming back.
#9. SparkToro
The three pillars of product-led SEO are:
- Focusing on intent and not keywords
- Identifying future demands
- Prioritizing non-branded, organic search
In SparkToro’s Resources section, you’ll find that Sparktoro’s content strategy is a mix of all of these factors.
Note the titles of SparkToro’s blogs. 👇
There are no signs of traditional keyword-stuffed titles. Instead, the blogs have fun titles, and they stress authentic queries that marketers and sales professionals might have.
Besides traditional SEO resources like case studies, FAQs, and newsletters, SparkToro also adds new-age resources like product videos and office hours.
The Office Hours resource is a fun take by the founding team to help marketers better use everyday tools like Google Analytics, Language Model, and attribution tools.
For example in this office hours video on marketing mistakes, Amanda and Rand from SparkToro discuss about three major mistakes in SaaS marketing:
- Marketers assume that audiences and customers are the same while in reality these approaches are poles apart. They further establish why combining audience research with subject matter expert interviews is important to attract more potential customers
- The duo also discuss how most brands often focus on a limited part of a buyer’s journey and that limits their opportunities. They discuss the concept of influence map to take marketers through different stages of buyer journey and the relevant channels
- Finally they shed some light on the critical mistake of ignoring audiences’ influence sources and solely focusing on actions. Rand describes how sources like podcasts, social accounts, events contribute to influencing audiences in taking actions and these sources are equally essential in a buyer’s journey
These Office Hours videos are highly insightful for content marketers to look at content from a different perspective and these tutorials build the foundation of SparkToro’s sustainable PLG.
📚Pro tip: Create in-depth tutorials related to your product to help the audience understand your features better.
#10. Webflow
Webflow’s user-generated programmatic SEO pages form the core of its PLG initiatives.
Webflow’s user-generated template library drives millions of monthly traffic and is responsible for acquiring and retaining customers.
Here is a sneak peek into Webflow’s template library. 👇
Each template is optimized for search engines, categorized with proper tags, and rated by many users. Hence, these templates are highly capable of building trust, which helps in successfully driving new users and retaining existing users for long. Additionally, by appearing for branded keywords, Webflow steers competitors away.
Webflow’s strategic pricing plan is responsible for boosting its product-led SEO initiatives. Note how the free plan offers access to all key features but limits the usage limits. This means that once a user lands on the platform through the user-generated templates, they are encouraged to sign up for the free plan. The features under this plan are enough to leave the users wanting for more and no wonder they upgrade to the premium plans pretty soon.
📚Pro tip: Focus on product-led, programmatic SEO pages to boost traffic. Keep your pricing plan aligned so it doesn’t become a roadblock in the path of conversion.
Conclusion
The secret to executing PLG in your organization involves – understanding your product end-to-end and finding the best ways to educate the users about your product so they experience its benefits first-hand.
Are you seeking a content-creation partner to support your PLG initiatives with product-led content?
Book your Demo with iScribblers.
About the author: This post is written by Sreyashi Chatterjee, a content strategy consult for SaaS companies.