Product-Led Marketing: What It Is and How to Do It
Traditional top-down marketing approaches no longer match the modern buyer’s ideal experience.
Today’s B2B buyers are informed and self-reliant.
They want hands-on experiences before making decisions.
But most companies are still just telling their prospective customers what their product does, how it works, and the ROI it can bring.
They’re not showing them.
Product-led marketing — a strategy that places your product at the forefront of acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers — flips that paradigm on its head, letting prospects try before they buy, ultimately leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
In this guide, we explore what product-led marketing (PLM) is, why it matters, and how to implement it successfully.
TL;DR: In product-led marketing (PLM), your product becomes the primary tool for attracting and converting users. Allowing prospects to experience your product's value upfront aligns your marketing efforts with the modern buyer's preferences and expectations, making them more likely to convert. This guide explains what PLM is and shares best practices for adopting it in your organization.
What Is Product-Led Marketing?
Product-led marketing uses your product as a vehicle for attracting and acquiring new customers.
Unlike traditional marketing models that rely heavily on promotional activities and sales outreach to higher-ups, PLM empowers end-users to experience your product's value before ever booking a live demo.
As users get a feel for what your product can do in a free trial or product tour, they recommend it to their peers, who also interact with and see the value in your product.
Eventually, a critical mass of users who are interested in your product push for the budget they need to make a purchase.
If you’ve heard of product-led growth (PLG), this flywheel will sound familiar. That’s because PLM is a subset of PLG, focused specifically on leveraging your product to market its value.
Why Product-Led Marketing Matters
The Evolving Buyer's Journey and Rise of Self-Serve Models
B2B buyers prefer to explore and evaluate products independently. But traditional marketing methods don’t offer buyers that choice — and it’s limiting their reach.
In a recent episode of Revenue on the Rocks, I talk about how we experienced this firsthand at Navattic:
“Sales-led was hitting a natural stagnant point, making us realize that we need to introduce some type of other motion.”
Going more product-led would help us engage a broader audience who preferred self-serve options.
By getting them into Navattic early through an interactive demo or a freemium account, we could nudge them toward a-ha moments and show them the value of purchasing a paid plan — without having to deploy our sales team.
Improve activation beyond the free trial
In a crowded SaaS market, buyers don’t want promises — they want proof.
While PLG strategies like free trials can give users the evidence they need to make a purchase decision, they don’t always help users make that leap.
Growth professional Andrew Capland notes that only 3-5% of SaaS website visitors sign up for a free trial. Of those, only 30-40% activate.
That’s because users often don’t have enough guidance to know what features to explore first. Or, if they do, they may not have enough time to experience all of your product’s capabilities before their trial is up.
As PLG expert Saad Khan puts it:
“Activation failure simply means [users] don't get what you are about, what you solve, and you are unable to give them a reason to come back.”
With product-led marketing, you can address this gap.
Using interactive product tours in your content, campaigns — even your free trials — can help prospects understand how your product can fit into their workflow, increasing the likelihood of activation and continued engagement.
Why PLM is the next phase of PLG
To activate and convert more of your ideal audience, you need to demonstrate product value far earlier in the sales cycle — from the moment a potential buyer lands on your site.
No-code interactive demo solutions like Navattic make it easy to spin up a demo that takes users directly to a-ha moments.
Embedding these product tours in your content ensures that everyone sees your product and interacts with it.
In fact, our data shows that interactive demos have a 43 - 60% engagement rate.
And users who are familiar with your platform before they jump into a PLG motion are more likely to be activated, healthy users down funnel.
Trainual, a knowledge transfer and training platform, ran an A/B test to see if there was a measurable difference in prospect engagement when its homepage displayed a Navattic demo versus a product video.
After several weeks, the Trainual team saw a +450% lift in free trial signups when the interactive demo was shown.
Even better, they gained a +100% increase in users reaching activated trial status seven days after signup. During that time, they experienced a +175% lift in users converting to paid customers.
How to Build a Product-Led Marketing Strategy
Implementing PLM requires thoughtful planning and collaboration across teams.
Here's how to get started:
1. Find Your A-Ha Moments and Use Them For Activation
First, identify the key moments when users realize the value of your product.
If you’re not sure, talk to your sales and customer success team to get their takes or watch old call recordings for inspiration.
Once you’ve got some ideas, start developing product-led content that helps users get to those a-ha moments faster.
A great place to start is creating an interactive demo. As we’ve touched on, this will allow users to explore core features without making a commitment to buy.
Go through the interactive demo you built yourself to pinpoint areas of potential friction or confusion and eliminate those before you publish.
When you’re comfortable with your demo, add it to your:
2. Align PLM to the User Journey and Their In-Product Behavior
The best way to figure out where to introduce your product is to go through the prospect-to-customer journey yourself and think about who they are and what they’re reading or doing in each stage of evaluation.
What features should they know about? How can you meet them where they’re at?
Consider building multiple demos for each customer persona, vertical, and use case and introduce them at stages that make sense to each segment of your ICP.
If, like most B2B organizations, you’re doing some kind of ABM, you’ll want to further personalize your interactive demos. Update any landing pages that contain an interactive demo with industry-specific language and logos. Add company names or even prospects’ job titles to tooltips in Navattic.
After you’ve published a few product-led marketing materials, figure out which ones are performing best and how users are interacting with them.
What can you learn from that content that you can apply across the rest of your funnel?
Can you guide people who are highly engaged to additional resources that guide them deeper into the product?
Tip: Customization really helps — in a recent experiment, we compared visitor behavior between prospects who saw a tailored demo on our homepage versus those who didn't. We saw a:
3. Track Key Metrics
Monitoring the right metrics helps you understand whether your PLM strategy is working. Here are a few to keep a close eye on:
- Activation Rate: What percentage of users reach a-ha moments in your demo?
- Engagement: How many steps do people make it through your demos on average? How many click the CTA button(s)? How long do people stay in the demo before clicking away?
- Conversion Rate: How many free trialers convert to paid users?
- User Retention: How long do accounts acquired via PLM stay customers?
Reviewing these KPIs on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly) can reveal where users are getting stuck or disinterested, helping you refine your strategy.
4. Get Buy-In and Drive Adoption Internally
Implementing PLM is a significant shift, and you need everyone on board. To get buy-in, you’ll need to clearly communicate why you’re making the shift to PLM and the growth you expect to gain from it.
Make a point to involve sales, product, and customer success teams in your comms and planning.
Not only because they should be aware of the change, but because they are closest to customers and likely have ideas for making your PLM approach stronger.
That said, it’s important to have a clear owner who can drive your overall strategy — someone wrangling the troops, figuring out all these processes.
Structuring Your Product-Led Marketing Team
As they say, teamwork makes the dream work — you need a solid team to execute your product-led marketing strategy. That team typically consists of:
- A product marketing manager: This person is essential to bridging the product and marketing gap, providing insight on value propositions that resonate most with each type of ideal customer.
- Content marketers: These folks create engaging content that showcases your product in some way.
- Growth marketer: This person finds new and exciting ways to drive user acquisition and activation.
At Navattic, our growth marketing manager, Raman, played a pivotal role in deploying PLM.
If it were just me trying to navigate a product-led strategy, we couldn’t have made as much progress in such a short time. Raman spearheaded the initiative, helping us all stay focused and accountable.
Best Practices for Cross-Functional Collaboration
My first piece of advice? Align with sales.
Make sure your leadership and your reps are onboard and understand how PLM can support their efforts. On a Revenue on the Rocks episode, our Head of Sales, Ben Pearson, explains:
“If your sales leader isn't aligned with product-led, it’s not going to go well. When we went this route at Navattic, we needed Natalie and Raman’s support to get the team excited about the direction we were headed.”
Next, make sure you’re engaged with the product team.
Where possible, use that relationship to integrate marketing efforts into the product roadmap. What features can you suggest to keep the PLM flywheel going?
Finally, connect regularly with the customer success team.
They are on the front lines talking to customers every day and can suggest data-driven (or at least anecdote-driven) improvements to PLM tactics.
Examples of Product-Led Marketing
Klue
Use Case: Multiple audiences or use cases
Klue, a highly versatile competitive enablement tool, built a “demo arena” to show all the ways it can be used across sales and marketing.
First, Klue introduces visitors to the product with an overview tour. Then, users are encouraged to explore more specific value props for product marketing, content marketing, sales leadership, and sales enablement.
In total, Klue’s demo center contains 14 tours, ensuring that everyone in their audience knows (1) what their product does and (2) how it can streamline their day-to-day.
In an interview with the Navattic team, Eric Holland at Klue explained:
“One demo is not enough, especially if you've got a complicated product with a lot of different jobs to be done within it."
When you think about all the different stakeholders involved in the buying process, it's not just your power user or your champion.”
Check out the full discussion here.
Vitally
Use Case: Homepage, demo center
Vitally, an all-in-one customer success platform, pushes website visitors to their product tour from the moment they hit the homepage.
When users click the “Start Product Tour” button, they’re asked to provide a few pieces of information before diving into the demo. The Vitally team uses this information (and the user’s behavior in the demo) to tailor their follow-ups.
This tour is more of a platform overview, showing what Vitally looks like, the tools it integrates with, and how it organizes and streamlines the customer success workflow.
For a more detailed dive into Vitally’s specific features, website visitors can head to the Vitally Academy, which has a whole set of product tours at the bottom — one for each of Vitally’s features:
This way, users can learn more about the aspects of Vitally that matter most to them and go into conversations with the Vitally sales team with insightful questions.
Added to product pages
Prospects head to product pages to learn more about the intricacies of your product. Adding an interactive demo to those pages can show rather than tell, users how your product works.
Dooly
Dooly, a sales enablement platform, strategically places its interactive demo just below the fold on one of its product pages — and has a persistent “TOUR DOOLY” button at the top of each webpage.
Dooly’s interactive product demo informs the prospect of what they’ll see and do within the tour.
Step by step, the prospect is shown exactly how they would keep their pipeline clean, updating the stage of an opportunity, adjusting its close date, and logging next steps.
Try Dooly’s product demo yourself
Ramp
When you visit Ramp’s product demo and hit “Explore Product,” it takes up your entire screen, making you feel like you’re actually in a real, live environment.
Ramp isn’t just telling users how their product works — they’re showing them, using pop-ups and overlays to point out features that save users time and money.
Importantly, prospects may not have encountered these features in a traditional free trial account.
Try Ramp’s demo yourself
Embedded within the product
Some companies are taking PLG marketing a step further and using it as part of their product onboarding experience.
MonitorQA
MonitorQA, software that streamlines compliance audits, has an intricate back-end structure, so getting started with the tool is tough without guidance.
So the MonitorQA team added an interactive demo to their onboarding flow.
This way, they can guarantee users see the most notable features and experience an a-ha moment right away.
Apollo
Apollo, a sales intelligence and engagement platform, sets new users up for success with their in-app sequences tour.
In it, users go through each step of sending an email to Tim, Apollo's CEO, from creating a new sequence to adding dynamic variables to adding contacts.
Guiding users through the process while they’re starting with Apollo makes using it far more approachable. Plus, it helps users see the value they’ll get out of it.
The team notes:
“When creating these in-app tours, we made sure it wasn’t just about giving people a step-by-step walkthrough of the product but also highlighting the platform’s value.”
Within Apollo, users can access interactive demos at any time in the Help sidebar, giving them immediate assistance whenever they get stuck.
Ready to experience the power of product-led marketing?
Sign up for a free Navattic account today and take the first step toward building your product-led marketing strategy.