Connect with us

MARKETING

How to Ace Product-led Marketing

Published

on

How to Ace Product-led Marketing

Marketing isn’t very different from great storytelling. If you want to sell your products, you need to sell the story first.

What is product-led growth marketing?

To sum up product-led marketing in one sentence, here’s what it is. Product-led growth marketing is when you use the product as the main driver of growth for your business.

The product also drives retention.

The components of a product-led growth strategy

  • The product is the key and sometimes the only way to market
  • The product should be so good that people share it with others
  • Marketers are more involved at each stage. They collaborate on sales, onboard users, and help with retention
  • User experience matters most
  • Self-service funnels and training are key
  • You should understand how people use the product to upgrade the onboarding experience
  • You should segment users by the stage they are in the buyer’s journey

Several companies have had product-led growth like Slack, and Dropbox.

Product-led growth marketing

There are far too many software products. And customers have become more demanding. If that weren’t all, attention spans are decreasing. People would rather try your product than read a bunch of whitepapers on the product. They want to see if the product solves their problem, be it by making their lives easier with design tools for customizable videos or infographics, tracking vacations of employees, or scheduling appointments.

Product-led growth is more than giving away free trials of the software before purchase. It’s about creating a great product and providing ways for it to sell on its own.

Advertisement

A marketing guy would look at a product and exclaim how to generate demand for the product. And product-led marketers like us would say how our product can generate demand. They are on opposing sides.

By being focused on the product you can avoid a bunch of problems like rising advertising costs, difficulty in getting to profitability, low retention, and longer sales cycles.

How product marketers can make the biggest impact possible

The market is competitive and product-led marketing helps lower customer acquisition costs while also improving profits.

It’s not about getting people to buy a product but making it so good that people recommend it to others. It’s a higher standard than your company has to aspire to. The learning curve has to be non-existent.

The role of the marketer isn’t to get customers but to get those customers to recommend the product to others.

To benefit from product-led marketing, you need a complete and unwavering focus on it. Study the product well and if possible spend time talking to users.

Advertisement

Should you offer a free trial or a freemium version?

As a marketer, you are handed down decisions from others. Whether the product has a free trial or uses a freemium model is a decision made by the higher-ups. For example, Canva is a free graphic design tool to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and other visual content. They also have Canva Pro which includes premium features like Brand Kit, Background Remover, and more.

But, a lot depends on the pricing model you choose to go with.

The wrong pricing model can destroy all hope of profitability. A freemium model when the market isn’t big enough brings plenty of uncertainty regarding when the product will become profitable, if at all.

A free trial model for a product that can be massively successful in the future can stunt its growth.

However, above all your product should share these characteristics for it to be successful.

  • The product must be simple and easy to use with users being able to see the value quickly
  • The market is large enough for the product
  • The product has fewer more useful features and is a scaled-down entity of enterprise-level software

There are a few conditions your product has to meet before you know if the free trial, the freemium version, or something else is more suitable.

Find out if a free trial is right for you

Advertisement
  • The free trial is right if prospects are able to understand why the product is superior to others during the free-trial period
  • The size of the recurring revenue with the product should be right to support sales
  • The market size is medium or small
  • The market isn’t overcrowded

The business model and the pricing model should be suitable for the product and the market. Think of the single feature you need that helps potential customers differentiate between what you do and what competitors aren’t able to do.

For product-led growth to happen there must be virality built around the product. Virality comes when users see the value of the product and share it with others. Meaning they’re not being externally incentivized to share the product or being compensated through a referral marketing program or an affiliate marketing program.

Simple value proposition from Quickbooks

You might already know what QuickBooks is. For those who don’t— QuickBooks is an accounting tool for small businesses. The homepage tells you this in simple words.

There’s no attempt at pointless creativity. The text is chosen carefully to be jargon-free and present what the brand is all about to someone new to the site before they can sign up and begin the free trial.

They say this is what Quickbooks is and that now you can try it.

The difference between marketing Quickbooks and other similar products is that for a product for which you provide a demo and not a free trial, you need to study and understand your persona and speak to them in the copy. You need to educate them on the solution and share what the business can do for them. There’s none of that with product-led growth. That’s exemplified by Quickbooks’ homepage. It’s a simplified homepage that motivates people to try the product before anything else.

Advertisement

Product-led homepage from Slack

1661963499 185 How to Ace Product led Marketing

In a similar fashion to Quickbooks, Slack makes it easy to get started with nothing more than an email address. This is available in the hero section.

Above the fold, you will find a product section that lets you click through and explore a few parts of the product. It’s like being allowed to use the product before signing up for it or going through the painful process of going through a demo.

The version is interactive and has many real aspects of a workspace that you can poke and play around with.

They have cleverly organized the menu bar by giving importance to the main list of tasks that you can expect to do with Slack. Plus, there’s a video that helps you attain even more clarity with the tool.

Freemium versus free trial: What is it?

Your pricing page

Another important part is the pricing page

Advertisement

Clear plan options from Delighted

1661963499 814 How to Ace Product led Marketing

Companies that use product-led growth must use a simple pricing page. Delighted has a great pricing page. There’s no complicated list of features explaining what you get and what you don’t. The pricing tiers must be simple to understand. Keep the number of factors that affect pricing to a minimum.

If you can simplify your pricing structure, go for that.

Buffer’s pricing page

1661963499 405 How to Ace Product led Marketing

For Buffer, loading up on more free users isn’t a priority anymore. That’s why they show the least possible features and try and downgrade the features they do show on the free plan. They have gently titled the scales to favor the more affordably priced paid plans for their product—which start for as low as $5.

Deliver value to your customer

A challenge in the customer experience space is putting together six different tools like a survey tool, a tool for email marketing, a CRM, and analytics to finally have something that can carry out and provide you the results of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey.

Delighted is a product that simplified these disparate parts of a customer experience program and brought them under one single umbrella, in an easy-to-use product—Delighted. They saw the value addition they brought by making things effortless to get companies to get an NPS score from their customers.

No one needed to be an expert programmer to do something as simple as this.

Advertisement

Understand and simplify onboarding

The highest rates of churn appear right after signup. The reason is clear. People can’t figure out how to use the product. After working on making the product the best it can be, you need to work on improving the experience, working on channels where you can distribute the tool, the dashboards you will give to customers, and so on. You need a way to get customer feedback.

The goal next is to make onboarding fast and simple. Refine your onboarding so that the customer can get what they’re looking for in little to no time.

Delighted focussed on getting feedback to customers in minutes rather than waiting for several days or months. Slack makes it possible to create your own workspace with just an email address. You can start adding team members and communicate with them almost instantly. The speed with which customers get their solutions led them to sing praises about the product. The key is in seeing the value first-hand.

Build a self-service solution

A self-service solution means customers don’t need hand-holding when they’re signing up for the trial and they can use the product. There’s no need to talk to a customer support agent or the implementation team. All they need is a credit card and upgrade the plan without assistance from anyone.

Think of simplifying these aspects:

  • Think of how customers are going to add their data inside the product. If they want to upload data think of all the different formats that you should be providing support for
  • If there are errors, make it easy for the support team to reach out to customers

These questions will help you create an improved self-service flow and create a better product.

The other choice is to get humans to solve issues that can result in confusing products and unhappy customers.

Advertisement

What do you think of my article on product-led marketing? Do let me know in the comments below.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

Published

on

A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

Advertisement

Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

Advertisement

Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

Advertisement

“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

Advertisement

Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

Advertisement

Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

Published

on

Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

Published

on

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

(more…)

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS