Creating vs. capturing vs. activating demand
My mental model for PLG marketing
Broadly speaking, I think everything we do in Product-Led Growth (PLG) marketing can be split into 3 buckets:
Creating demand: Generating interest & awareness for our product. This is especially important for new product categories.
Capturing demand: Converting users who are in the buying phase and actively looking for a product like ours – i.e. getting them to actually pick you as their solution of choice.
Activating demand: Taking people from trial or freemium to actually start paying for your product.
One thing that you’ll read over and over again, and that you’ll have noticed if you’re trying to grow a product, is that 99% of people are not yet in the buying phase. Therefore, we as marketers need to spend a lot of time on creating demand so that when they enter the buying phase and are actively looking for a product like ours, we can capture that demand.
Below is a shortlist of some of the initiatives I’ve seen companies run, and that I think work particularly well at each stage.
Creating demand
The goal here is to get people to want our product. This is an education phase before someone is ready to buy. Needless to say, someone cannot pick your solution if they don’t know that it exists.
So, how do you do that? I think one part is being where your audience hangs out and the other part is having something to say. I’ve noticed that opinionated brands and founders do best to stand out from the crowd. In other words, it’s not enough to get people to notice you – they need to also care about you and the problem you’re solving.
In the B2C world, this has long been true – think Tesla, Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, etc. The practice is not as common in B2B, but I believe it to be essential for creating demand today and standing out from the crowd.
Once you have the story right, there are a number of ways to distribute it:
Organic social on LinkedIn
Guest blogging
Guest podcasts
Speaking engagements
Events
Opinion pieces
Brand articles
Webinars
Capturing demand
The goal here is to make it easy for people to find us – and pick us instead of our competitors – when they are looking for what we’re selling (i.e. they’re in the buying phase). Ideally, the prospect already knows what your company does and what it stands for – this makes demand capture a lot easier.
In PLG, the goal should primarily be to get people to sign up to your product and try it out right away, without any human assistance. However, talking to your sales team should still be an option for larger/more complex organizations.
Driving product signups
PLG is about selling to the end-user. When in the buying phase, these people have questions – mainly about how to simplify a task – and they’re looking for answers. Therefore, some of the best ways to reach them are through SEO & SEM:
Guides
Templates
Free ungated tools
Dictionary
Paid search
Reviews
Customer cases
Driving demo requests
There’s another category of people in PLG that is not the end-user, but the executive buyer. This person is not looking to solve a pain related to their workflow (e.g. “I need to automate emails on form submission”), but an outcome for the business (e.g. “I need to hit pipeline quota”). These people are focused on the outcome rather than the tooling & tech specs. These are mainly the C-suite execs.
These people can also be in the buying phase, but they’re looking for something different than the potential end-users. They’re looking for ways to align their teams, grow their business, etc. The most effective way to reach them is through “push” marketing: paid social and outbound.
Activating demand
The last bucket is activating demand. Getting someone to sign up to your product doesn’t do much if they don’t actually start using it and experiencing value from it. The goal here is to get people to the “a-ha” moment as quickly as possible once they’ve onboarded to the product.
Some of the ways that Marketing can help activate demand quicker are through:
Removing friction at onboarding
Product videos
In-app cues
Docs
That’s my mental model for how to think about PLG. I’d also like to note that these three distinct phases of the buyer journey have different levels of importance as your company grows and finds product-market fit. Before product-market fit, your effort is better spent crafting your story and creating demand than fine-tuning your onboarding process to reduce friction – that might be a post for another time.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on PLG marketing – shoot me an email to let me know! :)