Product-led growth or “PLG” is on the rise. If you look around the SaaS world, there are plenty of great examples of PLG companies — Slack, Calendly, Dropbox and Airtable. When you look at the traits of successful PLG companies, you can glean a few lessons for your product-led growth PR strategy.
First, a quick refresh on product-led growth. A PLG company is all about individual user adoption turning into paying customers. The focus is on the end user rather than traditional buyers, like a company executive. With that in mind, here are three lessons we can learn from product-led growth PR done right.
- Cater to the end user
A PLG strategy is focused on the end user and this should be reflected in your PR strategy. If it’s the end users telling their bosses which software to buy, you want to ensure you are speaking to them. This should show up in the way press releases are written and the type of coverage you secure.
Let’s start with press releases. At last year’s Dreamforce, Slack unveiled its latest product innovations. If you do a quick skim of their announcement, you’ll see the messaging is focused on the benefits to the end user. They speak to how “clips” will help teams and how “Slack Connect” will help you collaborate. A press release should zero in on what benefits the end user will get from your new product.
There are a couple types of coverage you can pursue to ensure you are catering to the end user: product-focused coverage and customer stories. If you have a product that creates true value for the everyday human, you want media coverage that highlights it. Dropbox did this with a feature in TechRadar on the release of its password manager. Highlighting customer stories is another way to cater to the end user. By securing coverage of a customer story, you can showcase the value of your product through someone who has personally felt it.
- Make life easier
Not only do you want to cater to the end user, but you also want to make life better for them. One way successful PLG companies do this is through thought leadership. Thought leaders from leading PLG companies share their expertise on industry trends and best practices. For example, Calendly’s Chief Product Officer contributed to a Computerworld article on how to hold better, shorter meetings. Dropbox’s CEO shared the lessons he’s learned from leading a “virtual first” workforce with MIT. With their thought leadership efforts, PLG companies associate their name with industry expertise that makes life easier for their target audience. So answer the questions people are asking and help them solve their problems.
- Leverage data for virality
A common trait of a PLG company is virality. One path to virality is through media relations. How do you go viral if you’re a SaaS company? Data of course! Leveraging platform data, surveys, or publicly available data for media relations is a great way to drum up some buzz.
Take our client Chorus.ai as an example. When the pandemic hit, they began collecting anonymized data from their platform. We leveraged that data and earned a feature in Insider as well as several other interviews and pieces of contributed content. Surveys are another great approach. Slack has done this really well, conducting a quarterly Future Forum Pulse survey. This has landed them coverage in publications such as Fortune, WIRED, Tech Republic, ZDNet and more.
Catering your press releases to the end user, putting out helpful thought leadership, or sharing data to go viral are just a few of the lessons we can learn from the PR strategies of successful PLG companies.
If you want to know how to implement one of these lessons into your PR strategy, contact Lindsey Groepper to see how BLASTmedia can help.