Product Lead Growth (PLG) is usually considered the most powerful go-to-market model for SaaS businesses. Driven by the strength of the product and word-of-mouth recommendations, customers come inbound and sign up for your product by either self-serve on the website or after a light sales touch from the “Inbound” team. So far so good. But what do you do once you have a successful PLG model?

Having worked for several companies with highly successful PLG motions, including Slack, Dropbox and Google in the early years (yes, PLG was also Google’s initial growth driver), I’m often asked what the new generation of SaaS companies should do following very high initial growth driven by PLG.

From my experience, it is obvious that even with the strongest PLG momentum you need to invest early in building a marketing engine, long before you even think about moving to Outbound sales. Here’s why:

Hitting the adoption curve 

To understand why it’s important to build a high-performing marketing function early, it helps to take a look at who adopts your product and when — the so-called Adoption Curve.

The first users will be Innovators. Trying new things is important to them. They are the driving force behind your initial growth. They are risk-takers, inspired to try new things by technology communities, by what they read in blogs and social media, etc. The more momentum you create in this early phase, the better. Following on are the Early Adopters. They also get their inspiration from blogs, forums and social media. But they seek a lot more information before deciding to use a new product and look for proof points that your technology will work.

The third group is the Early Majority. While it is not quite so critical to them, they still do have an interest in staying at the forefront of innovation but are concerned about the risk of failure. They are typically unwilling to do a lot of research, so relevant information needs to be easily found. The final two groups are Late Majority and Laggards, but they are less relevant for you now.

Each of these groups needs to be spoken to through marketing. However, each audience requires different channels and ways to connect. If you fail to adapt your marketing as you progress through the adoption curve, or you don’t do any marketing in the early phases, your PLG will slow down prematurely. You will have less momentum with Innovators, and Early Adopters may not come inbound at all. Moreover, Outbound Sales targeting the Early Majority will also struggle if there is no effective marketing team in place. 

When we give this advice to PLG companies, the obvious follow-on question is, what do I mean by “Building a high-performing marketing team early?”. Marketing is a huge field ranging from content, public relations and brand, to lead gen and more. Does all of that need to be in place from day one? Here is a high-level recommendation on the sequencing of the build-out of the various marketing disciplines, and what of that needs to be in place before starting on Outbound.

Think about website offerings

Your website is your shop window and you only have a few seconds to catch a visitor’s interest (estimated to be 10-20 seconds). It’s vital, therefore, to invest the time to craft clear compelling messaging that will capture their attention and there are a few things to consider as you think about how that website will support the next growth stage. 

Bringing more traffic is the obvious next step, but making sure you are attracting the right traffic is key. Understanding the buyer persona you are targeting and creating content for that persona will attract more of the buyers you want. Start by publishing it on a blog and make sure it’s optimized for search.  

Another critical thing is offers. For the innovators, perhaps a simple “sign up” button is sufficient for converting visitors into your product and funnel, but as more of the other cohorts arrive, you’ll need more calls-to-action: demos, free trials, customer stories and content to ensure you are engaging the right potential customers.

Content fuel 

“Content is the fuel your new marketing engine runs on” says Liz Smyth, VP of Marketing at Slack. “First and foremost capture and tell your best customer stories.” 

They are not just the proof points that your prospective new customers need to hear, but also critical in helping the market understand new product offerings, their use cases and the value that can be derived. Also, take the time to create a few key pieces of thought leadership content. This is content that educates and informs. It is often research-based or presents your opinions and insights on specific topics. Together, those become the cornerstones of your early PR strategies. 

Remember to reformat and repurpose all the assets you build in your blogs (to drive SEO and organic web traffic), in social media posts (to create awareness), and in community forums (to engage more of those Early Adopters).

Optimise the engine 

Once the engine is running, it will be time to find ways to optimise it, often by looking at conversion rates and finding ways to improve them. Look at your website analytics to understand where your website visitors are engaging or dropping off. A 1% or 2% improvement at the top can make a big difference farther down your funnel and accelerate it. At this stage paid lead generation, webinars and content for specific personas and buying stages become increasingly important. 

This content, often called ‘full-funnel’, is designed to meet the buyers where they are on the attract-engage-convert journey. Light and short content for top-of-funnel targets who just heard about your product or search for a particular problem to solve e.g. answering “what is …” questions or “what to do if …”. Deeper content for mid-funnel including pain points solved, use cases, demos. For bottom-of-tunnel customer stories, feature comparisons, pricing info and analyst reports.

My advice to teams is to start by creating a few content assets for each stage, then build out your library and optimize it over time. Only when your ‘full-funnel’ content is firing, does it make sense to start building out your outbound strategy, with both efforts cooperating closely, learning from one another, and most importantly, amplifying each others’ outputs.

Laying a strong foundation 

If you have a strong PLG business, delaying building a strong marketing function or, as we’ve seen in extreme cases, almost leapfrog marketing and jump directly to building an outbound sales motion, is a mistake. 

If you don’t invest in a marketing team, you are likely to face significant difficulties building an Outbound motion, and eventually even experience premature slow-downs of your PLG. Instead, companies that use the initial time of strong PLG to build out a proper marketing function experience a longer period of healthy PLG and Inbound growth and are eventually more successful in their efforts to go Outbound. 

By Johann Butting, first published on EU Startups: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/12/the-no-marketing-trap-why-even-product-led-growth-companies-need-to-invest-in-marketing-early/