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Product Led Marketing: Definition, Metrics & Examples in 2025
Product-Led Marketing gives marketing team leverage to oversee entire buyer's journey and convert free into paying customers, directly attribute to revenue.
Gary Chan
April 15, 2025
Table of Contents
What is Product-Led Marketing?
Marketers today understand that the product is key to driving the top of the funnel. By creating marketing around the product and encouraging users to engage with it, will create powerful and valuable marketing assets such as testimonials, case studies, usage data, documentation, and communities.
The traditional marketing approach was to inundate customers with messaging, use cases, and long sales processes. In the past, there were only so many SaaS vendors out there, so it became increasingly easy just to do apple-to-apple comparison by using sales and marketing tactics to overwhelm users until they have no choice but to buy. And those were the days when you had giant sales teams and giant marketing teams going after clients, and at the end of the day, they just wanted to know whether the software would actually work. So many promises were made that when the software product is not adopted into the workflow, it becomes the responsibility of the product team and the customer success team to keep it going and prevent churn, which is unsustainable in the long-run.
With product-led growth strategies that have a freemium model and a free trial, customers can now test drive the product experience, see if it is something that they can adopt internally, and use that as the buying decision in championing it to the internal buying committees.
A Product-Led Marketing playbook came about by wrapping all messaging on the user's firsthand experience with the product and providing reassurance for customers.
The way I think about it is, "Hey, you don't have to rely on just thinking about marketing messaging and punchlines anymore." You can utilize how getting free access or a free trial as the call-to-action. You can think about product videos (“five minutes to try it out yourself and get value right away”). The fast activation and time-to-value are all very new and enticing "marketing speech" now enabled because of product-led. Marketing now has more “weapons” to convert customers.
How to think about Product Led Marketing in the customer journey?
When we map product-led marketing to the 4 stages of the buyer’s journey with awareness, consideration, and conversion, a lot of that free trial and freemium go-to-market motion changes this whole funnel dynamic.
In the Awareness stage, people who have used the product are creating virality through word of mouth. This awareness then spreads into LinkedIn communities through reviews and influencers. And it propagates, while the product is generating awareness for the next group of customers.
Then the users come in, curious about the Product-Led motion. With the right reassuring marketing messages, you can encourage users to try the product. By experiencing the product hands-on, they can quickly determine if the software is a good fit for their workflow in the Consideration stage.
Product-led marketing also includes lifecycle marketing and nurturing sequences, as the customer has not yet converted into a paying customer, meaning the marketing job continues. In this product-led marketing world, to convert these prospects, we keep relying on the product by highlighting additional use cases, adjusting the trial timeline, implementing paywalls in collaboration with the product and technical teams, and demonstrating how other customers achieve success with this software through testimonials and reviews. These product led marketing efforts make the Decision stage go smoothly.
Even at the Post-purchase stage, the product-led marketing content strategy changes into engaging with paying customers and gathering testimonials, case studies, and video reviews. Involving these customers in webinars and nurturing these influencers into champions creates the virality and word-of-mouth that loops back to the awareness stage.
All of these create a powerful flywheel effect that only product-led marketing and the product-led approach can unlock, generating a sustainable, self-growing system for acquisition, brand loyalty, and retention.
My take is Product-Led Marketing is extremely powerful because it gives the marketing team more leverage to oversee the entire process, from top-of-the-funnel to middle-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel. Driving to the North Star metric, which is converting free customers into paying customers and thus increasing revenue. And marketing strategies can directly attribute to increasing revenue. In collaboration with the Product Team and the Sales Team, the Marketing Team is actually shaping that whole buyer's journey from start to finish.
What are the foundational principles of Product-Led Marketing Teams?
Entice people with the Product, not just with words
Traditionally, marketing teams operate almost like a separate department, focusing on making the product sexy and exciting with a punchline or a cool brand. That's not the case in product-led marketing.
Most effective way to influence others by creating marketing materials focused on the product's value.
In product-led marketing, marketers become high-power users of the product, constantly trying to understand prospects, leads, and customers to figure out use cases and gather reviews. They recognize that this is the most effective way to influence others by creating marketing materials focused on the product's value. And so they study a lot about the user story, some of the analytics support tickets, and getting feedback from customers.
Product-led marketing teams work closely with the product manager, sales team, community team, and customer support team to uncover and utilize these artifacts as “weapons” to create more compelling product marketing messages.
Users are the gateway to the best marketing
Becoming the VP of Free Users
A lot of marketing teams would toss free users to the side. With product-led marketing, they understand that free users are just users who haven't advocated or haven't been upsold.
Free users give a lot of feedback behavior signals, what works, what doesn't, and figuring out their objections is the path to converting the next 1000 free users into paying customers.
Free users are an army of evangelists.
Making sure that free users spread virality through word-of-mouth, submitting G2 reviews, LinkedIn testimonials, etc. Tell them to spread the brand, tell stories about using the product for us. That's powerful! Now we have an army of evangelists walking around. If we can continue to nurture them, they are building a very powerful product marketing flywheel for us.
This type of brand advocacy is very costly in traditional marketing, but with product-led marketing, all it takes is to give them our freemium product.
Jason Lemkins have been saying for years, there needs to be a VP of Free
Using Lifecycle Email and Notifications for Frictionless Onboarding
Because product-led marketers are in charge of the whole lifecycle, converting free users into advocates, they have incentives to make sure the product delivers value as quickly as possible.
And that agenda and goal align with the product managers, the sales rep, and the designers. Delivering value and the quick “aha!” moment would drive adoption, which drives retention, which drives advocacy.
Product-led marketers are designing lifecycle emails, welcome series emails, and notification emails to ensure that free users are happy and satisfied, so they can hit them with a jab-jab-left-hook (“Hey, can you give us a testimonial? Hey, can you give us a G2 review?”) at the end. This type of marketing is powerful and builds more effective landing pages and marketing assets.
It is in everyone's interest to build the most frictionless onboarding. Get to the fastest aha moment.
Keep Marketing for Customer Expansion
In product-led marketing, the team is also responsible for expansion. And marketers are contributing to that direct revenue generation by driving more usage and adoption - that's through using webinars, interactive videos, and community building.
These types of offline and online resources and guides are building up power users and champions for your brand. And these champions, when they close a big deal, we can attribute that to product-led marketing.
You know, marketing doesn't stop at just acquisition; there's also lifecycle marketing. Even if customers are lost, you can continue to market to them and retarget them. The most experienced marketers understand that we're leveraging our brand to build more customers for life, and that is through by giving away awesome product experiences. We will win when fans become loyal and build a cult following.
Cross Functional Alignment and Shared PLG Goal
Really, it's gone are those days that marketing is a function that just passes on to the sales team. With product-led marketing, it's building a tight collaboration with the product team, the sales team, and the customer success team. And making sure that there's a regular feedback loop bringing learnings back so that the product gets better and better. Giving away a freemium product experience is going to reciprocate that viral upside from product-led growth… that money cannot buy!
I recall working with marketing and product-led growth; it's different, and we were working side by side to make sure that we have all the we're really using the product it's free as the driving force and momentum to attract free users and convert those free users. We're farming those free users into paying customers we're winning them over getting testimonials and then doubling down on our acquisition and awareness strategies. Building a better product does this.
How to build for Product-Led Marketing Strategies?
Driving users to Activation point, no matter what
Product-led marketing revolves a lot around that activation point, making sure that the customer succeeds and gains value, which creates all the artifacts for product-led marketing. Supporting that activation leads them to the “aha” moment, which you can figure out through listening in on onboarding calls.
From a product-led marketing perspective, collaborate with designers and product managers to map out the user journey. Identify all areas where users can recognize and find value, which could range from the “Share Dashboard” feature to “example templates” that accelerate the user activation process.
As you grow your customer base, you can personalize recommendations and create various paths for users to activate and gain value based on who they are, their role, their industry, and their job title, so on and so forth.
Product Let marketing is facilitating all that push to get users to use the product and get to activation.
Freemium models are the easiest & fastest way to get signals
Having the freemium model and the free trial will reduce the barrier to entry because we want users to experience the product's value firsthand rather than just reading about it, watching a copy, or viewing videos. By using it, they can better determine whether they're more likely to adopt it.
Getting the user to try that influence and influencing them to sign up. You have their full attention for the first five minutes, and in that time, it's important to put your best foot forward and provide them with all the reasons to reassure them and help them feel eager to continue investing their time. That's powerful.
The problem is you don’t know. You need to get the customers to use the freemium product, and they will tell you what they want to know, and how they want you to market to them.
Product-Led Marketing should own the CTAs
Product-led marketing should own the call to actions. Always encouraging users to dig deeper, try features, sign up for webinars, join the community, engage with lifecycle emails, share their perspectives, provide testimonials, add reviews for rewards, become mentors, and champion the brand. Product-led marketing should own the CTA.
Every CTA the user take is a powerful signal for brand and customer loyalty. Product Led Marketing should build that up.
Led users back to the product with Product led Content
Building reassurance through the product led content. So looking into users common behavior patterns, analyzing their support tickets, addressing common sales and onboarding questions, and creating FAQs and documentation related to these issues. Identify all objections and explore the topics they are most eager to learn about. This is product-led content. By gathering insights based on user engagement, they are more likely to provide feedback and chime in on what they want to learn more from your platform.
Then start applying those product-led growth bumpers, which include tutorials, tooltips, case studies, and paywalls. You have all the usage signals to ensure that these bumpers are clear, helpful, and can assist users in moving forward in their journey. Don't try to promote; just focus on the product value. An example could be, I'd love to show you this tutorial so that many customers in the construction industry use this advanced feature to build out a report for their customers. I believe it would be very valuable for your construction technology startup as well.
Coupled with Product Led Growth Customer Success, focus on helping the user solve their problem and come back to the product. This is how all of these elements are complementary to one another, driving growth.
Uncover the Marketing Message with Product Led SEO
When you take all of that content and put it together and then strip it away, removing all your product information again, you will find that the problem your customers are solving is universal. It doesn't have to be product-specific. They could be addressing it by using our competitors' products. And that's when you realize this is the core challenge that your customers have when hiring your product for their jobs to be done.
And that's when you can find and wrap that around the keywords your competitors are ranking for and learn how to 10x them, because now you have deep insights into the customer's problem. With all the objections and frequently asked questions, you understand what customers are afraid of and what is missing in a lot of competitors' content. The only thing that gap needs is the extra mile that will help your content rank for SEO.
Layering on Paid Ad and word of mouth to product led SEO is powerful distribution flywheel.
What are examples of successful Product-Led Growth Marketing companies?
Since the Product Led Marketing team owns the entire customer journey in Product Led Growth companies, here are three standout examples of companies optimizing each stage to unlock the PLG flywheel.
Linear
Linear, an issue tracking and project management tool, used product-led growth to get in front of developer communities and showcase how much faster and more intuitive experience compared to the legacy competitor, Jira. Linear’s approach has created a lot of buzz and a dedicated following.
Awareness
Posted on Hacker News and Reddit.
Gained attention from developer communities with a transparent changelog, cementing trust from users that Linear is responding to feedback.
Consideration
Having a transparent roadmap, an active community, and answering users' questions just builds that credibility that larger companies like Atlassian no longer have.
Conversion
Fast onboarding and easy integrations with Slack give it a modern take and easier adoption for new users.
Post-Purchase & Expansion
Continuous product updates, feedback loops, and collaborative features encouraged ongoing use and organic team expansion.
Linear’s focus on user engagement, ease of adoption, and the speed of listening to and implementing users’ feedback has truly resonated with the developer community, creating a cult-like following. Founded in 2019, Linear now holds a valuation of $400 million as of 2023.
Raycast
Raycast is a productivity tool with a command bar interface for MacOS, designed specifically for developers and technical users.
Awareness
Launched an API and Extension Store, allowing developers to build and share extensions, which helped create a strong ecosystem and developer community.
Organized Hackdays to encourage innovation and generate buzz within developer forums and on social media, ultimately drawing more developers to know more about Raycast.
Consideration
Prioritizing a frictionless, self-serve product experience, making it easy for technical users to try Raycast.
Built strong brand loyalty by collaborating with its savvy users and kept transparency with frequent updates.
Conversion
Public beta access and a product-led growth experience created word-of-mouth growth and fast adoption and virality.
Post-Purchase & Expansion
Adopted an “open source” mentality, encouraging user contribution and adding more extensions to their library.
Continuing open feedback channels helps retention and collects testimonials.
Raycast will leverage its relationship with developers and continue to foster that community. By making the product easy to use, keep engaging with customers, creating virality, and organic growth. Raycast raised over $30 million in 2024.
Tana
Tana.inc is a knowledge management tool that organizes unstructured data from conversations, recordings, and notes into actionable workflows, saving users time. Tana started as an invite-only beta program, gradually building out its community while listening to user feedback. This approach led to the creation of a referral program based on word of mouth, a waitlist, and now a big part of the growth strategy for the company.
Awareness
Began with an invite-only beta, building an exclusive community.
Generated buzz through a waitlist and multiple launch waves.
Consideration
Because it's a productivity tool, so it really requires a lot of integrations. Focused on integrating with other productivity tools, listening closely to customer feedback, and rapidly iterating based on user needs.
The more integrations, the more expansive their audience base.
Conversion
Making the product easy to use and easy to set up. Keep optimizing onboarding and speed of adoption.
Post-Purchase & Expansion
They continue to engage with the community, gather feedback, collect testimonials, and expand the integration library.
Now, users are coming out of the woodwork and saying they've been using Tana for the last months and years and are advocates and champions for the brand.
Tana’s close beta had 30,000 testers. They are building this community with over 20,000 Slack users. This is how they continue to generate word of mouth and organic demand for their free plan. Engaging users helps them experience the benefits and simplifies onboarding. Eventually, the flywheel turns. Word of mouth occurs. Virality happens on LinkedIn, in publications, through PR media, and by driving expansion and growth.
The upcoming weeks are all about Product Led Marketing:
What are the examples of Product Led Marketing Growth Metrics?
In the meantime, also check out my article on Product Led Sales:
And Paid Ad Flywheel:
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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. Building ClarityInbox. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.