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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
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.
The upcoming weeks are all about Product Led Marketing:
How to implement Product-Led Marketing?
What are examples of successful Product-Led Marketing?
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.