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Product-Led Marketing: 2025 Guide to Grow With the Product
Help SaaS teams grow using the product as the funnel to drive acquisition, activation, and retention, without big ad budgets or a giant sales team. Learn key PLM principles, real examples, and proven tactics for word of mouth, SEO, paid ads, and retention content to turn users into loyal advocates and champions.
Gary Chan
May 13, 2025
Product-led marketing (PLM) is transforming how SaaS teams drive growth without relying on oversized (and addictive) paid ad budgets or long, drawn out sales cycles. Product-led marketing focuses on building a product with freemium and free trial offer so that all CTAs lead to trying the product. Then adding on SEO content marketing, referrals, word of mouth, community, and education to accelerate the user journey from adoption, retention, and expansion revenue.
If you are building SaaS bootstrapped, venture-backed, or want to reduce customer acquisition costs, PLM is the modern SaaS growth playbook.
What Is Product-Led Marketing?
Instead of just “talking” about the product value, magic ✨ happens when let customers “experience” the product value.
Product-led marketing lets the product do most of the selling to grow. Instead of using lots of paid marketing or a growing sales frontline, trying the product for free or over a trial will activate them. When users experience the value for themselves, they are more likely to champion within their organizations, invite their colleagues, explore advanced features, and tell others. This turns happy customers and users into your best marketers and champions. Marketing teams would work closely with product and customer success teams to make sure users have a great experience from awareness, conversion, onboarding, retention, expansion, and referral.
Here are my Key Principles of Product-Led Marketing:
Show, Don’t Just Tell: Let users experience the product’s value instead of just talking about it.
Value Free Users: Treat people who use the free version as potential customers and viral champions.
Use Freemium or Free Trials: Lower the barrier so more people can try the product.
Easy Onboarding & Activation: Make it simple for new users to get started and get to “aha” moment quickly.
Improve Retention as a Team: Marketing, product, and customer success teams own retention together.
Product Led Growth Bumpers: Guide users to the next step using call to actions, tooltips, and paywalls, like upgrading or sharing.
Create Helpful Content to Nurture: Answer real user questions and help them get more from the product.
Improve with User Feedback: Use feedback and user data to improve marketing and the product.
Build for Sharing: Make it easy for users to tell others about the product.
Word of Mouth: The Real Growth Engine
How to Earn Attention (Not Buy It)
Word of mouth and virality are not luck. Virality is the result of strong product retention. Retention is the one growth metric to optimize (which I’ll talk about below). In my recent analysis, 40% of our PLG sign-ups came directly from word-of-mouth and referrals, outpacing organic search and even paid ads in some cases. The power of building for activation and retention, and enhancing with shareability, sparks conversations.
Break Through Your Competitors, Without Burning Budget
Most SaaS ads and blog posts blend into the background noise. Product Led Marketing breaks through by showing the value first, then earning trust through nurturing content and real user value.
Can PLG Use Paid Ads? We used it as a Catalyst
Paid ads can work for PLG, but only to drive audience to the product experience, not to a sales call. Target audience by intent, lead with an onboarding call, and drop users straight into the product as quickly as possible. Using paid ads as a catalyst for the PLG flywheel, investing in driving the bottom of the funnel, word-of-mouth, and organic growth.
Product + Marketing = The Growth Flywheel
PLM isn’t just a marketing function, it’s a cross-functional flywheel. The best Product, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams create tight loops between product usage, content, support, and feedback, turning every free and paid customer into marketing and sales engines.
Every onboarding call is potential marketing material to create virality.
Expansion and upsell opportunities are driven by product retention, paywalls, and ongoing value.
Continue to nurture free users to become future champions and future paid customers.
Product-Led SEO: From Quick Wins to Scalable Growth
Product-led SEO is about opening up your learnings and product data on your website into a growth engine that attracts, educates, and converts organic visitors, without paid channels.
Five-Minute SEO for PLG
I simplify SEO in this guide:
Using SEO tools for competitor analysis and identifying market opportunities
“10x-ing” your competitor’s content
Investing in video content, interactive demos, and CTAs
Programmatic SEO for PLG
Programmatic SEO scales faster and uses proprietary product data as informative content.
Create pages using real product or industry data
Invest in internal link architecture to make pages easier to find
Use tags, categories, and related widgets to help users explore deeper
Retention Content & Lifecycle Marketing
In PLM, marketing also oversees product retention. Retention is the driving force of virality, creating G2 reviews and testimonials, and content like webinars and case studies. Investing in content and lifecycle strategies turns users into loyal advocates.
Tech Touches and Lifecycle Playbooks
I explain how our PLM (product, customer success, marketing, and sales) team automated, personalized communication (“tech touches”) keeps free customers engaged at every stage, from onboarding to referral.
In my article on Lifecycle Marketing, I used a playbook to maximize and nurture customer engagement.
Who Owns Retention?
As the Head of Product Led Growth, I oversaw retention. But within the organization, which department (product, marketing, or customer success) owns your customer retention responsibility? The answer: it’s a team sport, and the best PLG and PLM companies align all functions around driving ongoing value throughout the customer journey.
What’s Coming Next on Product-Led Marketing
The next PLM topics will focus on advanced strategies and practical execution for PLG teams:
Community-Led Growth: How to build and scale user communities that drive organic adoption.
Vibe Marketing: How AI has change the way SaaS market and scale
AI & Automation in PLG: Leveraging new tools to scale customer engagement and support.
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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.