40% of PLG Sign-Ups came from Word of Mouth! 🗣️

I found out a whopping 🍔 40%. !!! of our PLG Sign-Ups came from Word of Mouth! 🗣️

Comment below: What marketing activities do you think we should invest in next?

I analyzed +3000 sign-ups for our TrustCloud Startup Program (aka our PLG freemium, aka FreeSOC2) after 18 months of launch…

📊 Sign-Up Sources:
• 45% Paid Ads
• 15% Organic Search
• 40% Word of Mouth & "Miscellaneous"

🤔 That was pretty crazy to find out… because we only invested in Paid Ads as our only marketing channel! (We should probably diversify…)

What is "Miscellaneous"? I'll go into how the categorization works.

🕵️‍♂️ Digging Deeper and the Setup:
Our FreeSOC2(.)com landing page and form are hosted on HubSpot
Of the 3000+ sign-ups, over 20% of leads have answered the open one-liner -text field: "How did you find out about us?"

600+ Customers wrote ✍🏻 ✍🏻 ✍🏻
- "LinkedIn", "linkin"
- "Ad", "ads"
- "reddit"
- "Internet"
- "Search"
- "Chatgpt"
- "Google", "google"
- "Webs"
- "Friend"

It's a marketer's dreaded afternoon to sift through this… 😨

Not for me… lol… As the Head of PLG, I love it … I grab my pot of chai ☕️🫖, and I started cranking

🤔 Where the heck are these people coming from… 🤔 

I used Perplexity to group with the prompt "Hey you are a data analyst, group and categorize this by Paid (LinkedIn, Reddit, Ads), Search (google, bing, web, internet, chatgpt), Word of Mouth (friend), etc…"

🤖 Perplexity outputs:
➡️ 45% came from LinkedIn
➡️ 15% came from Search
➡️ 15% came from Word of Mouth
➡️ 25% cannot categorize… calling it "Miscellaneous"

The leftover in Miscellaneous were:
- "Soc2.fyi"
- "YC" 😲😲😲
- "Heard the founder speak on Tech star event"
- InsightAssurance",
- Auditor,
- "don't remember"
- "Someone told me…"
- "Forgot who"
- "I used it in my previous company" 😲😲😲

I dump this into Sublime Text, CTRL-F Find-All, to find all the instances on "YC" and CMD-L… and counting & deleting them…

After doing that for like 30 minutes… I snapped out of it … I realized all of this Miscellaneous list is Word of Mouth!!!!! 😂

Amazing… 😲 

A whopping 🍔 40%. !!! of our PLG Sign-Ups came from Word of Mouth! 🗣️ ....


🔑 Key Takeaways:
1️⃣ PLG is a powerful acquisition channel <<<<
2️⃣ Free can spread like wildfire 🔥☄️ (read my post about it in the comment)
3️⃣ We hit a pain point in the market… and incumbents are TAXING startups on compliance

💡 What This Probably Means:
• Our FreeSOC 2 messaging is resonating strongly with customers; creating a zeitgeist movement
• Referral & WoM is a major growth; don't dismiss it, maybe systemize it
• There's a clear need for affordable compliance solutions for startups

👥 🫵 Over to you: Given these results, comment below: What marketing activities do you think we should invest in next??

I write daily. Feel free to connect and ask PLG questions ❤️

See the comments here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garyyauchan_productledgrowth-plg-growthmarketing-activity-7240469912694009856-lgpc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.