Implementing a Product-Led Growth Strategy

Nailing PLG can be tricky. Your strategies are unique to your own value, data, and know-how.

It’s no surprise that product-led growth (PLG) is in the spotlight. It’s a proven way to keep customer acquisition costs low while meeting high customer expectations, where users have more choices and love the try-before-you-buy model. But nailing PLG can be tricky because you can’t just copy another company’s approach. Their strategies are unique to their own value, data, and know-how.

PLG revolves around putting users first, so your strategy needs to be as unique as they are. No matter the approach, the key to PLG success is deeply understanding your customer journey and cross-referencing it with your product strategy and utilization.

Could you be doing more with your data? Let’s explore what actionable data means and what roadblocks may prevent you from unlocking its full potential.

Data Analysis for your PLG strategy

One common roadblock to implementing a successful PLG strategy is access to data. Understanding SQL, waiting for someone to pull data for you, build your dashboards, and more prohibits faster decisions to improve customer experiences, increase revenue, and reduce churn. 

All this to, in the end, look at a dashboard and ask yourself, “What does that mean? I need more information about this”, and you are back on this circle, causing data paralysis.

Raia makes it easy and intuitive for any team to start this journey without the challenges above. No SQL knowledge is required. Teams can leverage data to understand how users are using their products, user retention, forecast and act on potential churn before it happens, and more.

What does that data on the dashboard mean? I need more information about this

Every dashboard user

Why Current Solutions Fail

Interviewing users is a common practice at Raia and is part of our culture. We love understanding their journey and how we can work together to help them succeed. 

While doing so, many highlighted points that, despite having a solution in place, they still struggled to monitor their PLG strategy and enable their teams to leverage the data they had available. Some of these include:

• Fragmented data: To have a complete view of your customers, from the first time they visit your website, to sign up, to conversion, and retention, it’s not uncommon to have that data distributed across different databases, data warehouses, and CRM. Most solutions can’t cross-reference that data and give you insights into what’s happening and, most importantly, what to do. 
• Data definition consistency: Different teams and systems may reference and store data in different formats and define things differently. This causes complexity for current solutions when normalizing this data and providing teams with consistent responses.
• Complexity in reporting: Current solutions are built for Data Analytics teams with deep experience in SQL and building dashboards. The problem? This excludes end-users who need data but do not have the technical expertise in BI tools, causing heavy dependency and delay in making decisions.
• Lack of speed: Current Analytics tools are focused on giving you dashboards, but let’s be honest, who likes looking at a dashboard? The data in dashboards is often just the start, and from there, you start asking 2, 3, 4, or more questions about a specific number to help you really understand things. The problem? You then need the Data Analytics team to do this, and this severely delays your actions and decisions.

Customer Acquisition and Retention

Customer acquisition is no longer about “growth at all costs.” Instead, it’s about having a holistic view of product, marketing, and sales insights to ensure you’re investing in the right tactics and optimizing your channel investments.

With Raia, you can connect marketing campaign data to product usage, which lets you identify which channels, tactics, and campaigns result in user acquisition. Raia gives you insights into which strategies to double down on and which to reduce or stop. These insights help you define better experiences that convert new customers faster and retain them.

Customer Conversion and Monetization

Whether your monetization strategy is product-led, sales-led, or marketing-led, understanding the customer is critical. Knowing what your customers value most will help your team align that value with the customer’s willingness to pay.

For a successful PLG strategy, you need a comprehensive view of customer actions, product feature utilization, history of user monetization on similar accounts, and more. This will help you see which new features or experiences most impact your revenue. This efficient approach can help de-risk your monetization strategy as you accelerate revenue growth.

When teams work across disparate systems to ship features and analyze results across siloed tools, it leads to many problems, like mismatched data and less trust in metrics. Companies are in the dark about how their product investments drive revenue in these frustrating ecosystems.

With Raia, your team can quantify the impact of the new releases faster and find opportunities for growth more quickly. This will help you dial in the right features and experiences that convert and monetize your users.

Improve Customer Retention

Long-term customer retention is the key to generating revenue, growing customer lifetime value, and building a competitive moat. And although understanding and tracking churn is important, the effort can’t stop there. Lumping many different types of users into a single retention curve is ineffective—not all users are created equal.

Instead, your analysis and approach to improving retention should vary based on their lifecycle stage and common behavioral and user attributes. Segmenting your analysis with this granularity will help you understand what each customer loves, what makes them leave, and what keeps them coming back.

Understanding your users at this level will make them feel an individual connection with your company. This is important since 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. Personalization is no longer a nice thing; it’s a must.

With Raia, you can now analyze rich insights, easily segment users, create cohorts, and personalize how they engage these users across every touchpoint to maximize impact.

With Raia, you can understand the behavioral insight and orchestrate how customers are engaged across channels and platforms so they keep coming back for more. We make it easy to integrate with industry-leading tools to activate campaigns, drive acquisition, and maximize lifetime value.

Build the Path to PLG

Building for product-led growth can be daunting. But many of our users have figured out that, with the proper foundation, it doesn’t have to be. No matter your company’s size or growth stage, Raia has you covered and will help you surface how you acquire, retain, and monetize customers.

We are helping so many different teams implement and automate their PLG strategy. Connect with our team and sign up for Raia. Our team will work with you to get your PLG motion up and running in no time.