Product-led marketing to reach 400,000 users
How MarkUp.io crossed 400k users in 3 years without compromising on quality
Attention PLG companies: you’ve got a marketing problem.
Before you can create a PLG flywheel, you have to get users for the product. But it’s harder than ever to attract them in a noisy world.
Product-led marketing doesn’t look like traditional B2B marketing (which I wrote about in
). Your goal is to make it easy for end users to discover your product when they need it. Easy to say, hard to do in practice. And especially hard to do on a shoestring budget.For inspiration, I turned to one *very* practical startup marketer, Tamara Ceman. Tamara was the Head of Marketing at Uscreen (bootstrapped to $20M+ ARR as featured in an earlier newsletter) and is now Director of Marketing at MarkUp.io, a collaborative PLG product that makes it easy to leave feedback on digital content. MarkUp.io was launched by Ceros in March 2020 and has since scaled to 400,000 users with a lean team of only 25 people.
Tamara got candid about the role of marketing in a PLG startup (pro-tip: it’s more than lead generation), why PLG companies should rethink the classic idea of personas, and how MarkUp.io accelerated user growth.
This is a guest post in collaboration with Tamara Ceman, Director of Marketing at MarkUp.io
Product-led marketing: how MarkUp.io reached 400k users
In a product-led business model, growth comes from the marriage between the product, marketing, and customer success. It’s really that simple.
If your product is amazing, but no one finds it, it fails. If your marketing attracts millions of people, but they hate the product, it fails. To make this relationship work, the first thing that needs to happen is for the whole organization to rethink marketing and its role in the business.
“We need to talk.” - your marketing team.
I can’t believe I have to say this out loud, but… product-led marketing is not just a lead-generation engine.
It’s a series of activities peppered throughout the user journey. From the moment someone first realizes they have a need, through key feature adoption, to long after they cancel or leave. I love to say that “go-to-market and stay-in-market are two different strategies.” In product-led environments, marketing has stakes in both.
To achieve exponential growth, a product-led organization needs to:
Make the right data available to the marketing team.
Focus on intent and eliminate the noise.
Layer in the right messaging.
Experiment and triage.
Choose your battles and stay focused.
Using these principles, MarkUp.io hit an important milestone: crossing the 400K users mark in March 2023. Here’s how we did it 👇
1. Make the right data available to the marketing team.
MarkUp.io is a visual commenting platform developed by Ceros that enables users to seamlessly add contextual feedback on over 30 file types, including websites, images, PDFs, and videos. When I joined MarkUp.io in early 2022 as the marketing director, the product, while already amazing, had a blurry set of data.
There was no way to tell how the product was really doing.
The first order of business was to dig through the data from several angles and figure out who is getting the most value out of the product and why.
In any true PLG environment, the usage metrics should be a shared north star for the entire company. But you need to work hard to get everyone on the same page. The chances are your first, second, and third attempts to uncover the key metrics will be wrong. That was certainly true for us.
However, our marketing, customer success, product, and engineering teams worked closely together to surface the most important data points.
At first, we tried to stitch all the product, user, and marketing information in one tool so that they could be easily surfaced and visualized. After testing several tools, we ended up opting for Mixpanel, but in terms of marketing and subscription information, we realized we had to give up on the “one tool to rule them all” idea and look for other options.
For marketing purposes, we now heavily rely on Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Looker (formerly Data Studio) for a more granular representation of what happens before users sign up.
Once everything was plugged in and we understood the limitations of each of the sources, we could start surfacing information critical for each team.
Are people using the tool the way it was intended?
Are the initial assumptions around the usage correct? If not, why?
How many users are active daily, weekly, and monthly?
And how many of them are inviting other users?
Can we identify patterns of the most active users?
The data confirmed. Adoption leads to expansion. For example, it became clear that once a user created three MarkUps (files created in MarkUp.io), they were roughly 10x more likely to stick with the platform.
Thanks to surfacing data like this, our marketing team discovered massive opportunities.
In early 2022, we saw low adoption metrics for a segment of users originating from our paid ads. People were signing up, but not performing key actions within the platform that we identified as activation.
We wanted to understand if the lack of product adoption is a result of bad messaging (i.e. if we’re attracting the wrong people or misrepresenting the product) or if there is a different reason. After dissecting the entire user journey, we realized that our ads in a few geolocations were attracting a massive number of spam signups that, unfortunately, outnumbered the true users. This ultimately led to tightening the targeting, rerouting our budgets to geolocations that showed better conversion metrics for this specific channel, and the overall adoption metrics peaked.
The activation rose roughly 20%, yet the budget stayed the same.
Later that year, we encountered what we assumed to be a similar problem. However, after more digging, it turned out to be something quite different. A specific feature just didn’t solve the user’s pain point. (A marketer’s nightmare.) This caused a ripple effect and heavily influenced both our product roadmap and marketing focus. We rerouted our marketing budget to features with higher yields, which again improved our overall adoption metrics.
2. Focus on intent and eliminate the noise.
Product-led marketing is all about the intention of a user. The best way to think about this is as if your entire marketing function is built around “jobs to be done” instead of the classic demographics and psychographics points.
While having the baseline data can certainly be useful, everyone at MarkUp.io favors segments with common pain points over the classic idea of a persona. The truth is too much granularity can be just a distraction.
Knowing one user is Designer Dan, age 29, from New York, means little.
But knowing a group of users share a common pain of collecting feedback from their clients and are struggling to complete the projects because of lengthy review and feedback processes–is gold.
We understand their problem. We know we are solving it. Now it’s just a matter of getting in front of the right people at the moment when they’re searching for a solution and enabling a smooth self-served process.
And this is why in principle, SEO works so well for product-led companies, regardless if you’re optimizing for Google Search, YouTube, or a specific social media. I chose a risky approach, and that is to focus on high intent-signaling longtail keywords that naturally have a very low search volume. (Yes, even zero.)
For example, when we started out, every keyword research tool suggested that the term “markup in Chrome” had virtually no search volume. But we know from our user interviews that they were actively searching for a solution, so we decided to bet on these terms. Now, when searching for MarkUp for Chrome, at the top of the search results, you’ll likely see one of our ads, but right after that is a snippet showcasing our MarkUp Chrome Extension.
But we didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so if you scroll further down the page, you’ll see we have featured snippets that lead directly to a relevant blog post.
To lower the risk of this long-play approach, this meant narrowing down who gets the true value out of the platform and who doesn’t.
Having a strong negative audience is underrated. Many companies waste big budgets and efforts trying to market to everyone with watered-down, superficial campaigns. We decided to pick a few common use cases, lean into them, and eliminate distractions. The buyer decision and objections matrix (showed in the section below) helped us stay on track.
3. Layer in the right messaging.
MarkUp.io classifies as a B2B tool, which means that on our typical user’s side, there’s a small village involved in the decision-making process. But, creating separate messaging for different layers of buyers (commonly within the same organization) can be challenging.
A common thing we marketers often do is position all the value for the end-user. But what if the technical team, playing the role of gatekeepers, decides to pull the plug on the whole deal?
Layered messaging is making sure that somewhere in your ecosystem, the information exists for the right buyer role. It’s a great opportunity to handle objections before they’re even brought up. This doesn’t mean you have to dilute your Homepage. Just make sure that the right message is present at key points of interaction.
4. Experiment and triage.
If you have a lean team like us, you have to be comfortable with triaging and focusing on projects that move the needle. This means that besides remaining nimble, your marketing team will often have to “manage up” to convey the reasons why some things are ruthlessly chopped.
Luckily, MarkUp.io’s senior management has a genuine interest in marketing and is very supportive. Daniel McGlade, the EVP of Ceros and Head of MarkUp.io, likes to say: “Don’t be afraid to test, fail, retest, and move on if something isn’t working.”
This gives us the license to take actions that are considered counterintuitive to some, like avoiding A/B testing for the sake of A/B testing. If the data is really bad, I can easily decide to pull the plug and move on.
The freedom to rip the Band-Aid becomes very handy when evaluating the marketing spend.
Earlier this year, we wanted to see if we could improve our ad conversion rates. We chose to focus on people using our platform for the website MarkUps and created a niche landing page. This traffic would previously go to our homepage, which definitely isn’t an industry best practice. The only two real differences between our homepage and the new landing page were the messaging and the fact that our new landing page didn’t have a navigation bar.
After a month, the new page had roughly 40% fewer conversions than the homepage. That gap was way too big for any proper A/B test. We pulled a plug and went back to the drawing board. You either earn or learn, and this was a case of learning.
The main lesson, or rather a confirmation, was that the globally accepted best practices don’t apply well to self-served funnels.
The same principles goes for testing the marketing channels.
When I joined MarkUp.io, the only existing channel was the paid channel. While it’s true that audience research can help choose a channel of communication to some extent, it’s only with experimentation that you truly prove or disprove a hypothesis.
We tested various social media channels via organic, paid, and influencer marketing. Our decision, for example, to drop TikTok has nothing to do with the audience not being there (because a portion of them definitely are). It had to do with a combination of the effort needed to gain traction, time-to-traction, and the historical data that shows our best conversions come from desktops, not mobile.
Every marketer knows this: ripping the Band-Aid also comes with uncomfortable conversations. So, in such cases, we have information broken down in a clear, concise manner that helps justify our decisions if anyone questions it.
5. Choose your battles and stay focused.
For MarkUp.io, as for many different product-led companies, the adoption pillars are
Attraction > Free plan > adoption > expansion > Pro trial > Pro plan > adoption > expansion > Enterprise
Our marketing team is involved, to some extent, in each step of the adoption and expansion process.
Staying true to the lean team mentality, our product marketing, for example, focuses on only a handful of things at the time. Yes, we could start to chip away at solving issues at each stage of the user journey, but that would significantly slow down the time needed to see any results.
For the last few months, we have predominantly focused on the early parts of the funnel. The goal was to ensure that people who come into the platform have a smooth, uninterrupted experience while still getting necessary prompts to help them experience the most value from the platform. This meant revamping our email onboarding process.
The fact that we chose to focus on the early adoption meant we picked this up relatively early and were able to spin up a “fix” for the sequence that’s currently in testing. If we were diluting our attention to other parts of the adoption funnel, a quick turnaround would be impossible.
So focus, deliver, test, improve, and only then move on.
The TL;DR — Product-led marketing to reach 400,000 users
MarkUp.io’s product-led marketing strategy showed enough promise that Ceros, our parent company, is now expanding the PLG aspect of the entire organization.
Next goal–million users. We got there in five steps:
Make the right data available to the marketing team.
Focus on intent and eliminate the noise.
Layer in the right messaging.
Experiment and triage.
Choose your battles and stay focused.
Very insightful to see the work done by Tamara on product-led marketing at MarkUp! Do you plan to continue guest posts like this ins the future?