Bay Area Inbound Marketing Blog

What is Product-Led Growth and How Do We Make it Work?

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Thu, Oct 13, 2022 @ 06:25 AM

 
APIs and modular tools have empowered end users to mold solutions and integrate products into ultra-customizable software stacks that improve their work. The way users experience and demo software products has changed, leading many software companies to change their entire business models to keep up with the industry-wide shift.
 
We’ve entered the era of end-user experience and a new and powerful growth model: product-led growth. In this blog post, we'll take a look at what product-led growth is and how you can use it to grow your revenue.

What is Product-Led Growth?

 
Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy where the product itself is the main driver of customer acquisition, activation, and retention. 
 
While traditional marketing-and sales-led methods push content downloads and calls with executive buyers, PLG attracts bottom-up virality through product adoption by end users. 
 
The goal of product-led growth is to: 1) get as many users on the product, and 2) keep them using the product through an excellent user experience. When people can see the value of the product for themselves, they're much more likely to become long-term customers and evangelists.
 
Obviously, software companies have to design a user-friendly product that allows trial users to quickly and easily discover it's value. This requires alignment across all teams involved with designing, engineering, selling, and marketing your product. 
Read More

Tags: product-led growth, what is product-led growth?

Why Do We Need a Go-to-Market Strategy?

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Tue, Sep 27, 2022 @ 01:56 PM

What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?

A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy should identify a market problem and position the product as a solution.

GTM Strategy is a roadmap that measures the viability of a solution's success and predicts it's performance based on market research including, but not limited to:

  1. Customer needs
    • including pain points solved and applications for our product
    • what prospects are willing to pay for a solution to these problems
  2. Market landscape and sizing
  3. ROI Analysis
  4. Business case
  5. Prior examples of related product launches
  6. Competitive data
  7. Target Verticals and Personas
  8. Positioning and Messaging
  9. Marketing channels to get message out there
  10. Content, to answer questions, drive deamand, and prove value
  11. Sales Channels 
Read More

Tags: #gotomarketstrategy, #go-to-market-strategy-creation

Growth Marketing Vs. Growth Hacking, Both Are Important

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Thu, Aug 05, 2021 @ 08:49 AM

As is the usual practice of marketers selling marketing products and services, several new terms have been buzzing around for the last several years. In this article, I want to define two of the latest crazes, "Growth Marketing" and "Growth Hacking", and give some ideas on how to do both, because, they are both a good idea for growing and retaining brand-loyal customers.

Read More

Tags: Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking, Definition of Growth Marketing, Growth Hacking, How to do Growth Marketing, How to do Growth Hacking, Definition of Growth Hacking, Growth Marketing

Life According to Agile Methodologies

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Mon, Mar 22, 2021 @ 09:13 AM

I was fortunate to learn a lot of the now-dubbed "Agile methodologies" many years ago, when reporting to the VP of Engineering, Juan Grau, at Proxim. He taught his teams to start by building the minimum viable product among many other agile methodologies. 

Here they are:

  1. Build the minimum viable product in order to produce often (aka start small)
  2. Break big projects (called stories about customers needs in Agile) into small tasks and assign them to people 
  3. Short documentation
  4. Track progress
  5. Weekly sprints
  6. Daily standups
  7. Continuously evaluate our own performance and make improvements 

I have used a lot of these methodologies in life, for many years, because they work. Below I give some examples where it has helped me, and my family, to succeed.

Read More

Tags: Constantly improve, Agile Methodologies, start small

Can You Deliver 10x More, for 10x Less, by Tomorrow?

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Mon, Mar 22, 2021 @ 09:13 AM

It's the beginning of a new year, and all tech companies are feeling pressure to double their revenue year-over-year, as usual. 

Then there's this:, "Can you deliver 10x more, for 10x less, by tomorrow?"

Read More

Tags: content strategy, deliver 10x more for 10x less, stop the spam, channel performance and anaylitics

My Website Pages Are Not Coming Up Correctly in Google Search

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Mon, Mar 22, 2021 @ 09:12 AM

I was searching for my own blog article to find something I had written about as a reference, and discovered my web pages weren't coming up correctly in a google search.

The article still came up, in the number 3 position, but it came up to the main blog title page, not the specific article I wanted. So I checked another one, and it was doing the same thing. 

I called Hubspot Support, like I do when things are broken, and they sent me links to videos and several help articles on my website. Getting started for beginners on google search console, There is also this article on managing your site maps here.

The good thing about setting up Google Search Console and indexing your site map, is it will alert you if someone tries to hack your website, or if you have any errors on your site that google detects which adversely affect your search rankings.

I did some research and found out google started using google search console in 2015, but I missed it somehow between flying all over the country for my daughter's volleyball and making sure my son graduated with high honors. You know, that thing called life.

Read More

Tags: Bay Area Inbound Marketing Consultants, Utah Life, indexing your website, indexing my site, adding sitemap to google search console, Google Search Console, website pages coming up wrong, my website pages are not coming up right, indexing my sitemap

Lost All My Facebook Likes When I Rolled from HTTP to HTTPS

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Mon, Mar 22, 2021 @ 09:12 AM

So, I'm very late rolling from http to https, but I've been a busy gal, being a Mom of two student-athletes and working in digital marketing. 

Read More

Tags: lost facebook likes, rolled from http to https and lost facebook likes

Ten Ways to Get the Most Out of Hubspot

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Tue, Oct 13, 2020 @ 03:39 PM

I've owned my Hubspot portal for ten years now. It helps me to market my own marketing consulting services, and be an expert on how to do digital marketing for my employers. 

Read More

Tags: Steps to Troubleshoot Hubspot, Troubleshooting Issues with Hubspot

Building Trust from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Wed, Aug 26, 2020 @ 01:03 PM

I love this old quote that we use often in Sales, the goal is always to "under promise and over deliver." 

Just read another couple of chapters from Stephen R. Covey's, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and wanted to share a few highlights I read from the section on building trust with other people.

These principles are true about our relationships with anyone really.

Read More

Tags: BAI Marketing in Utah

Eight Steps to Succeed at Account-Based Marketing

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Wed, Sep 25, 2019 @ 02:13 PM


Account-Based Marketing was all the rage in 2017. It makes sense, you do everything as if you have a market of one. Just like when you interview, you study the company and interviewer's background. If you want to do well, you find out who' does what and ask questions like, "What's going well and what isn't?" You get to know things about the people you will be working with. It's the same thing when you are going on a date. You ask them what they like and you are polite and considerate. 

When you are trying to penetrate a target account to sell them something, shouldn't you be just as courteous?

Shouldn't you try to customize your emails to show familiarity with them and their issues before you tell them how you can solve their problems? Any decent Marketing Automation platform like Hubspot can do Account-based interactions like persona-targeted CTA buttons and landing pages.

Most marketer's can merge a list of names into an email these days, below are a few more things you might want to consider.

Read More

Tags: Account -based Marketing, ABM