Preparing a marketing strategy for digital products or services always makes internal marketing teams or agencies nervous, this nervousness is not for less since the set up of a digital strategy defines the roadmap of actions to be taken at least in the first quarter of execution of the strategy.

In a product-led growth approach, in order to define a marketing strategy for a product, the marketing team must be clear about why people buy your product. There are  3 key pillars that can give an approach to why.

1.- The Functional Pillar:  What tasks customer wants to do or get done?

2.-The Emotional Pillar: How customers want to feel as a result of the functional outcome. 

3.- Social Pillar: How customers want to be perceived by others by using your product. 

Once these pillars are defined, the teams move on to the next step, which is to define the value metrics.

What is a value metric?

Teams that work in a product-led growth approach define the value metric as the way to measure the value exchange of your product. 

For example, if you sell pants your value metric is pair of pants, so when you sell more pair of pants your business starts to grow, expands, and generate more revenue. 

As you can see defining a value metric based on the 3 pillars allows you to align your revenue model with your customer acquisition model. 

According to Patrick Campbell CEO of ProfitWell a SAAS that gathers information about metrics, there are also 3 keys to how you can test your value metrics. 

1.- It is easy for customers to understand why they are paying your price and the outcomes that they will receive. 

2.-  It is aligned with the value that the customer received 

3.- The metric grows every time the customers receive that value. 

Getting the marketing, product, and sales teams to align to understand and define the 3 pillars and value metrics is a challenge. The product-led growth approach helps us to engage growth teams built by these three departments and to establish a good and sustainable digital product strategy.