Figma's Marketing Strategy: A Masterclass in Digital Marketing and Go-to-Market Planning

Figma, the cloud-based design and prototyping tool, made headlines recently when Adobe acquired them for $20 billion.

This was a crazy valuation, especially considering that Figma was only projected to make $450 million this year.

The high valuation caused Adobe's stock price to drop by 24% overnight.

Madness.

But While the economics and public opinions of the acquisition are fascinating, what's even more impressive is Figma's marketing strategy and go-to-market planning. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how Figma achieved its success.

The Viral Coefficient and Network Effects

Before we jump into the meat of Figma’s marketing strategy, there’s one thing we need to acknowledge first - Viral Coefficient.

In short vital coefficient is a simple sum that calculates how many users are generated by existing users.

The equation looks precisely like this:

For example, sending out 15 invites at a 40% conversion rate would give you a viral coefficient of 6 - so each user you acquire will generate 6 new users (quick math).

Sounds easy right?

Nope.

Figma, like other software such as Zoom and Slack, isn't great in single-player mode, which means to gain a vital coefficient, it first needs to acquire a whole host of users to start using the product before the product can unlock its intended value.

In 2016, they started giving their product away for free to all the people who didn't want to pay for an Adobe package. This move created the Network Effect that Figma needed to achieve an excellent viral coefficient.

As more and more people used Figma as a fundamental process flow within their organization, it became part of the process flow for smaller companies and individuals with enterprises. That's when they launched their Enterprise offering, which led to the hockey-stick curve of growth that Figma is now experiencing.

Waiting 6 years before offering paid subscriptions, not only allowed them to gain a large client base but invaluable insight to help them constantly evolve their positioning to ensure they had a great product-market fit.

Pouring Gasoline on the Fire - Paid Social

Figma's success wasn't just built on a great product and Network Effects. They poured gasoline on the fire with their social strategy. With a close handle on their community, they knew their audience well and got to the bottom of what their customers were trying to solve.

Their marketing aligned with the feedback they received for their product rather than trying to sell their software. They targeted their audience's daily pain points and found ways to alleviate them.

Here’s an example of a social ad.

Instead of ‘buy our cloud design tool’, they peeled back the daily pain points that designers face. Such as the dreaded ‘Can we hop on a quick call’.

Chances are designers pay money to start hearing that phrase less.

Taking this one step further, they helped their prospects by giving them marketing collateral to sell Figma and the economics of working with Figma internally:

Thinking outside the box to help decision-makers internally more effectively influence buying decisions with the wider company.

Search Marketing Marketing

So they were using paid social to start ‘creating demand’ for the product, but how did they capture ‘existing demand’ in the market?

The SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages), of course!

You can see their SEO focus by their organic traffic numbers since 2015:

Besides the impressive increase in traffic, there are two main elements to Figma’s SEM strategy that I think are awesome:

1. The Stepping Stone Offer

We’ve coined this Search Engine Marketing strategy ‘The Stepping Stone Offer’.

Let me explain.

Companies generally try to compete in search engines for every single term under the sun related to their product. There is no rhyme or reason except they want that traffic.

Not a wrong approach, but it lacks strategy.

In most businesses, there are typical products suited to acquiring net new business, and products more suited to up-selling / cross-selling.

In Figma’s case, this cornerstone product is Wireframing.

They know ‘wireframing’ lies at the beginning of any modern-day design process. This means if they can acquire new customers at the wireframing stage, they can be pretty damn sure they will stick with the product through the design process and beyond!

They are so sure about this phase that they bid on the term ‘wireframe’. Probably not the smart move if you’re not a venture-backed start-up.

But to counter that, you can see below all the ‘high-intent variations’ they are organically ranking for you know is hoovering up new users.

2. Community SEO Growth Hacking

Figma's crowdsourced SEO strategy is among the best things I've seen for B2B growth hacking recently.

This strategy involves the introduction of the community blog, where users can upload Figma templates they've created.

This community section gets over 400K organic visits a month (according to Ahrefs).

A good example is ranking #1 for 'TikTok UI'.

For someone looking for a quick interface design of TikTok, this offers a big enough reason to become a customer of Figma - which explains why this template has over 20K installs.

This beautiful marketing strategy offers a completely free and scalable client acquisition strategy. They can stay on top of trends, capture sub-market requirements, and create beautiful designs without lifting a finger.

For the people in the community, Figma's massive audience incentivises them to build their brand. The creator who uploaded this TikTok UI has 700+ followers and links to all their paid UI files.

So why is this growth hacking not just SEO?

Growth hacking is full-funnel marketing based on rapid experimentation.

While SEO drives this strategy's success, not all SEO drives full-funnel success.

This approach combines Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action in one fell swoop.

That said, Figma only introduced this in 2021, which means they had ten years of doing the basics well before implementing this growth hacking strategy.

Start with the fundamentals; figure out what works. Then create a full-funnel growth approach to scale the flywheel.

Final thoughts

Figma’s GTM strategy can be utilised by any B2B company looking to gain a competitive advantage, by:

• Product-market fit - ensuring everything you build is needed and not being afraid to get the users to test it before launching new products

• Demand Generation - using deep knowledge experts to help the marketing team create assets and marketing angles that position them as ‘solving a problem’, not selling a product.

• Demand Capture - deep knowledge of the buyer journey to ensure they are appearing for problems and solutions prospects are most likely to buy.

Hope you found this week’s article helpful! Feel free to hit ‘reply’ to this email with any questions!

Until next time!