Want to Triple Your Revenue? Maybe Start by Cutting Your Ad Spend💲

Hi everyone,

It's that time of the year when the Christmas lights come out, Michael Bublé crawls out of his cave and we start having conversations about 2025 strategies. For those of you finalizing budgets, here’s a fresh perspective that might surprise you.

Today, we're diving into a case study on how Air, a B2B SaaS company, slashed their marketing spend by 90%—and tripled their revenue by going all in on creative content.

If you’re questioning the ROI of your current ad strategy, this story could inspire a game-changing pivot.

Enjoy the read.

How Air Cut 90% of Marketing Spend
and Tripled Revenue in 18 Months
by Ariel Rubin, Head of Content at Air

In B2B SaaS, it can be easy to fall back on the adage that scaling demands ever-increasing marketing budgets and complex ad funnel strategies. But what if the opposite were true? What if a B2B could actually thrive by slashing its marketing spend and going all in on creative? Can one really move away from the classic SaaS marketing playbook of awkward webinars and endless Facebook ads and not just grow - but thrive? 

That’s precisely what we at Air, an early-stage B2B SaaS company, have done over the past 18 months. With over 2,200 paying customers and 100,000+ users, I believe Air is showing how center-of-culture campaigns and content-led marketing can both drive revenue and maximize efficiency. 

Status quo: Endless ads, stagnant growth

In 2022, Air was facing a common dilemma. Our marketing team was burning through a significant budget on paid media and PPC campaigns. Despite the big spend, conversions simply weren’t keeping pace with expenditure.

CEO Shange Hegde recognized a crucial truth: the team was pouring money into strategies that lacked focus and what’s more, didn’t really speak to the brand he wanted to build. “We were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck,” he recalls. “We weren’t being efficient and the reality was that while we were growing, it wasn’t nearly fast or cheap enough. It was simply unsustainable. It was also frankly a bit dull.” 

Pivot: All in on creative

We decided to take a radical turn. We cut 90% of our marketing budget, focusing our remaining energies on building a moat on the one aspect of marketing that couldn’t be replicated: creativity.

Everything we do in our marketing efforts at Air has to answer two simple questions. If the answer is no to either, it’s a non-starter: 

1. Does it make us look bigger than we are?

2. Would I watch/share/like it if I wasn’t being paid to watch/share/like it?

Our ICP are Creative Directors and their colleagues. We know that to reach them, we need to earn their trust. We will not be able to wrestle them into submission with an endless barrage of Meta ads and Google search terms. Paid has its place. But early-stage companies all too often go all in there while neglecting brand entirely. If brand people are our audience - so went our reasoning - shouldn’t we be leaning towards where they are?

Taking stock of now-infamous marketing tactics from CPG brands like Liquid Death and Oatly, our content team got to work on building a strategy that could effectively reach an outsized audience of our ICP - in ways that didn’t require breaking the bank to pay for the privilege. A recent interview with Liquid Death VP Creative, Andy Pearson, nails the ethos we were beginning to hone in on:

“We don’t really buy media, relatively speaking. If you turn on a basketball or football game, you’ll see the same ad like three times because they’re buying media against it to make sure you do that. We’d rather make something hilarious. We want to be the best thing someone sees that day, and then you can go on about your day.”

As we built out our content marketing strategy, we asked ourselves three key questions: 

1. Can we take that same ethos from CPG and bring it to SaaS? 

2. Can we find ways to make those top-of-funnel campaigns serve as pull further into the funnel? 

3. In a chaotic media landscape, can awareness also become activation? 

The answer - we continued to see as campaigns grew in size and following - was yes.

Vision: Content-market fit

We kicked off this approach with a subversive short film made in conjunction with Cash Studios which set the stage for what was to come. The result was an AdAge Editor’s Pick, Vimeo Staff Pick, alongside features in both Little Black Book and AdWeek. A series of bold campaigns followed, highlights included:

• A sustained stunt spanning months where we collaborated with social media influencer Kareem Rahma as our Chief Imagination Officer. Releasing a series of (fake) podcast clips making incendiary and ridiculous points about creative work. Air then abruptly "fired" him, and then "rehired" him and produced a 20-minute mockumentary where he went Borat-style undercover at a Creative Operations conference in London.

• We staged a protest of elderly people decrying Dropbox because it takes too damn long to find creative files and they don't have unlimited time. The protest not only garnered earned media, it went genuinely and organically completely viral.

•  We also took a more serious, thoughtful look at the business of creativity and entrepreneurship with Out to Lunch, a two-season series sponsored by JP Morgan that brought Air CEO Shane Hegde face-to-face with some of the most exciting brand-builders and CMOs in New York City. The series amassed hundreds of thousands of views and earned a 2024 Webby honoree.

“Content is the tentpole by which we surround our entire marketing strategy at Air,” notes Shane. “These campaigns we produce on a monthly basis are the lighthouse. Everything we do - SEO, paid, lifecycle, etc - waterfalls from that. Everyone talks about product-market fit, and that customers pull you into the market because of success. At Air, we believe that content-market fit is equally important.”

 Results: CAC down, margins up

By mid 2024, we saw some pretty incredible results. Here’s a breakdown:

• 90% Reduction in Marketing Spend: By cutting out ineffective channels and focusing on existing customers, Air was able to focus on what worked, saving substantial resources in the process. 
  
  
• Tripled Revenue: Through word-of-mouth, increased awareness, and customer expansion, Air was able to triple its revenue.
  
  
• 83% Gross Margin: A pared-down marketing team with a razor-sharp focus on enterprise offerings has helped drive up gross margin.

What Others Can Learn

Our experience serves as a powerful reminder that successful growth doesn’t always come from spending more—  get razor sharp on your focus while spending smarter and the results can be extraordinary. Here are some key takeaways:

• Creative is a moat: Especially if your ICP are marketers and creatives, speaking to them where they are with memorable campaigns can drive awareness.
  
  
• Be data-driven: Use social media analytics to guide your campaign development and marketing strategies. Understand where your audience is. Just because something goes viral, it doesn’t mean your customer saw it.
  
  
• Show up big: The internet is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you’re Charlie XCX or a cloud storage company, you have the same opportunity to make yourself known on the world’s biggest stage. Don’t waste it.
  
  
• Spend on what you believe in: Cutting down cost doesn’t mean cutting out cost. Develop a hypothesis and spend (carefully and cautiously) to see if you can prove it out.
  
  
• Differentiate Radically - Get weird: It’s easy to do the same thing as other people in your space, but the reality is you’re not competing with everyone else in X category, you’re competing with everyone else on every platform at all times. Act accordingly. 

In an industry where brand all too often takes a back seat to funnel focus, a campaign-driven reminds us that sometimes the best strategy is to go all in on creative and take the brakes off.

As the B2B SaaS landscape continues to evolve and budgets tighten, this approach can, when done right, yield some truly game-changing results.

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