📂 The perfect marketing strategy doesn't exi—

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Today's newsletter is proudly supported by 42/Agency 🙌

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When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to handle: multi-channel strategy, remarketing, landing pages, email sequences, revenue ops, conversion rate optimization.

42/Agency, founded by my friend Kamil Rextin, has worked with companies like Sprout Social, Klue, Qwilr, Uptick, Onfleet, and many more to help them with all things demand generation. They're always my top agency recommendation for specializing in SaaS demand gen. Go read some spicy takes on freemium, "inbound marketing", and category creation and then schedule a free consultation.

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It's inevitable.

At some point or another, I always get to talking with a SaaS founder or marketer about which channels are working and what to invest in.

Here's the thing though: You can essentially make any channel "work" for you.

If you're after something that works, just pick something and start executing. You'll eventually find some that work better than others, but at what cost? What if you had invested in the most effective channels from the beginning?

Let's do a quick thought experiment: If you had the choice of making any three channels work for your SaaS business, regardless of whether or not it's actually viable, which three would you choose?

I'll tell you what I'd pick. In an ideal world, it's the perfect marketing strategy.

1. SEO

SEO has a few unique advantages:

Write an article once and get traffic ~forever. With most other channels, you have to keep paying to keep getting traffic or leads. With SEO, you can spend the time yourself to write or pay someone once to write for you, but then it doesn't cost you anything ever again.

It’s also a high-intent channel. People use Facebook to waste time. People use Google to get their questions answered. There's a google search for everything, ranging across high-level questions all the way down to specific types of software.

It's also incredibly huge! For the amount of search volume that's out there, a few articles could bring in thousands of qualified visitors every single month. The best part is that you don't have to pay more for getting more traffic. Ranking for a keyword with 10,000 searches per month "costs" the same as ranking for a keyword with 100 searches per month.

2. Affiliates

Affiliate marketing gets a bad rap because it's been the monetization strategy of choice for scammy internet marketers, but that doesn't mean that it's bad altogether.

Imagine being able to recruit an army of sales people and marketers who will promote your product, and you don't have to pay them unless they bring you customers!

I love affiliate marketing because it allows you do much more marketing than you'd be able to do alone and it'll only cost you a commission fee.

Unlike other channels where you have to "pay to play," you have to invest hard earned dollars into something that might not work out. With affiliates, you can lock in your customer acquisition cost so that you only pay for each additional customer.

3. Referrals

Finally, referral marketing.

Referral marketing encapsulates both formal referral programs as well as innate word of mouth. Nothing can beat word of mouth, and I think we can all agree on that.

So let's dive deeper into formal referral programs.

Referral programs have the same benefits of affiliate programs in that you can build an army of marketers while only paying a fixed cost, except the benefits of a referral program are even more drastic.

With a sizable user base, both free users and customers can share with their peers to enjoy a small kickback, discount, or bonus perk.

Referral rewards can be extremely cheap for a company, even ~free, which makes it a no-brainer if users are happy to share with others in exchange for that reward.

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →​

Thanks again to our featured sponsors:

1. ​Agorapulse: “The Zappos of social media management platforms” helps you plan, schedule, and report on your social presence.
2. ​Ahrefs: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a free SEO toolset to help you build backlinks, improve your site, and rank for keywords.
3. ​The Juice: “Spotify for marketing & sales content” to discover blogs, podcasts, and videos to help you grow your business.
4. ​42/Agency: My #1 recommended demand generation agency for SaaS to help you drive demos and signups.
5. ​Supermetrics: Get all your marketing data into your reporting tool of choice. Push data from 70+ integrations into Google Data Studio, Sheets, and more.

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