Brendan Hufford

Director of SEO

Exploring how SaaS companies *actually* get customers

Getting results via my 4-part SaaS growth framework is what I do.

Having led and scaled growth teams at two agencies, most of the clients I worked with didn’t want (or need) 6-12 month marketing engagements. I knew there was a better way, so I created this service.

My best clients could be incredibly successful if only they just had a little help guiding them along the path of making sure they had a strong website and were perfectly positioned to rank in Google.

It’s why so many of them double, or even triple leads and MQLs after working together:

📈  +2,750% MQLs for ETL Software company

📈  Launched content marketing campaign that brought in 100k site visitors, 1,000 new backlinks and  $130,000 in monthly traffic value for Cloud Operations software company

📈  Led strategy for a multi-pronged SEO and content marketing campaign for an established software company resulting in +100% website traffic in only 3 months.

Founder

We Help Take SaaS Companies From $10M to $100M ARR. Using our SaaS Growth Sprint Framework, we help Saas companies increase revenue from Google through short, focused marketing sprints.

"Our product is so technical, no one can write for us."

I hear this on at least half my discovery calls. 

And I always ask the same question:

"Can no one do this? Or has no one done it so far?"

Nine times out of ten, they pause.

Because they've hired a bunch of generic content writers who gave them generic content. And now they're convinced the problem is their product complexity.

It's not.

The problem is they hired writers who don't understand the problem they solve.

Here's what's actually happening:

- You're so in love with your product that you think it's completely unique.

- You think because YOU live in the weeds of your data science platform or your DevOps tooling, the market must see it the same way.

The market does not.

I had a client, super smart marketer, genuinely innovative product. 

He kept telling me "we're nothing like [their biggest competitor]."

I'm like, "First of all, your [biggest competitor] has an awareness problem and they're incredible. Second, the market is trying to figure out what problem you solve. And unless somebody's actively thinking 'we have a data science problem,' you're invisible."

There's a huge difference between:

A. A writer who can explain your features

and

B. A writer who understands why those features matter to someone at 2am trying to solve a specific problem

The first one gives you generic content.

The second one gives you content that actually converts.

Stop playing small behind claims of "we're too technical."

Instead, answer this - "Have we hired people who actually understand the problems our buyers are trying to solve?"

⚡️

PS - The companies with the most "technical" products often have the clearest content strategies. 

Because they can't hide behind vague marketing speak. 

They have to get specific about the problem. 

And specific problems attract specific buyers.

Content marketing in 2026 has 4 ingredients.
Most teams have all 4, but almost nobody has them working together.

You can do SEO, AEO, social, and newsletters. You can even have a clear point of view.

But if they're running as separate projects with separate calendars and separate goals?

Nothing compounds. It's just activity.

The teams winning right now figured out something simple:

1. Content IP (your language layer)

Out: Jargon. Naming solutions instead of problems. Copying competitor messaging.

In: Pick one problem to solve. Give it a snappy name. Make people say "oh, THAT'S what that's called."

This is the foundation.

2. Discoverability (SEO/AEO)

Out: Checklist-driven. Clicks over intent. Too general, too siloed.

In: Problem-driven. Partnered with sales, success and support (3S content). Content that doubles as sales enablement.

3. Virality (social)

Out: Chasing trends. Rage baiting. Generic ghost-written posts that could belong to anyone.

In: Focused on your audience's actual problems. Making people feel seen. The "I see you at the top of my feed every time I log on" energy.

4. Relatability (newsletter)

Out: Blog distribution. AI rewrites. Treated like an afterthought.

In: Feels human. Conversational. Focused on insights people actually forward to their team.

--

Repetition IS the strategy.

Saying the same thing from different angles across all 4 channels is how ideas stick.

The best content gets discovered. Saved. Shared with teams. Forwarded to a boss.

Because it gives people language and ideas they can reuse.

⚡️

PS - If your SEO team has never talked to your social person, and your newsletter is just "here's what we published this week"... you don't have a content strategy.

SaaS Marketing - Content, AEO & SEO | Newsletter: How SaaS companies *actually* get customers

My wife looked at me and said, "That's not normal."

I was telling her about a rough stretch in the business. 

She asked if I'd ever just... quit.

And I said no. I'll never quit.

Now listen, I'll humble myself and do literally any job if I have to. 

Family first. 

Also, all work is valid.

But I'm not going to wake up one day and decide *this* is too hard.

That's when she hit me with it.

"That's not normal. Not everybody thinks like that."

And she's right.

If I took a landscaping job tomorrow, within 6 months I'd be:

- Writing down every house I visited. 
- Learning every client's name. 
- Sending follow-up cards nobody asked me to send.
- And quietly planning to run things some day..

I can't turn it off.

Nick and I were laughing about this on a call the other day. He said the same thing — he'd take any job, and his brain would immediately start figuring out how to run the place.

Not everybody’s like that.

But some of you are.

- You sit in on sales calls because you want to hear how customers actually talk
- You read the board deck because you want to understand where the company is headed
- You learn the P&L because you're tired of marketing being treated like a cost center

You're not a specialist. You're not a generalist either.

You're a deep generalist.

You analyze. You synthesize. You make connections across channels and functions that nobody else sees. And then you turn those connections into new skills.

Most people become myopic about one channel. They get religious about SEO or paid or email and stop there.

You can't do that. You need to understand everything.

And thanks to that - if you got laid off tomorrow, you wouldn't panic. 

You'd start reading. Watching. Talking to people. Synthesizing everything you learned into your next move.

That's the deep generalist brain. It never turns off.

You don't have to be crazy to do this work.

But it helps.

⚡️

PS - If you're nodding along, you're one of us. Acquiring skills and taking ownership of things that aren't technically our job. It's what gives deep generalists teeth. 

That's why when people compete against us... they lose.

The winners in SaaS marketing are already playing a new game.

+ Klue
+ Ramp
+ Gusto
+ Lattice
+ Dropbox
+ Sendoso
+ ActiveCampaign

Intuit, Datadog, Cloudflare and Notion, too.

ALL have public interactive product demos.

I’ve been pumped about interactive demos over the past few years because they WORK.

+71% click-through rate (yes, in 2026!
+ Convert 12% better than product videos

oh and...

+450% lift in free trial signups
+100% lift in users reaching activated trial status
+175% lift in users converting to paid customers in that same timeframe

The list gets longer every day.

But now it’s about to get REALLY long.

Navattic just their State of the Interactive Demo 2026.

40,000+ Navattic demos have have been built in the past year.

And they analyzed every single one of them.

In a few years, we'll look back and wonder why it took us all so long to surf the wave with them.

⚡️

PS - If you've got big 2026 goals to hit, this is the move.

Confession: I was really nervous this was gonna backfire.

So Heike Young and I ran an experiment over the holidays.

The rules were simple:

We're both at 49k followers. First one to get the OTHER person to 50k wins.

So I wrote a post telling everyone to follow her instead of me.

She did the same for me.

During the deadest week on LinkedIn - between Christmas and New Year's - we hit 24k impressions combined.

Here's what I learned:

1. Collaboration beats competition

Every "growth hack" tells you to guard your audience. Hoard your followers. Treat attention like a zero-sum game.

We did the opposite. Gave each other's audiences away freely.

Result? We both grew faster than if we'd been posting solo.

2. "Dead" times aren't dead

Let your competitors follow the generic LinkedIn guru advice.

Meanwhile, we'll take advantage of the reduced noise. 

Same eyeballs. Better odds.

3. People love a good bit

No one wants to me to post a "5 tips for Q1 planning" post in late December.

(including me)

But a dumb competition between two marketers trying to out-nice each other?

That's entertaining.

The best content marketing doesn't always look like content marketing.

In our case, it was telling people to unfollow us.

Sometimes it looks like two friends making a ridiculous bet and letting the internet watch.

⚡️

PS - I think Heike won. And honestly? We need dumb, creative content marketing more than ever.

Fernando Mendoza might be the best thing to happen to LinkedIn:

1. Wins Heisman Trophy

Adds it to his LinkedIn bio.

2. Undefeated season and win a national championship

Posts  "Here's what winning a National Championship taught me about B2B sales"

💀

But it gets better.

3. Declared for the NFL draft this week

Changes his status to #OpenToWork.

Updated his profile picture with the green banner and everything.

The man is clearly having a GREAT time on here.

And you can tell.

Fun fact: Mendoza deleted every other social media app during the season.

Kept only YouTube and LinkedIn because, in his words, "it's a positive site."

This is the energy I want to see more of.

⚡️

PS - If you're not following Fernando Mendoza on here yet, fix that immediately. 

The man understands the assignment better than most of us.

When I went out on my own in 2022, I built my business with one important (but financially stupid) goal in mind...

Early in my career, I got in a lot of trouble every time we churned an account.

and I was like HOLD. UP.

We're supposed to retain them forever?

FOR-E-VER?

No way.

It broke my young marketer heart realizing the only way the client-agency relationship would end is with my client breaking up with us.

So when I started Growth Sprints, I knew it had to be different.

3-month sprints.

In and out.

No long term retainers.

No lets-get-married-until-we-hate-eachother relationships so typical of agencies.

End with a double overhand high five and we all win. 🙌

And recently Nick had me review every client I'd worked with in the past two years (48 total), and asked me a question:

"How many of them are a 10/10 relationship?"

And, honestly, while I'd love for that number to be 100% (its not), getting to reflect on all the genuine friendships I've made over the last few years was so fun.

Truly, when you do work like this, you get the opportunity to have clients become colleagues become friends.

⚡️

Agencies take note: turns out the fastest way to build long-term relationships is to stop trying to trap people in them.

I've been looking at Search Console data across a dozen different companies lately. They're all seeing the same thing.

I call it the crocodile curve.

Impressions up. Clicks down. A little mouth opening wider every month.

Google is showing your links more than ever. And less people are clicking them.

Most people think this is bad and traffic their job is to get traffic to go back up.

I disagree.

My take: The value of a click just doubled.

If you used to get 1,000 clicks and now you get 500, each of those 500 clicks is worth twice as much. 

The people who DO click actually give a damn.

So why are you still serving them the same generic content you were writing when clicks were cheap?

This is where most companies get it backwards.

Traffic is down, so they panic. 

They pump out MORE content. 
More keywords. 
More volume.

Checkbox marketing at its finest.

But the answer isn't more checkbox content. It's better content for the people who still bother to click.

When someone lands on your blog in 2026, you have about five seconds to prove you're worth their time.

The fastest way to do that? Name the problem they've struggled to articulate.

If the first thing they read is "digital fatigue is higher than ever" or "checkbox marketing is destroying your pipeline" (and they've felt that in their bones for months) you've got them.

They're not skimming anymore. They're reading.

Clicks are the new currency.

And the people who click deserve better than recycled content that could be swapped with your competitor's.

⚡️

PS - If your traffic is down, "how do we get more?" is the wrong question.

"How do we deserve the clicks we get?" is the right one.

Private goals feel safer.
Public goals work better.

I made myself a bingo card for 2026.

For me, this is a (fun) public accountability tracker.

Here's what's on it:

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀:
→ Hit 50k LinkedIn followers (86 away as I write this)
→ Hit 60k LinkedIn followers (ambitious, I know)
→ Video hits 10k views
→ Video hits 100k views
→ Launch "hobby" TikTok
→ Launch new YouTube channel
→ Write 25 newsletters

𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀:
→ 100% YoY revenue (without burnout) - center bingo!
→ $100k revenue from newsletter
→ ALL IN hits 1500 members
→ Interview 12 CMOs
→ Run 12 AMAs for ALL IN members
→ Say "no" to a bad-fit deal

𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀:
→ Be cited by an LLM
→ LLM top pick
→ Speak at an industry event
→ First ALL IN "Demo Day"
→ Migrate new newsletter platform

𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀:
→ Lose 10lbs (then 20lbs)
→ Train 200 times (181 last year)
→ Write 100 journal entries (85 last year)
→ Take a full week off

That last section matters most.

Because that little part at the bottom (that's hard to read) says:

"𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺."

I'm sharing this publicly because I want you to follow along.:

1. Call me out when I'm slacking. 
2. Celebrate when I hit one.
3. And then... MAKE YOUR OWN (mine is based on one I saw Shali share!).

I'll re-share this at the start of every month and let you know how it's going.

⚡️

Real friends only: Which square do you think I'll hit first? Which one do you think I'll miss entirely? 

Be honest. I can take it.

I don't think about clients. I think about careers.

Told a client last week, "I get the privilege of helping you, but at the end of the day, you put this work on your resume forever."

This gets your next job. 

Your next promotion. 

Financial stability for your family.

I think about that constantly.

If we do this *right*, this person's ENTIRE career gets easier.

When I'm on a sales call, I'm not just talking about content strategy or pipeline. 

I'm talking to someone whose career is on the line.

They don't hire me for "more" content.

With Chatty G, every company can content volume themselves into oblivion if they want.

I get hired because we need to prove to their CEO that marketing actually works. 

They need wins they can point to. 

Results that follow them to their next role.

I'm competitive. I want to win. But this isn't really about me.

It's about the director of marketing who just got promoted and has six months to show impact before the board meeting.

It's about the VP who left a safe corporate job to bet on a startup and can't afford for this to not work.

It's about the CMO who's four months in seat and needs to show their new team they made the right choice.

These aren't just clients. These are people with mortgages and kids and careers they've spent years building.

So when I say I take this work seriously, I mean it.

Not because I'm trying to close a deal. Because I understand what's actually at stake.

Your content strategy isn't just a marketing initiative.

It's your career. 

It's your life.

⚡️

PS - If you're working with someone who doesn't understand the weight of what they're helping you build, find someone who does.

50 marketers. 27 channels. Zero loops.

I keep watching the same movie play out:

- Big SaaS company. 
- Huge marketing team. 
- Incredibly complicated "be everywhere" GTM plan.

They've got:
- ABM campaigns built by expert GTM engineers
- Paid media across 10 platforms
- A podcast only people with a company email listen to
- Events strategy
- Community initiatives
- Partner marketing
- Influencer programs

And somehow they're getting absolutely demolished by a 4-person team that does THREE things really well.

Here's what the small teams figured out:

1. Discovery loops (AEO/SEO)
Get found when people are actively looking for solutions.

2. Viral loops (social)
Build your audience a place to engage with and amplify your message for free.

3. Relationship loops (newsletter)
Own the relationship. No algorithm required.

That's it. Three loops. Compounding forever.

The 50-person team? They're spread so thin across 27 programs that none of them actually work.

Meanwhile, the focused team has:
- SEO driving consistent inbound
- AEO meeting buyers as they make a decision
- Social building trust and reach
- Newsletter converting that attention into pipeline

Each loop feeds the others. It compounds.

The "be everywhere" strategy sounds smart in a board meeting.

It makes for great engagement ransom (comment to get my insanely complicated playbook!) here on LinkedIn.

But being everywhere usually means being mediocre everywhere.

(sorry if that offends people)

The best marketing teams I've seen don't try to win every channel.

They pick the three loops that compound and go all in.

⚡️

PS - If you can't explain your marketing strategy in 30 seconds, it's probably too complicated. "We get found, we go viral in our industry, we build relationships." 

That's it. 

That's the whole thing.

Invisible content gets approved instantly.
Visible content gets torn apart.

Why does the content nobody reads ship every week, but the newsletter and social posts that could drive $100K in pipeline sit "in review" for three months?

“This is going on social?! I need to scrutinize EVERY WORD” - Your CEO who doesn't know anything about marketing.

Terry from product marketing needs to review the carousel because "is that how we talk about the product?"

Legal wants to weigh in.

And don’t forget about your boss's boss that has "just one small note."

So, the social content sits. The newsletter sits. The stuff that could actually build relationships and drive pipeline just…sits.

While the content nobody reads keeps shipping on schedule.

This isn't a people problem.

It's a visibility problem.

Social and newsletters live somewhere public. They're exposed. Leadership sees them. Customers see them. 

Your CEO's college roommate might see them. (gasp)

The blog is safely tucked away on your website where nobody's watching.

So you keep producing the invisible work that ships easily and avoiding the visible work that actually matters.

And six months later you're wondering why your content isn't driving pipeline.

⚡️

PS - When I ask discovery call prospects "Are you thinking of hiring somebody? Why not keep doing what you've been doing?" this is usually the answer. 

They've been doing SEO for years. It works. But it's not enough anymore. 

In 2026, you need 3 loops:

1. Discovery loops (seo/aeo)
2. Viral loops (social)
3. Relationship loops (newsletter)

But the content that builds real relationships keeps getting killed by committee and they know that needs to change.

"I know this is working. I just can't... prove it."

1. The sales team is mentioning content in deal notes. 
2. Prospects are showing up warmer. 
3. The brand is getting recognized at events.

But when it's time for the exec update?

Crickets. Fuzzy charts. Defensive posture.

Newsletter. LinkedIn. AEO. Community. SEO. Influencer. Events.

All of it shows up later.

And "later" doesn't fit in a weekly, monthly, or quarterly dashboard.

So you end up in prove-it purgatory.

You know something is true. And you still have to defend it like a courtroom case.

The gap between impact and proof is the real stressor.

Not the work itself.

The work is actually working. You can feel it. Your team feels it. Your audience definitely feels it.

But feelings don't get budget renewed.

Here's what I've learned:

The work is always hard to measure.

But it's FAR harder when you're checking boxes.

Before they've named the problem they're solving.

Before they've picked the leading and trailing indicators that matter.

Before they've given leadership a story to tell the board.

If you don't build the executive narrative before you scale execution, you'll spend every quarterly review playing defense.

And that's exhausting.

The best marketers I know build the case for the work FIRST.

⚡️

PS - If you're stuck in prove-it purgatory right now, you're not alone. 

The gap between what you know and what you can show is real. 

Trust your gut. 

Then build the narrative to match.

Marketing channels should be about customers.
But they're really about careers.

The budget doesn't go to the channel that might work best.

Especially in big orgs, it goes to the channel that's easiest to explain when it doesn't work.

"We ran Meta ads."

Nobody gets fired for that. It's the safe choice. The explainable choice.

But pitch a newsletter strategy? A LinkedIn play? Something newer that might actually reach your buyers where they are?

Now you're on the hook.

If it works, you're a genius.

If it doesn't? You're the person who wasted budget on something "unproven."

So what happens?

Conservative budgets win.

Newer channels get scrutinized to death.

And mediocre-but-defensible beats promising-but-risky every single time.

The problem isn't that marketers don't know what might work better.

You do!

The problem, especially for new leaders, is the org punishes them for being wrong about anything that wasn't already approved by consensus.

This is why so many marketing strategies look identical across competitors.

Because they're safe for the marketer.

The customer comes in second to safety.

And until that changes, we'll keep funding the explainable over the effective.

⚡️

PS - If you've ever killed a promising idea because you couldn't defend it in a meeting (to non-marketers, of course), you already know this is true.

Most channel decisions are career decisions.

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