Stanford Continuing Studies

Teaching BUS 113 — Modern Approaches to Creating Customer Demand

Stanford Instructor

ActiveCampaign

I will be working with ActiveCampaign to open up new organic growth channels and help more brands learn about the transformative impact ActiveCampaign can have on their business. At 250m ARR and hundreds of thousands of customers, AC is a category leader with one of the largest pools of first-hand data in the software world.

Senior Growth Marketing Manager

Quora

I am currently a top Quora writer in the categories of SaaS Sales, SaaS Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Software as a Service, Newsletters and Email marketing with over 3,800,000 total views.

Quora is a platform where millions of users go each week to ask questions and read answers from industry experts.

Industry Expert in SaaS, Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation

McKinsey & Company

I advise McKinsey & Company on SMB trends around marketing automation, CRM, eCommerce, project management, sales tools, ESPs etc.

I have also worked with McKinsey around SaaS investments, SaaS pricing trends, and SaaS marketing.

Strategic Advisor

BlackRock

Providing strategic insight and industry knowledge around the personal video, SMB vendor market, marketing automation market, and CRM/ESP vendor selection.

TenCore Partners, L.P.

Providing strategic guidance on CRM, SMB vendor selection, inbound marketing, SaaS trends and market considerations.

Strategic Business Consultant

Third Bridge Group Limited

Consulted clients around SMB Vendor Selection, SMB Martech industry conditions, SMB SaaS competitive landscape, SaaS Pricing Trends.

Institutional Consultant/Advisor

GrowthMentor

I help brands from a range of industries, from B2B SaaS to eCommerce with CRO, email marketing, brand strategy, hiring and managerial insights, KPI/OKRs, growth advice etc.

Consultant at Growth Mentor

Coleman Research

Provided insight and strategic guidance to investors/contracted firms in the following areas: SMB email marketing solutions, CRM/ESPs, SaaS pricing trends, SaaS churn trends, vendor selection for SMBs etc.

Institutional Consultant 

Guidepoint

I help provide insight to Guidepoint about market trends, vendor analysis, churn, niche analysis, pricing trends etc.

Consultant for CRM/ESP Market Analysis

Sr. Growth Manager @ ActiveCampaign | Institutional Consultant | Founder

Casey is a growth veteran, with over a decade of experience in helping software companies scale fast. 

Whether it's garnering millions of views on Quora and Linkedin, or pioneering new growth levers (like booking his team on hundreds of podcasts), Casey is always looking for creative and value-led ways to grab attention and break from the mold. In his current role leading growth at ActiveCampaign, he is building organic growth engines to propel the team to $1,000,000,000 in ARR.

On the consulting side, Casey works with some of the world's biggest firms including places like McKinsey, Blackrock, Colemans, GLG, Guidepoint, etc., where he provides institutional guidance to PE/VC teams around topics such as: SMB marketing vendor selection, SaaS pricing, SaaS marketing/CRM tool differentiation, market analysis, inbound marketing, and marketing automation.

Our podcast launched this week and we are at 600,000 Linkedin impressions on the trailer + podcast clips + Youtube shorts, 3000 listens and 37 reviews. 

Here is what I learned.

1) We emailed our list on Day 1. Our first email was 

subject line: [New Show] ActiveCampaign Launches a Debate Show
Preheader: Zapier Founder VS. SaaStr Founder

This got about a 30% open rate and contributed a few hundred listens. Then, we sent 3 different versions of follow-up emails, one if they didn’t open, one if they opened but didn’t click through and one if they clicked through but we wanted to ask for a review. The best performing copy was the opened but didn’t click through,

Subject line: The future of work?
Preheader: Hear two $1B+ SaaS founders debate

This version got 60%+ open rates and contributed a bunch more listens. This could have been because of the stronger preheader hook or because this email included some great testimonials.

2) I went out to all my network on Linkedin. I looked to every partner who shared content about SaaS, organic growth, AI or related and asked if they would feature our trailer or some short video clips that tie back to the pod. 5 newsletters agreed to share and over 30 individuals outside of the ActiveCampaign organization shared about our launch.

3) We had an internal mobilization effort where we made an excel sheet and asked the teams to do three things: watch the podcast, leave a review and share with at least one other person outside ActiveCampaign. They would check a box when done, and put their name and department next to it. 

4) Danny McCarthy, our head of video, made lots of short-form videos to make it easy for our team and others to promote the show and maximize views on not just the full podcast but the content of the show. 

5) We had a great, polished trailer that helped pull in a lot of eyes. I uploaded the trailer mp4 directly to my Linkedin launch post so YT doesn’t show the views, but that post got 40k+ plays on the trailer alone!

6) We created a custom email signature for the ActiveCampaign team that links to the podcast and a custom AC Zoom waiting screen to draw in more eyes.

7) We applied for a Apple podcast promotion (free) when our episode launched (still haven’t heard back here)

8) We reached out to a lot of listicles in the SaaS space, and hopefully we will get some features in “top SaaS podcasts of 2024” type of content

9) We put a small amount of paid budget to boost my Linkedin launch post as a Linkedin thought leader ad

 10) We created a website announcement banner on select blog pages 

PS thank you to the many podcast experts in my network from 🔶🔸Mason Cosby🔸🔶, to Ian Faison, to James Carbary, who helped educate me on how all this stuff works. For example, I didn’t realize “listens” and “downloads” were different (downloads looking specifically at someone who watches all the way through or clicks the download button). Listens on the other hand are counted after 2 min of watch time

Casey Hill

Search is going to become more of a conversation (and Reddit, Youtube, Quora, LinkedIn, TikTok will be used as sources)

Old way:

Search “Best things to do in Peru in January”

Click into some travel blogs and top results, write a few things down. Maybe refine the search.

“Best things to do in Peru January with kids”

You essentially keep information gathering, often visiting a dozen sites. It’s time consuming and always missing some personal nuance. 

New way: 

“My wife (32) and I (33) are traveling to Peru in January with our two kids (6 and 4 years old). We like outdoor activities, seeing wildlife and museums. We like local cuisine and Indian food. We are going for 7 days. Can you provide a good itinerary?”

Then you can ask follow-up questions to refine stuff like “can you include a list of good vegan restaurants for day 3?”

Not only do you get a faster, more personalized answer but the LLM can remember your preferences for the next search. 

Your search process is being guided by a personal assistant who gets to know you. 

This is the future. 

Search will serve up more relevant content, faster and more personalized. 

Google is currently moving closer to AI-search with SGE (search generative experience) which you see in the picture below. In the past nobody would write a paragraph long search query, but now, thinking of search more like interacting with a ChatGPT-style environment, it makes sense.

Other changes like Google Perspectives (a test that incorporates more first hand story content curated from Reddit, Youtube, Quora, LinkedIn, TikTok etc) I think will also be incorporated into the sources used for SGE style content.

If you are a SaaS brand trying to win in SEO in 2024, I would be getting your team sharing personal stories that tie back to topics related to your brand and doing so across all the major social channels that are ranking.

I sat down with two of the biggest names in software to debate the most pressing issues SaaS brands face.

In one corner you have Wade Foster, founder of Zapier, a brand that pioneered the no-code integration space, and was last valued at $5,000,000,000. 

In the other corner you have Jason M. Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, the top SaaS event company in the world. He also sold his last company Echosign for $400,000,000 and is a serial unicorn investor. 

In our pilot episode of Angles and Insight they get into…

Does remote work hurt productivity? 

What are founders and executives saying behind closed doors?

What jobs will AI replace? How fast? What is AI hype vs. AI reality?

What marketing channels are working in 2024?

How should teams think about building owned assets vs. leaning into "walled gardens"?

This episode has some zingers. Buckle up.

When someone opts in to your newsletter, you want to do 3 things in your first email to maximize engagement.

1) Tell them exactly when they will hear from you and what about

2) Provide content they can consume immediately. If you have been operating for a while this could be “top articles” like you see Kyle Poyar does in the screenshot below. 

If you are just starting, you can just send your first issue immediately (this is what we did with our newsletter SaaS Steps)

3) Reply % is one of the biggest signals for whether to put you in the primary folder or promotions. Brands that get 30%+ replies from their first email typically see their future emails landing in the recipient's primary inbox. So ask questions, the more specific, the higher the reply % you will get.

Recently in a lecture I did on email marketing someone asked an interesting question, "Casey, what if I don't want to get my inbox flooded with replies?"

If you don't want to take the time to reply to folks, you have the wrong people on your email list. If the leads don't constitute enough value to warrant a reply, you probably need to screen/vet them more.

Trust me, getting TOO MANY replies is a good problem to have.

Here is what 800,000 impressions per month really means when it comes to impact…

- $30,000+ in revenue influenced (tracked via HockeyStack) 

- 14 inbound DMs about ActiveCampaign 

-  Invited to speak on 12 podcasts via LinkedIn DMs

- 700 new followers

- 50+ folks who shared about our new podcast launch for Angles and Insight, helping push us to 3,000 listens and hundreds of thousands of LI impressions in week 1 of the launch 

- ~250 newsletter subscribers to SaaS Steps. Typically I get about 20 new subs per 10,000 impressions when I include the newsletter optin in the comments

- 2 influencer opportunities sourced

- 3 great fit job candidates sourced. 2 candidates hired mentioning LinkedIn was a factor

- Dozens of DMs from customers around the product = faster feedback loops

One month and you see impact to revenue, to qualified pipeline, to brand awareness, to owned asset growth, to network, to hiring, to collaborations and accelerated customer feedback.  

When you are looking at impact of LinkedIn, make sure you are seeing the full picture.

How much should you offer a B2B influencer? How do you know what metrics to focus on? How do you structure the deals? 

I recently had Brianna Doe as a guest lecturer for my Bus 113 class at Stanford and she provided a masterclass on how to think about the influencer marketing motion for B2B and B2C. 

In the slides below she covers….

1) How much should you offer for different sized influencers? Of course there is big variance, but this was an amazing launching off point. 

2) What are different ways you can structure an offer? I learned a lot about base rate + CPM deals here (and to make sure they have a cap of no more than 21 days)

3) What KPIs should you look at? Great walkthrough of different metrics, why qualified leads vs paid accounts is a better metric (i.e. what the influencer can control), and brand awareness/sentiment vs. engagement oriented plays fitting different goals for brands. 

4) What types of content collaborations perform? There are so many creative ways to work with influencers from co-created content, to events, to social posts, to courses, to roundtables, to affiliate models and on and on. 

She not only dug into that but also gave helpful general green and red flags, like a 3% follower to likes ratio as a great engagement signal or to avoid brands whose feed is primarily sponsored content as they are going to have diminishing returns.

She talked about if you want to use an agency to help you source influencers and potentially run and manage the campaigns, you want to be at least at $6k/m budget (and likely I think $10k+/m is ideal)

How to Think About Influencer Deals

“In marketing, nobody thanks you when you end the year with no pipeline but you spent nothing. Nobody says good job CMO, you spent $5m last year, this year you spent nothing, but you have no pipe. It feels good to say no, but you get fired” - Jason M. Lemkin

Marketing is tough for SaaS in 2024. SEO is changing. Paid is getting more expensive. Organic is more saturated.

Driving incremental revenue and quality pipeline is just flat out hard. 

But the best teams find a way. Here is what I am seeing from the top 1% of brands…

1) Use AI tools as an output accelerant. Run more research. Output more short-form video. Do more outbound. Localize more content. What you should NOT do is replace creativity with bland, AI programmatic content. Use it for distribution and production acceleration, not replacing first hand anecdotes, learnings and experience. 

2) SEO is shifting quickly. Experiments like SGE, Google Perspectives and others show the writing on the wall. Start building lots of helpful long and short form Youtubes, get your team on Reddit, Linkedin, Quora, TikTok. Personal experiences, walk-throughs and explanations are ranking. A brand without any voice on social channels is going to get crushed. 

3) Leverage creators. Whether it is influencer plays or whether they are hiring lots of creators internally, how many top SaaS brands do you see ($100m ARR+) in B2B SaaS who aren’t staffing or investing in content creators/influencers? Almost none. On the flip side, I see startups with 20 people punching way over their weight class because there is a creator on their team who is getting 5,000,000 views a year and putting their brand on the map. 

4) Build owned channels. Almost all the top CMOs and VPs I talk with are investing in owned channels. Youtube series, podcasts, newsletters. It’s hard, it’s saturated, but there is still incredible (and increasing) demand for truly great, entertaining or informative content. Channels where you aren’t beholden to the social algorithms and you have control of your data? This is essential. 

5) You can’t let relationships atrophy. Whether it is going to events, meeting customers in person, collaborating with partners, the top brands are dialed in to keeping their networks strong. I think more teams should be thinking about their “relationship karma”. When you re-share a partner’s content, or highlight their big release, or do a warm hand-off for a customer, or grab dinner with them, or give them a glowing testimonial… You are building relationship karma. 

6) Don’t hide in long-term plays. Building a community or a podcast or a Linkedin channel play doesn’t happen overnight. But you can’t hide behind that either. You can’t have a team that is always ready to deliver amazing results… next quarter. You have to find a way to blend the short term wins, from the webinar, from the paid campaign, from the event, from the pricing changes, from the sponsored play, with the long-term plays. Even if the ROAS is lower.

I recently sat down with Joaquim Lecha, CEO of Typeform, to learn about the GTM motions that helped Typeform at different stages of their growth journey to $80m+ ARR.

Their first engine was PLG, but as they grew, they had to layer in additional engines to keep velocity going. 

These interviews, which look at each stage of a SaaS brand's growth and what worked at those different points in time, are delivered monthly through ActiveCampaign’s new newsletter, SaaS Steps. 

Here is a sneak peak of Typeform’s second engine they added at $20-80m ARR…

The team focused on building go-to-market (GTM) motions that satisfied three criteria:

1) Must be scalable

2) Fast feedback loops (no waiting months to see if things work)

3) Under 12 month payback period 

With this model in mind, they doubled down on: 

 🔍  Google Search Ads: Because there was so much demand for words like “forms”, “surveys”, and “lead generation”, Typeform began bidding for these words to capture the demand. They used a blend of branded and non-branded keyword tactics but focused on capturing demand via non-branded keywords. Using machine learning, they optimized the bidding process.

💰 Pricing adjustments: With the space becoming increasingly competitive, Typeform continued to evolve with differentiating capabilities and began to adapt its pricing strategy to better represent the value they were delivering for different customer types. 

🚀 Upmarket infrastructure: To service more mid-market or enterprise customers, Typeform invested in the compliance and infrastructure changes needed to facilitate this (HIPAA, ISO 2700, SSO, etc).

During this stage, Typeform grew rapidly from 45,000 customers to more than 125,000 customers, and from 200 million submissions to more than 500 million submissions annually.

To see the rest of Typeform’s growth journey, opt-in to SaaS Steps and receive the Typeform story immediately.

My newsletter in our first month hit 1,000 subscribers and the content from it was seen 400,000 times. 

The unique premise of SaaS Steps is there is an ungodly amount of growth content out there, but I didn’t see growth broken down for a single brand by each stage of growth ($0-1m, $1-10m, $10-25m, $25-100m, $100-250m etc).

So I built it. 

Here is what I learned…

1) Building owned assets with distribution in mind often means incorporating in other brands. We tried to increase the incentives of the featured company distributing in two primary ways...

- The issues are entirely focused on that brand’s growth journey. No advertisements. No outside content. We are happy to plug in their UTMs so they can track traffic to their site. 

- We deliver SaaS Steps monthly, and each month the most recent issue is sent automatically when new subscribers opt-in. This provides an incentive for whoever was featured last to promote the episode as all the new subs will get their issue. 

2) On day 1 we emailed our ActiveCampaign list of SaaS brands, B2B brands and Agencies/consultants that served SaaS or B2B about the launch of a new newsletter. This contributed to a lot of eyes on the content and generated about 400 new subscribers. 

Our first issue covered ActiveCampaign’s journey.

Subject line: What zero to $250m ARR looks like step-by-step 
Preview Text: From zero to $1m ARR is completely different from the tactics that got us from $10 to $100m

Our second issue covered Typeform.

Subject line: Typeform grew to $80m+ with these 3 growth levers
Preview text: From PLG, to a paid motion, to upmarket investments

3) Because the premise of the newsletter is stages of growth, I would share one stage of growth in its entirety on Linkedin + other social channels and encourage folks to opt-in to see the full journey

4) Any time I talked about email marketing or newsletter tactics in general on social, I would include a link to the newsletter (I find that per 10,000 impressions on topical content I typically get about 20 new subscribers)

5) Any time I do a podcast appearance or am on a show that involves email tactics, I ask them to include SaaS Steps in the show notes. 

6) I answered questions on Reddit and Quora about top SaaS newsletters, making lists of 10 top newsletters and always slipping in SaaS Steps between the 7-9th spot. This is increasingly relevant as Forum content ranks in Google. 

7) I encouraged our team members to choose one aspect of the growth journey in an issue that was interesting to them and follow the blueprint of #3 to drive new subscribers.

My goal is 1,000,000 impressions and 5,000 subscribers by month 3!

Two billionaire software icons debate the future of work

That is what ChatGPT wanted me to use as my hook

I'm surprised it didn't say "delve into the future of work". ChatGPT loves the word "delve"

I would have gone with something closer to…

“The world doesn’t need another podcast 

But it does need constructive, nuanced conversations”

Whichever way you take it, the reason I wanted to build a “debate” style podcast with two different leaders providing their own lived experiences is because I think there is a gap there 

Different perspectives and getting out of our echo chambers matters 

The specifics and the details matter when it comes to the big issues that affect us

How do we build good team culture and keep folks productive?

What marketing channels are working in 2024? How is that changing? Where should you focus?

How do we think about these shifts due to AI? How do we separate the “hype cycle” like we clearly saw for crypto/web 3.0/NFTs from the reality of transformative technology?

I couldn’t be more thrilled to have gotten the opportunity to share an hour with Wade Foster of Zapier and Jason M. Lemkin of SaaStr, learning about their experiences in the trenches 

Listen to the Angles and Insight Podcast, anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Why did Google pay Reddit $60m for a licensing deal?

Because access to data is the competitive advantage right now. 

Here is the blunt truth. 

Larger companies with more access to unique data can build better systems. 

AI agents that can access this data and learn become progressively more valuable over time. 

In my world of marketing automation the best brands will help you learn about your customers, their habits, their likes and dislikes and serve up increasingly tailored experiences. 

Make sure your foundational tech stack is AI-first.

Imagine during the birth of the internet being a company that isn’t online.

Or during the growth of the cloud, being strictly on-prem. 

As the Economist wrote, “The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”

I was researching how SaaS brands measure content play ROI and how to structure marketing hires and stumbled upon this gem of an episode from Harry Stebbings and Guillaume "𝑮" Cabane, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder | E1088 on 20VC. 

I consume a lot of content in the SaaS space. There are a select few channels I find truly great when it comes to SaaS growth/market insights/AI

20VC, SaaStr, BG2 pod, Marketing Against the Grain, Growth Unhinged, a16z, All-In Podcast, Dwarkesh Podcast. 

There are others but it’s not a huge list.

I appreciated this episode because it got deep on specifics, which is rare in growth content. 

In this episode....

They talk about the challenges in hiring senior leaders from big firms that are going to “get their hands dirty” at a startup. He also talks about the challenges of the IC path in marketing (essentially saying it’s incredibly rare for folks with 5+ years of experience to not naturally gravitate into managerial roles)

They talk about scaling up paid marketing campaigns and finding your efficiency cap. He talks about an interesting 2x by 2x by 2x strategy.

They talk about using reciprocity to dominate outbound sales, and G provides some brilliant examples of creative email campaigns, from identifying problems on someone's site, to offering $50 sports bets, to localized coffee gifts.

They talk about CAC and LTV, thinking about how to get <12m payback periods. 

They talk about marketing KPIs and the critical importance of everything connecting back to qualified pipeline.

They talk about the importance of aggressive creativity and risk taking 

They talk about leveraging AI to stay cutting edge

They talk about the importance of leveraging your network as a competitive advantage and learning accelerant

They gets into the pitfalls of pricing bundling

I try to dedicate my content on Linkedin to helping folks grow and find velocity on organic channels. Most of this comes from my first-hand experimentation but I also want to share great content as I come across it.

If you look at the top B2B podcasts, the top .5%ers, like 

Marketing Against the Grain, My First Million, 20VC, SaaStr, Smart Passive Income, Everyone Hates Marketing…

You see a few trends…

#1 They cover a wide net of topics, they aren’t hyper drilled down into just say PPC marketing or SEO. They realize that the key is to build trust with as large a chunk of their ICP as possible. 

#2 With a long-term owned asset, often the play is to create the best possible content, grow the subscriber base 0-6 months and then as you reach scale, you can add an advertisement or you can look at different ways to monetize. But the initial focus is to build the largest possible base of relevant ICP listeners. For any of the above shows, if you hear a product advertisement, go back to their first episodes and you will almost always see they didn’t start with them. 

#3 While the formats vary from co-hosted, to guest shows, to a hybrid, the key is it’s not just the generic format of bringing on a topical guest that talks 90%+ of the time at a 30,000 foot level, with no pushback. There is back and forth, there is personality and there is unique data being surfaced.

#4 Most of the top podcasts also use their content on channels like Youtube, and they are thoughtful about the video thumbnails and headlines. Good hooks and grabby taglines pull more eyes

“Ignore the competition” = bad advice

Until 10m or so ARR, maybe.

But between 10-100m ARR nearly every SaaS I know has a plan to start pulling market share.

The key though is how you do it. 

The old way is pump big budget into bidding on their branded keywords and running comparative ads and trying to get customer lists.

A better way is this…

1. Create a box for the competitor but keep it positive. Let’s say I want to compete against Hubspot and my target audience is marketers. I would press a narrative, both from my sales folks, in online forums and social discussions around how great their sales product was. I would mention all the folks talking about the future of Hubspot is their sales product and I would drive home that they are a leader in the CRM/sales category. In this sense we seed the idea that the focus of this platform is different from my ICP’s core needs. 

2. Talk to their customers/agencies who recommend them. Learn where the gaps are from first hand stories. Use this to sharpen your relative positioning.

3. Build relationships with their partners. Don’t try to replace the competitor, just be another tool in the partner’s tool belt. 

4. Have your team open free trials and poke around. Get a real sense of the product. 99% of sales teams in SaaS don’t know anything beyond a 30k view of competitors. Be the 1%.

5. Invest in third party resources that position you well. When folks search on Google or YouTube, what ranks and how can you get involved? Remember the power of the new Discussion and Forums section on Google. 

6. Pick your battles wisely. In most industries there are 2-3 major incumbents, who have some scar tissue with users, who have large armies but have started to idle, grown complacent in their dominant position, have become disconnected from the voices of their communities. Focus here.

One of the misconceptions is that CRM’s are just for sales management.

I’ll walk you through how I set up a podcast guesting sprint in my CRM as a marketer. 

To start my process I reach out to 100 podcasts. 

I set up a pipeline view and have stages (I only add a deal for a podcast once they respond), 

Not Interested - Responded and said it’s not a fit

Circle Back Later - Interested but just wrapping up a season or not right now. I set a task to follow-up when they indicate it would be ideal.

Pending - They said they would love to have me, or someone on my team, but it’s not on the calendar yet.

Booked - it’s scheduled. 

Recorded - the recording is done. I set a task after I do the recording for the day they say it will be released or EOM of the month they think it will be released if they don’t have a day.

Live - I have a link to a live recording. 

In order to gauge potential impact, I use ListenNotes to look at top 10%, top 5%, top 1% etc. and the $$ value of the deal represents projected views. I get to projected views in a few ways…

Sometimes I will ask and explain I track in a chart for forecasting (about 50% of hosts share this info openly) and other times I use known reference points since I have friends with podcasts at every percentile, from top 10% to top .05%.

These can vary by industry but general references…

Top 10% -> 100-300 listens per episode. Legacy 500+ views.

Top 5% -> 100-1,000 listens per episode. Legacy 2500+ views. 

Top .05% -> 5,000 -> 30,000 listens per episode. Legacy 100,000+ views.

When OpenAI assembled a new board after the chaotic restructure, only one name was kept from the ousting board. 

Adam De’Angelo, CEO of Quora.

Quora is currently at an interesting state, investing heavily in Poe, their AI chatbot service, seemingly trying to find their next act. 

They are also one of the last massive unindexed data sets that has yet to do a licensing deal (Reddit was the biggest, doing the $60m deal with Google just a few months ago).

Users of Quora in the B2B realm have been jaded about the platform for years. It seems like Quora peaked around 2018-2019, and since then there have been diminishing returns in regards to content reach. 

But if you look at Quora traffic recently you notice some interesting trends. 

Quora organic traffic is up 13% over the last quarter. Quora traffic from Google and Reddit is up 5-10%.

Quora is ranking across a huge portion of “Discussion and Forums” results on Google (over 90% page 1 for this new Google search tab).

Recently I did a slew of Quora answers around marketing, AI, SEO and marketing automation as a test. The posts by the standards of Linkedin or Reddit did dismal, getting an average of 100-200 views (my posts in the early 2020’s would get 10,000-20,000 views). 

But maybe we are thinking about it wrong. 

If this traffic is BOF, direct intent traffic, coming from someone searching say “ActiveCampaign vs. Hubspot”, that 100 views might be worth 10,000 for a more TOF query.

As Google goes through substantial changes, there will be time periods where certain channels (like I would argue Quora) have very low relative competition, and first movers will have a strong advantage. 

Add to this the fact that industry insiders, and major forces on the AI front like OpenAI, seem to have tremendous confidence in Quora… 

There may be a hidden gem here.

Notice any trends with the subject lines from top B2B/SaaS newsletters?

SaaStr weekly -> Don’t Hide in Zero Cost Marketing

Growth Unhinged -> From 0 to 10 million users in four years

SaaS Steps -> What zero to $250m ARR looks like step-by-step

GTM Newsletter -> 4 Common Mistakes SaaS Companies Make While Scaling Revenue

ProducTea -> Positioning your B2B Startup through your Homepage

Mostly Metrics -> How to calculate CAC Payback Period (the right way)

Mutiny -> 3 ways AI is helping GTM teams hit targets

Scaling SaaS -> 5 Interesting Learnings from Blackline at $600,000,000 in ARR

Expectation to reality is clear.

I know it’s tempting to get clever and fancy with your subject lines. 

But what I see again and again, is the best engaged B2B newsletters really just get crystal clear on the value someone can expect from a read.

It’s okay to pique some curiosity but notice none of these have subject lines like “The world is ending (And what you can do about it)” or “AI is taking your job next month”

Brands that can’t evolve around AI are going to die.

AI being a game changer is not a question of “if” but a question of “when” and “how”

There is two sides of this: stay competitive by using AI in your internal processes and stay competitive by building AI agents and co-pilots into your product-side

Some of the ways I see top brands leveraging AI + Marketing right now are…

1) Build out your tone of voice, persona and other fundamentals of your brand into your LLM of choice. Build a prompt library that you can access to 10x speed of revision. This makes it dramatically faster to output relevant copy, hooks, and content that requires less modification. Note: It will still require the human touch to be A-level. But it will be better.

2) Use AI as a research tool to find articles, videos and forums that tie into your content plays. For example, you can use AI to quickly identify relevant influencers you might want to connect to, or you can use it to find relevant Reddit/Quora articles to engage with, or you can use it to find what Inc 500 software leader talked about [insert specific niche] topic so you can drop a link to them in your article

3) Use tools like Opus Clip to dramatically ramp up your video output. The best teams tap their leaders to create unique, deep and valuable content and then use AI to create multiple distributable assets that they can leverage across different channels. AI should amplify the speed at which you can share, it shouldn’t replace creativity.

4) One idea I haven’t implemented but I think is brilliant (got the idea from Marketing Against the Grain) is feed your customer data, call conversations, chat tickets etc. into an LLM and get a sense of how your customers communicate, chief problems and what they value. Use this as a way to check against your marketing, ads and positioning as a brand and stay dialed in to the customer. 

In the recent launch of our new podcast, Angles and Insight, Wade Foster and Jason M. Lemkin go deep into topics like what is AI hype vs. AI reality, how teams should leverage it and what the future is going to look like.

If a process or a project doesn’t make sense, speak up.

Teams win when they have a culture of engaged employees who want to do everything they can to help the company win. 

But there are 3 things that are critical, when giving feedback, to make it valuable and actionable for leadership.

1) Present the alternative. If a process doesn’t make sense or is causing poor outcomes, what is the leanest and fastest to implement alternative? 

2) Present the evidence. This one is so critical. Everyone has an opinion in an organization. What will make feedback immediately more valuable is if it’s attached to real-world data to back it up. Ex: Let’s say I keep hearing that we send too many onboarding emails. But there is debate because various stakeholders want certain emails in the flow. The most valuable way to approach an alternative solution would be to talk to 5-10 similar brands to yours in industry and learn how they are doing it and their results. Then bring a data-backed argument into the conversation. 

Finally, and this part is often the hardest but… 

3) If leadership aligns around a different direction than you think is best, despite you presenting your opinion and your data… You have to rally behind the team. Do everything you can to make it a success.

Constantly undercutting the project or process will only be detrimental to the company and hurt morale.  

The other side of this, if you are in leadership, celebrate constructive debate when done in a data-backed way. 

This is how you build a winning culture.

Most teams think about the “control” in a growth test as the existing version.

I have a website hero block with a video on the right and a CTA to “Get Started” on the left. 

Folks will say “we are converting at 2.5% here, what if we made this button with rounded edges and changed the text to “Try it Today””

Then they test to see if there is a lift. 

But what if the control was no CTA at the top?

What if the control was not a different subject line, but no first onboarding email?

What if the control was not different variants of the ad, but no ads at all for two weeks?

Often times we go through a hamster wheel of testing in growth, where we see slight lifts, slight dips, where our teams are incentivized to accentuate the “wins” of these tests that they invested sometimes months in conducting. 

More teams would benefit from using “doing nothing” as a control and seeing how much change there is.

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