For the confused marketer

“I’m a moron when it comes to marketing, just help us.”

Those were the words a successful AI startup founder said to me last month.

They flew me out to San Francisco for a few weeks to help figure out which marketing levers to pull.

Up to that point, their growth had mostly come from the occasional viral X (Twitter) post. Big spikes in traffic. Then… nothing. Lots of hype, no predictability. No stability in signups.

Normally, in a situation like this, I’ll have some direction on what’s a priority (from a marketing perspective). And from there, I’ll create a strategy to be executed on.

But this time, I was a bit confused if I’m being honest.

And that actually ended up being perfect.

Because in last week’s edition, we saw that most of us are struggling to drive consistent traffic. So I took a step back and mapped out the most effective marketing channels for startups:

This gave me a bird’s-eye view of the levers we could realistically pull — especially for an early-stage AI SaaS product.

Then it hit me: they didn’t have a clear ICP.

And without a clear ICP, there’s probably no solid product–market fit yet. Which means…

Ads are off the table.

I love ads. But they work best when you already know who your best users are and you’ve got good retention.

Word-of-mouth?

Trying to spin up word of mouth is also really hard in the early stages. I only had a few weeks to put together a plan.

So I went back to my bread and butter: owned media.

Here’s what that looked like:

• Creating an SEO strategy to turned spiky social traffic into calm, predictable traffic.

• Optimizing email onboarding flows to better educate new users about the product.

• Designing a YouTube strategy with product-led “how to” videos for everyday use cases.

This is the foundation. The control center.

The stuff you own. And honestly, it’s always been my favorite type of marketing — even though I started my career running ads.

So here’s my challenge to you:

• Take a hard look at your marketing channels.

• Bucket them into Owned, Paid, and Earned.

• List out all the levers you can pull to get more users and customers.

• Then ask: Are we pulling the right ones?

You’ll start to see things more clearly.

And maybe even look smart in front of your boss who still doesn’t totally get what marketing does 😅

Next week, I’m sharing 10 years worth of lessons from experimenting with all these channels — from marketing agency life to in-house startup jobs to freelance gigs.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• 9 laws of GTM success

• How to write useful stuff

• 8 LLM SEO tips

• A weird (but surprising) A/B test

• Ad in the wild

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Trump says TikTok US sell off deal will be finalized this week

• The hottest AI models, what they do, and how to use them

• Meta moves into controversial ad space: principal-based trading

• Google’s March Core Update: Early observations from initial rollout

• LinkedIn rolls out improvements for campaign manager

🚀 All things growth & product

The 9 laws of GTM success, the 3 stages of startup growth, five PLG tactics for sales-led companies, and signs you need to invest in product marketing.

💌 Email marketing & copywriting

18 pop-up examples to capture more emails, how to write useful stuff (as a bad writer), and how to write a hero section.

✍️ SEO & content marketing

8 LLM SEO tips, an SEO A/B test for location-based landing pages, and how to talk about content to the C-suite.

🤳 Social media, branding, & psychology

How to create a social media portfolio, why all brands become average, and a surprising psychology A/B test.

🤖 AI

8 of my favorite AI marketing tools, how AI is shifting digital marketing, and how to humanize your AI chatbots to reduce fraud.

📣 Ad in the wild

Spotted an ad in the wild that caught your eye? Reply to this email with the ad and your @ for credit to get it featured!

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Product Marketing Manager @ Splice

• Growth Marketer @ Method

• Senior Email Marketing Manager @ Wistia

• Director SEO, @ Rula

• Director of Growth @ Smalls

Okay, that's it for now 💙. See you in the next edition!

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” — Henry David Thoreau

Riddle answer: They can really drive in traffic.