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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Goal: 50k followers (49,930) - SaaS Marketing - Content, AEO & SEO | Newsletter: How SaaS companies *actually* get customers

"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.

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 28,000,000+ views across Linkedin, Reddit and Quora, 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 marketing at DoWhatWorks, he is looking to reshape how brands split test and experiment online. 

On the consulting side, Casey has worked 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, conversion rate optimization and marketing automation.

Casey also teaches classes at UCSD and Stanford extension around demand creation, email marketing and content marketing.

I run a Substack that does analysis on the world's top websites based on our proprietary database of A/B test results: https://dowhatworks.substack.com/

Current areas of extensive experience...

-> B2B SaaS / B2B Enterprise SaaS / SMB SaaS

-> CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) / Website optimization

-> Email marketing

-> Content marketing (especially LinkedIn and Reddit)

-> B2B Influencer marketing

-> Pricing optimization

Casey Hill

I looked at over 50 competitor comparison pages. PostHog had the best ⬇️

Let me start by saying that most competitor comparison pages are dreadful.

They are dishonest (like factually inaccurate about the competitors).

They are misleading. They don’t build trust. They treat the prospect like they are dumb.

And here is the kicker… they don’t convert. 

I have worked with a handful of marketing teams (startups to at-scale orgs) who have shifted retargeting budget away from competitor comparison pages because the CPA was just too high (one spent $800k/m for a quarter and had just 7 sales at a 5-figure ACV)

It makes sense to educate prospects about your strengths (and even mention competitor weaknesses), but the framing is what is killing all these pages.

With Posthog, they do several things that build trust and buck the trend:

1) When describing a competitor, they quote how the competitor describes themselves. No misrepresenting or trying to paint them into a certain box. Just be straightforward.

2) They include a “what people like about [competitor]” and “What people don’t like about [competitor] and then include quotes from reviews (I think they pull from G2). And the real part that builds trust is that they include honest positives. Not weird, fake compliments, “this is a perfect software if you are an enterprise org with 5,000+ employees and a $12 million a month budget for all the consultants you will need”. Just actual strengths. It then makes the weaknesses that they bring up next feel way more realistic. 

Ultimately, the most effective competitor comparisons start with honesty.

That in and of itself is so rare, it’s disarming, and builds trust and confidence in whatever you say next. 

Have you read a competitor comparison that really resonated (or created one that converted really well)?

Chief Marketing Officer @ DoWhatWorks | Institutional Consultant | Founder

I lined up a call with a top executive to talk through their A/B testing learnings. 

Then it went completely off course…

Them: “Yeah I ran a bunch of tests this quarter. Nothing works. Headline tests, section tests, button tests. None of it moved the needle. Not a focus area any more”.

I listened and took it all in. I had all these notes. 

All this data to compare against their test results. These follow up questions lined up to get into the “why it won”. 

But none of it worked for them. It wasn't even that the variants "lost", they just were the same. They didn't matter.

We still had a nice chat, but after I got to analyzing his situation.

I realized the experience of this exec is actually exceptionally common. 

Optimizely published data saying that 90% of A/B tests "lose" (as in the variant doesn’t show any statistical difference so they stay with the control).

A big part of the problem stems from how we approach testing. 

1. Do we really understand where our traffic comes from and how that impacts positioning? If your traffic comes from paid retargeting ads or if it comes from dark social, what resonates will be very different.

2. Do we design A/B tests with a specific, unified problem we are trying to solve for? Many brands just do a dozen homepage hero headline variants and try and see what wins. But the question always has to be what problem are you solving for? Everything should ladder up to that.

3. Are you testing things that are meaningful? A big gap I found from my chat with that executive was a lack of “meaningful testing”. This means you try 10 copy variants but none of them a) introduce new information or b) provide new direct value. 

I am teaming up with the incredible team from GrowthX AI this Thursday (9AM PST) to do a workshop, where we will get deep into how to better convert your web traffic in 2026. 

Not only will we look at specific A/B tests from dozens of the top brands in the world, but we will address what to test, and how to think about your website in an age of AI discovery.

There is a major problem across AI companies selling agentic products ⬇️

They are unbelievably vague in their messaging. 

I curated a list of 30 top companies selling agents. 

Here are the headlines…

Company A: “We are a frontier research and deployment company providing enterprises with a powerful, cost-efficient, and easy-to-adopt technology to integrate agentic AI directly into their core workflows and processes.”

Company B: “Deploy, orchestrate, and govern fleets of specialized AI agents that work alongside your team”

Company C: “Ops teams can build and manage an entire AI workforce in one powerful visual platform.”

Company D: “[company] is the simplest way for businesses to create, manage, and share agents.”

It took me until company eight on the list that I got one that actually gave me any real information about what it did.

Company H: “Docket's AI agent handles qualification, discovery, and booking while you sleep. Teams see 30%+ more qualified pipeline from the same traffic.”

I understand these brands want the optics of addressing a large TAM, but when you can go to ten sites, and the headlines are almost identical, this isn’t providing any clarity or insight that is helping prospects decide on your product.

What does the data say 💡: I looked at DoWhatWorks database of hundreds of A/B tests around AI messaging. Tests from brands like OpenAI, IBM, Hootsuite, GoDaddy, Notion, and beyond. The takeaway is clear → AI messaging that is clear and explanatory to the capability it solves for (i.e. our support agents provide 24/7 ticket coverage in 42 languages) dramatically outperforms vague or sweeping messaging.

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The Battle

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Casey Hill

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Engagements

Likes

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