In the early days of a SaaS business, marketing strategy is often shaped by a combination of time pressure, lack of expertise, and secondhand inspiration.
And that’s perfectly fine when you’re still finding product-market fit. But not so much when you’re ready to scale.
You’re a founder with 100 things on your plate. You hire a junior or mid-level marketer to get things going. When they ask for direction, you forward them a link to a podcast your competitor just launched.
Now they’re scrambling to figure out how to start a podcast. Without an audience and
no idea if your ideal customer profile (ICP) even listens to podcasts.
Three podcasts and 24 listeners later, you wonder what’s the ROI and why you’re spending time on it.
This kind of marketing happens all the time but rarely works.
Skip ahead 👇 to download our checklist of “10 Questions to Ask When Evaluting Channel Fit”
The Problem: Copying Without Context
When you copy your competitor’s marketing playbook without context, you’re not being strategic. You’re being reactive.
What worked for your competitor may be totally irrelevant to you.
They might be in a more mature category, have way more internal resources or already have traction or an existing audience. They may also be investing in branding, while you may be after sales conversions.
Without knowing how much money and time it took, what failed before it worked or whether it’s even working at all.
The Smarter Thing to do: Find The Right Channel Fit
Just like product market fit, channel–market fit is about identifying the right way to reach your audience, based on your team, your product, and your buyer’s behavior.
This means picking 1–2 channels and going deep enough to see if it gains traction with your ideal customer profile.
As a founder, your expertise may not be in Marketing. However, you can guide your Marketing team by asking the right questions. They should be able to build a case for the channel-market fit and have a robust discussion with you. If not, you may benefit from having a fractional senior Marketing consultant to work on strategy and guide your team for the interim.
How Do You Pick the Right Marketing Channels?
These are the 5 main areas I recommend SaaS founders to start looking into:
1. Understand your audience preference
You probably have some first hand intel to share with your team here. As a founder, you’re close to customers, you’ve also tested out some early messaging and know what works.
Ask your customers where they get their news from. Do they get updates from their news feeds or through newsletters? Do they follow influencers or have trusted advisors? One of my favourite questions to ask is when was the last time you read a whitepaper/ listened to a podcast about your industry?
These simple questions help to inform where your audience is at. And those are the platforms you want to be.
2. Evaluate how your channel fits with your message
Next, you have to evaluate how well the channel will fit with your message and overall objectives. Introducing an entirely new category or solution to a pain point would look different from launching a new product into an established market.
For the latter, cold email or search ads can easily communicate your product benefits. For example, say you are launching a task management software for yoga practitioners, “Like Asana but made for yogis”. (See what i did there?)
While if you’re introducing a new category where potential customers may not even be aware that they have a problem that needs to be fixed, then aspirational or educational messaging may be required. Channels could include video marketing, PR or influencer engagement.
3. Assess your strategic advantage
Ask yourself what resources or advantages you have at the moment. For example, a unique backstory, deep domain knowledge or a tight ICP list, then let your team leverage that advantage to get a headstart.
4. Speed for Feedback
Getting feedback on your efforts is crucial – you need a way to gauge if your channel investment is gaining traction or going to pay off in time to come.
Here’s a fun fact: 80% of experiments fail. And that’s fine. The best teams experiment fast, fail early so they get to the 20% of successes sooner.
The first iteration doesn’t have to sleek and 100% on brand, but putting it out there to get feedback is key.
5. Team resource & capability
Whether your team can realistically execute and sustain the channel is also another important consideration. There’s no point starting strong and floundering along the way. Consistency is crucial as your audience needs to know what they can expect from you.
Here’s a checklist of 10 questions to ask when evaluating channel fit. Share this with your marketing team and keep this handy when discussing next steps.
Here are Marketing Channels You Can Consider
Once you Then map that to a few likely options:
- LinkedIn: If you’re selling a high-consideration B2B product and can show up as a founder with insight and experience, this can drive awareness and leads with zero ad spend.
- Cold outbound: If you can define your ICP tightly and articulate a clear, painful problem, outbound still works, especially for tools with fast ROI.
- SEO: If there’s proven search intent around the pain you solve (and you can produce content people trust), SEO can drive consistent growth over time — but it’s not a short-term win.
- Partnerships: If there are agencies, consultants, or platforms that already have your audience’s trust, partner with them. Co-marketing or channel partnerships can get you into rooms you couldn’t reach solo.
- Community: This works best when your audience already has a habit of talking to each other. Think dev tools, UX, early-stage founders — groups with strong problem identity and shared language.
Remember, the key is to pick the one that’s most likely to give you fast feedback and then test it seriously.
Final Notes For SaaS Founders
Don’t assume your competitor’s channel will work for you. Start with some introspection to figure out what works for your SaaS business. Guide your marketing team and give them space to experiment and fail, as long as they’re learning from it.
Many of the most successful SaaS businesses leaned into fewer growth channels at the start.
If you feel that you need additional Marketing Leadership to steer the ship, reach out to us for a complementary consultation.
