Every early-stage SaaS company I work with asks the same question within the first two meetings: “Where should we be marketing?”
It sounds like a simple question. It’s not. Because behind it is a more honest question they’re usually not ready to ask: “We have limited money, limited time, and limited people. How do we avoid wasting all three?”
The answer is not “be everywhere.” The answer is almost never “be everywhere.” And yet, that’s what most companies try to do. A little SEO, a little LinkedIn, some Google Ads, maybe a newsletter, throw in a webinar series. Six months later, none of it is working because none of it was given enough focus to actually compound.
I’ve spent the last few years helping companies make this decision, and I’ve developed a framework for it. It’s not original or genius — it’s just practical. And practical is what you need when you’re burning cash and need to see pipeline within two quarters.
The Five Filters
When a client asks me where to focus, I run their situation through five filters. Not sequentially — more like a simultaneous evaluation where each filter narrows the options.
Filter 1: Where Is Your Buyer Already Looking?
This is the most important question and the one most companies skip. They start with what channels they’re excited about or what they’ve seen competitors do. But the only thing that matters is where your specific buyer goes when they have the problem you solve.
For some markets, that’s Google. If your buyer’s first instinct when they have a problem is to search for a solution, then SEO and paid search are strong candidates. This is true for a lot of horizontal SaaS categories — project management, CRM, accounting software. The search volume exists because the behavior exists.
For other markets, the buyer doesn’t search because they don’t know the category exists yet. If you’re selling something genuinely new — a category you’re creating — search won’t work because nobody’s searching for it. In that case, you need a channel that creates awareness: content marketing on platforms where your buyer already spends time, outbound that introduces the problem before pitching the solution, or community-driven approaches.
I had a client selling AI-powered contract analysis for mid-market legal teams. They wanted to run Google Ads. I asked them: “When a legal ops manager has a contracting bottleneck, do they Google ‘AI contract analysis tool’?” The answer was no. They ask peers. They read industry publications. They attend legal tech conferences. The buyer behavior pointed to LinkedIn content and strategic outbound — not search.
This filter alone eliminates half the options for most companies.
Filter 2: What’s the Intent Level?
Not all marketing channels carry the same intent. Google search is high-intent — someone is actively looking for a solution. LinkedIn organic is medium-intent — someone might engage with your content but they’re not in buying mode. Display ads and most social media are low-intent — you’re interrupting someone’s scroll.
Early-stage companies should almost always start with high-intent channels. You need revenue, not awareness. You need people who are ready to evaluate, not people who might remember your name in six months.
The exception is if there’s no high-intent channel available for your market — the category-creation scenario I mentioned. But if one exists, start there. Always.
One of the most common mistakes I see is companies running top-of-funnel campaigns before they’ve captured the demand that already exists at the bottom. Why run brand awareness on Instagram when there are 2,000 people a month searching for exactly what you sell and finding your competitor instead?
Filter 3: What’s the Competitive Density?
Every channel has a competition level, and it’s not uniform. Some keywords are so contested that a new entrant will burn cash for months before getting traction. Some LinkedIn niches are so crowded with content that standing out requires either exceptional quality or exceptional volume — both expensive for a small team.
I always tell clients to look for the gaps. The underserved search queries. The LinkedIn conversations nobody’s having yet. The communities where your competitors aren’t showing up.
A client in the procurement SaaS space discovered that while their primary keywords were brutally competitive (think $40+ per click), there was a cluster of long-tail queries around specific procurement workflows that had decent volume and almost no competition. We built an entire content strategy around those queries. Within four months, they were ranking on page one for forty-plus terms that collectively drove more qualified traffic than the head terms would have.
The unglamorous channels are often the best channels. They’re unglamorous precisely because nobody’s fighting over them.
Filter 4: What Can You Sustain?
This filter is about honesty.
Content marketing is a great channel — if you can produce high-quality content consistently for twelve months before expecting meaningful returns. Can you? Do you have the writers, the subject matter expertise, the editorial process to sustain it?
Paid ads can work quickly — if you have the budget to test, iterate, and optimize without panicking when the first two months don’t produce ROI. Do you?
Outbound sales is effective — if you have someone who can write compelling sequences, manage the tooling, and handle the rejection rate without burning out. Do you?
I’ve watched companies choose channels based on theoretical potential and then abandon them after two months because the reality was harder than the plan. That’s not a channel failure — it’s a sustainability failure.
Be honest about your resources. Not the resources you wish you had or plan to have. The resources you have right now, this quarter. Pick the channel you can actually execute on consistently for at least six months. Mediocre execution on the right channel loses to excellent execution on a merely good channel every time.
Filter 5: What’s the Feedback Loop?
Some channels give you fast feedback. Paid ads tell you within days whether your messaging resonates. Outbound tells you within weeks whether your ICP is right. These fast-feedback channels are valuable for early-stage companies because you’re still learning — about your buyer, your positioning, your market.
Other channels give you slow feedback. SEO takes months. Podcasting takes months. Community building takes months. These channels can be powerful, but they’re harder to iterate on because the signal is delayed.
I generally recommend that early-stage companies start with at least one fast-feedback channel, even if their long-term strategy centers on a slow-feedback one. Use paid ads or outbound to validate your messaging and ICP, then invest the learnings into content or community.
The worst position to be in is spending six months on a slow-feedback channel and then discovering your positioning was wrong the entire time. Fast feedback protects you from expensive mistakes.
One Channel, Done Well
Here’s the part that’s hard to accept: you should probably pick one channel.
Not two. Not three. One.
The math is simple. If you have one marketer and $5,000 a month in budget, spreading that across three channels means each channel gets a third of a person and $1,700. That’s not enough to do any of them well. But focusing everything on one channel means that one channel gets a full person and full budget. That’s enough to test, learn, and build momentum.
I know it feels risky. It feels like putting all your eggs in one basket. But the alternative — spreading thin and doing nothing well — is riskier. At least with one channel, you’ll know within three to four months whether it’s working. If it’s not, you can pivot with clear data about why. If you’re doing three channels poorly, you won’t know which one failed and which one just needed more time.
One of my clients — a vertical SaaS company selling to property managers — wanted to do SEO, LinkedIn, and Google Ads simultaneously. Their team was two people. I convinced them to do just outbound email for the first quarter. Focused, targeted, measured.
They booked fourteen demos in three months. Not a huge number. But each one taught them something about their messaging, their ICP, and their sales process. By the time they expanded to content marketing in Q2, they knew exactly who they were writing for and what language resonated. The content worked faster because the outbound had taught them the market.
That sequence — start narrow, learn, expand with insight — is the pattern I see in every successful early-stage marketing effort.
When to Add the Second Channel
You add the second channel when three conditions are met.
First, the primary channel is producing consistent, measurable results. Not explosive growth — just consistent evidence that the channel works for your market. Pipeline, not just traffic.
Second, you’ve extracted the key learnings — who your buyer is, what messaging works, what objections come up — and can apply them to a new channel without starting from zero.
Third, you have the resources to maintain the first channel at its current level while investing in the second. If adding a channel means the first one suffers, you’re not ready.
Most companies add the second channel sometime between month four and month eight. Some take longer. There’s no shame in running a single-channel strategy for a year if it’s working.
The Real Framework
If I’m being honest, the framework I’ve described isn’t really five filters. It’s one question asked five different ways: what’s the highest-probability path to pipeline given your specific constraints?
The answer is different for every company. A developer tools company will answer differently than a healthcare SaaS company. A company with a founder who’s great on camera will answer differently than one whose founder writes beautifully but hates video.
The framework just forces you to answer honestly instead of aspirationally. And that honesty — about your buyer, your market, your resources, your timeline — is the real competitive advantage. Not the channel. The clarity about why you chose it.