The marketing lead who refuses to run paid acquisition.
Eight years at a B2B app company, growing the user base on content alone. A short conversation about why she did it, what it cost, and what it produced — none of which is what the conventional growth-marketing playbook would predict.
The company is a B2B app in the operations-management space, founded in 2017, with — by its current published figures — around twelve thousand paying customer accounts. The marketing lead, who I will call J at her request, joined the company in 2018 as its first marketing hire. She has, in the eight years since, built the marketing operation from a single person to a team of seven. She has also, in those eight years, run almost no paid acquisition campaigns. The annual paid-marketing budget for the entire company has, by her account, never exceeded around £15,000.
This is, by the standards of B2B SaaS marketing in 2026, unusual. The company's nearest competitor is publicly reported to spend somewhere in the region of three million pounds a year on paid acquisition. J's company, by her account, spends less than half a per cent of that figure on the same activity. The user-base growth rates of the two companies, by J's account, are broadly comparable.
The conversation
Specsheet: Let's start with the obvious question. Why no paid acquisition?
J: The simple version is that I tried it, in the first two years, and the unit economics did not work. We spent a few thousand pounds on a fairly conventional Google Ads campaign in early 2019. The customer acquisition cost was about three times higher than I had assumed it would be. The customers we acquired, when I looked at them six months later, had a churn rate about twice as high as the customers we were acquiring through organic channels. The combined effect on the unit economics was, in candour, brutal.
S: So you turned it off.
J: I turned it off, and I went back to my CEO and said: I do not, on these numbers, think we should restart it. He agreed, mostly because the numbers were unambiguous. We then had a longer conversation about what the alternative was. The alternative, by elimination, was content. We had, at that point, no content function to speak of. I asked for two writers, a small budget, and twelve months to demonstrate that the alternative could work.
S: Did it work?
J: Yes. Not immediately. The first six months produced almost nothing visible. The second six months produced a slow trickle of inbound traffic from the long-tail queries we were beginning to rank for. By the end of year two of the content investment, we were getting about as many signups from content as we would have got, on the unit economics we had measured, from spending around £80,000 a month on Google Ads. The cost of the content operation, at that point, was somewhere around £15,000 a month — and falling, on a per-signup basis, because the articles we had published two years earlier were still bringing in traffic.
S: The compounding effect.
J: The compounding effect is the part of the content channel that the growth-marketing playbook does not adequately price. A Google Ads campaign costs the same per signup in year five as in year one. A content article that ranks well in year one is, in many cases, still ranking in year five — and is still bringing in signups whose only cost is the article you have already paid for. The per-signup cost of the content channel, calculated over a long enough horizon, falls towards zero. The per-signup cost of paid acquisition does not.
"The growth-marketing playbook does not price the compounding effect of content properly. A good article keeps working. A paid ad stops the moment you stop paying."
On what content actually is
S: Tell me what you mean by content. I assume you do not mean what most B2B SaaS companies mean.
J: Probably not. Most B2B SaaS content I see is, in candour, search-engine bait. Short articles, written quickly, optimised for a keyword that the writer has identified as having decent search volume. The articles are not, in most cases, useful. They are an attempt to capture a small fraction of the traffic for that keyword, in the hope that some of the captured traffic will convert. The yield, on the basis of what I see in our competitors' analytics where I can see them, is poor.
S: What is yours?
J: Long. Researched. Often written by an actual practitioner of the discipline the article is about rather than by a generalist writer with a brief. The average article we publish is somewhere around four thousand words. We publish, on average, two articles a month. We have been doing this for eight years. The archive is, at this point, several hundred substantial pieces. The substantial pieces, almost without exception, rank well for the queries they target — and several of them rank for queries we did not initially target but that the article turns out to answer better than the conventional alternatives.
S: How do you choose what to write about?
J: Mostly by listening to customers. The single biggest source of article ideas, by some margin, is the customer success function. They are, every day, in conversations with our customers about specific problems. The patterns in those problems — the ones that come up repeatedly, that are not adequately answered anywhere on the internet — are the ones we write about. We have, at this point, a fairly robust process for surfacing those patterns. The process is, in essence, a weekly meeting and a shared spreadsheet.
On the team
S: You said the team is seven people now. What do they all do?
J: Four of them are writers. They are, with one exception, former practitioners — people who used to do the work our customers do, who have moved into writing about it. They write the long pieces. They each write somewhere between one and three pieces a month. The remaining three are: a designer who handles the visual work and the marketing-site updates, a developer who handles the technical SEO and the content-site infrastructure, and a content operations person who handles the editorial calendar, the publishing process, and the analytics.
S: No paid-acquisition person.
J: No paid-acquisition person. We have, on retainer, a freelance specialist who handles the very small amount of paid activity we do — mostly remarketing to people who have already visited the site, plus a small budget for testing new channels. The retainer is about £1,500 a month. It is, by some margin, the smallest line on our marketing budget.
On the trade-offs
S: What does this approach cost you, that the conventional approach would not?
J: The biggest cost is speed. The content channel does not respond to short-term effort the way the paid channel does. If we needed to triple our signups next month, the paid channel would let us do that — at a unit economics cost we would have to absorb, but the channel would respond. The content channel does not respond on that timescale. The articles we publish this month will, in most cases, start producing meaningful traffic in three to six months. The articles we want to be producing traffic in three months had to be commissioned in the past.
S: Does that matter?
J: It matters in one specific situation: when the business needs a short-term injection of users for a particular reason. We have, in eight years, faced that situation perhaps three times. We have, in each case, had to either accept that the content channel would not solve the problem or temporarily turn paid acquisition back on for the duration of the specific situation. The temporary use of paid acquisition has, in those three cases, worked tolerably well. We have always turned it off again afterwards.
S: What would you say to a marketing lead at another company who is wondering whether to try this approach?
J: I would say: be honest with yourself about your unit economics. The content approach works when the customer lifetime value is high enough to justify the long investment horizon. If you are in a business with low LTV or a short customer relationship, the content channel will probably not work for you — the math will not add up over a horizon you can credibly commit to.
I would also say: be honest with yourself about your patience. The content channel demands a longer investment horizon than most marketing leads are given. If you are in a business that needs visible monthly growth and a CEO who is going to ask you about it every Monday, the content channel will probably not work for you — not because it cannot produce the growth, but because you will not be allowed to wait long enough for it to start producing it.
And I would say: the content channel works much better when the content is actually useful. The shortcut version — writing short SEO-bait articles to capture incidental traffic — produces results that look like the content channel but are, in fact, a much weaker form of it. The strong form requires real investment in the quality of the writing and the depth of the research. Without that, you have a content operation in name only.
What I left thinking
I left the conversation with the impression that J's approach is, in 2026, a much more defensible strategic position than the conventional growth-marketing playbook acknowledges. The compounding effect she described — content that keeps working long after it has been paid for — is real and well-documented. The unit economics she described — better customers, lower churn, higher lifetime value — are also real, and they are the kind of thing that does not show up in the standard month-by-month marketing dashboards that most companies use to evaluate the marketing function.
I do not think the content-only approach will become the new norm. It is too patience-demanding, too dependent on a particular kind of leadership, too hard to demonstrate value on quickly. I do think, however, that a hybrid approach — small paid acquisition activity layered onto a substantial long-term content investment — is going to become much more common in B2B SaaS over the next several years. The companies that have invested in content during the years when paid acquisition was the default are, in 2026, looking notably healthier than the ones that did not.