Hi Marketing Bestie,

Ari and I are trying to plan a trip in December.

1 important detail: We aren't campers or glampers. Just setting the stage.

So I'm coming to you: What's the best place you've ever traveled to?

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EVENT OF THE WEEK

I love seeing people's individual AI prompts & how they set them up.

But TBH, I want the shortcut. The whole WORKFLOW.

The thing you run every Monday that used to take all day.

🗣️ Viktor's team said they'd show us 5 of theirs on July 21st.

Free, & ready to copy run before our chat's even over.

Register for the free event to get the recording later.

Register: 5 AI Workflows that Save Hours

SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD

5 WAYS TO THINK LIKE A GROWTH MARKETER WHILE BUILDING BRAND

Kelly Cheng has been a marketer since age 7 when she pitched her parents on getting a dog with a full PowerPoint presentation.

She's since worked through advertising agencies, growth roles, and is now CMO of Goldcast.

And she's figured out something most brands get wrong: Growth and brand aren't enemies. They're partners.

Growth is how you test. Brand is how you scale. Together, they move the needle.

Her approach: Think in experiments. Win customers across their entire lifecycle. Stop obsessing over MQLs. Use video as your trust signal.

Listen to the full episode here where Kelly breaks down why marketing doesn't stop after the sale, how to defend brand to a pipeline-obsessed CEO, and why video is your competitive advantage in the AI age.

1️⃣. Growth Isn't Just About Acquisition. It's About Experimentation And Hypothesis At Every Stage.

Kelly's Take: "When it comes down to actual growth marketing, it's operating in an agile way and consistently experimenting and hypothesizing. And really, really being able to use experimentation to help move the needle towards what your hypothesis is on what you're trying to grow. There's so many different ways that growth can show up. You can do growth within brand, you can do growth within your free trial product, you can do growth within your email marketing."

Growth marketing is often seen as a top-of-funnel thing. Acquisition. Lead gen. More leads, more volume.

But that's limiting. Growth is a mindset. It's about testing hypotheses at every stage of the customer journey.

You can run growth experiments in retention. In upsell. In advocacy. In renewal emails. In onboarding flows.

The common thread isn't the stage. It's the approach. You hypothesize. You test. You learn. You iterate.

Kelly sees growth as a function that spans the entire business. It's not siloed to acquisition. It's about moving the needle wherever there's friction or opportunity.

Takeaway: Pick 1 stage of your customer journey that feels stuck or suboptimal. Could be email retention. Could be onboarding. Could be upsell.

Run a growth experiment. Hypothesize what change will improve the metric.

Test it. Measure it. Learn from it. Don't wait for acquisition to be perfect before you start growing in other areas.

Growth happens everywhere.

2️⃣. Marketing Doesn't Stop After The Sale. It's Your Entire Customer Lifecycle.

Kelly's Take: "Brand isn't just about capturing like the top funnel awareness. It's about continuing that journey throughout. So even after someone who has bought your product, whether you're in consumer or you know, B2B, you're gonna have to consistently win them back. The market is way too noisy today for you to just stop doing marketing once you have that sale. Because you know in software there is that annual recurring revenue that we're looking at. Every year you have that renewal that you still have to work towards. And so marketing doesn't stop after the contract gets signed. It's every single touch point. It's the entire customer experience all the way through advocacy."

You land a customer. Close the deal. Check. Move on to the next one.

That's backwards.

The day someone becomes a customer is when marketing gets MORE important, not less.

In SaaS, you have that annual renewal. In ecom, customers need reasons to come back. In B2B services, they need ongoing justification for their purchase.

The market is noisy. Your competitors are circling. Your customer is asking "did I make the right choice?" every single day.

Kelly's point: You can't stop marketing once the contract is signed. The entire journey matters. Every touchpoint. Every email. Every piece of content. Every support interaction.

That's what builds mind share. Consistent messaging throughout the customer lifecycle.

Takeaway: Map your customer lifecycle from day 1 post-purchase to renewal or churn.

What touchpoints exist? What marketing are they seeing? What's the messaging? Is it consistent with what they signed up for?

Run through it yourself. Look for gaps. Look for moments where you're not actively winning them back.

Design marketing interventions at those gaps.

Your job isn't done when they convert. It's just getting started.

3️⃣. Video Proves You're Real When AI Content Is Flooding Feeds.

Kelly's Take: "Authentic video is still hard to come by, especially in the B2B side of things. And so when I think about in this day and age of AI and you're getting bombarded with digital AI slop, events is really key because events is still really, really that place, that source of really trusted and engagement signals. But video is really how you scale events because you can repurpose and really, really take your video content and repurpose it into small little clips across your YouTube playlist or your Instagram reels or your LinkedIn, turn it into multimedia content like blog posts with both text and video. Human beings process video at much faster speed than they read text. And our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter."

Feeds are flooded with AI content. It's getting harder to tell what's authentic.

But video is still hard to fake at scale. A real conversation. A real handshake. A real panel discussion. Those signal authenticity.

Video becomes your differentiator. Proof that there's a human behind your brand.

Kelly's insight: Video doesn't have to be expensive anymore. AI has made production easier. But more importantly, 1 piece of video can be repurposed into dozens of assets. A panel discussion becomes clips. Clips become reels. Reels become blog posts with embedded video.

1 video investment scales across channels.

Takeaway: If you're not investing in video, start.

Pick 1 format. Could be customer interviews. Could be team Q&As. Could be product demos. Could be founder commentary. Pick 1.

Produce it well (authentic matters more than polished). Then repurpose it. Cut clips for LinkedIn. Cut clips for Instagram. Add transcripts as blog posts. Make one video do the work of ten pieces of content. You'll stand out in a feed full of AI slop because you're real and you're everywhere.

4️⃣. Connect Brand Investment To Pipeline Metrics Your CEO Actually Cares About.

Kelly's Take: "It's really challenging to defend that because when you're talking to a lot of businesses that have really complicated BI tools that report out on attribution, brand is often overlooked because it's difficult to track brand and so it's hard to defend to the board. And so I think it's a lot of educating about marketing. It's really on the the marketing leader is to do that cross-functional education so all the stakeholders understands the impact of marketing beyond what you can track in terms of ROI."

Your CEO says "I don't care about brand. I just want pipeline."

Don't argue. Connect the dots instead.

The customers you win through brand awareness have different economics. Lower acquisition cost. Higher lifetime value. Lower churn. Longer tenure. Higher spend. More referrals.

That's a pipeline story. That's a revenue story.

Kelly's point: Stop defending brand as a standalone investment.

Connect it directly to pipeline quality. Show how brand activities feed your highest-quality pipeline.

Takeaway: Run an analysis of your last 12 months of pipeline. Segment by source.

Which sources have the highest win rate? Highest deal size? Lowest churn?
Longest customer lifetime?

Connect those sources back to your brand activities.

Did a thought leadership campaign drive those customers?
Did a sponsored event?
Did consistent content presence?

Build a narrative: "Brand investment drove $X in pipeline with these specific metrics."

Present it to your CEO. You stop having to defend brand because it's clearly moving pipeline.

5️⃣. Marketing Should Own Pipeline.

Kelly's Take: "Marketing should be goaled on pipeline."

That's it. That's the mandate.

Not leads. Not MQLs. Not awareness metrics. Pipeline.

When marketing owns pipeline as the primary metric, everything changes.

You stop optimizing for volume. You start optimizing for quality. You start caring about what happens after the lead lands with sales. You start tracking win rates. You start understanding deal economics.

Because pipeline is a number that matters to the entire organization. Sales understands it. Finance understands it. The CEO understands it.

And when marketing is measured on pipeline instead of MQLs, there's alignment. No finger-pointing about lead quality. You're both shooting for the same target.

Takeaway: Change your primary marketing metric from MQLs to pipeline generated. Track it weekly. Report on it weekly.

Make it the metric you're held accountable for. Watch how your strategy shifts. Watch how your relationship with sales improves.

You'll start making different decisions because you're optimizing for something that actually matters to the business.

IN A MEME

My favorite 2 places are London and Sydney.

Your friend,

Daniel