ISSUE #253

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving 🦃!

I’m landing in your inbox on a Sunday, not because of a 3-day food coma 👀 (welp, those leftovers hit hard), but to avoid the Friday email traffic. We’re about building pipeline, not buying peacoats.

Anywho, we’re running it back with another SaaS Weekly Originals. Once a month I send a long-form writeup covering foundational growth & GTM plays or my perspective on SaaS trends.

Today's edition is about media-led growth strategies:

• HubSpot’s latest acquisition

• Why SaaS companies are launching/ acquiring media businesses

• How to put a media-led growth strategy into practice

Let's dive in!

Ian at SaaS Weekly

SAAS WEEKLY ORIGINAL

🎥 Perspective | 6 min read | Ian Ito at SaaS Weekly
Are SaaS media buyouts back?

This past October, HubSpot acquired MindStream, a daily newsletter sent to 150K subscribers covering the latest in AI and tech. (Great news for newsletters, eh?)

In the same month, Semrush announced it acquired Search Engine Land (via Third Door Media), a popular digital marketing site. What the heck is going on?

And this isn’t their first rodeo. Nor is this “move into media” unique to HubSpot and Semrush – other SaaS companies have been doing the same.

But why? Why now? And more importantly, how can other growth-stage startups put this play into practice?

HubSpot buys The Hustle: A trust exercise

Let’s rewind the clock to 2021. While most SaaS companies were partying on high valuations, HubSpot was making moves that had folks scratching their heads: they bought The Hustle for around $27M.

A SaaS giant doing $1.3B+ in revenue (at the time) buying a newsletter business? Someone make this make sense.

From a high level, the acquisition seemed like HubSpot was buying access to an immediate customer base  – which would be a great ROI. But diving deeper, HubSpot seemed to be playing the long game: earning trust with future customers early in their journey. As HubSpot's SVP of marketing Kieran Flanagan explained:

Let’s break this down.

By creating content that serves the reader, not just to service the funnel, your brand becomes organically entrenched in people’s consumption habits. It’s a way to earn trust with your audience way before the buying journey begins.

To bring it back full circle.

HubSpot has been doubling down on the AI space, releasing a suite of AI-enabled features across its many-hubs-model. With the acquisition of MindStream, the company has a direct channel to reinforce the relationship between AI-use cases and jobs-to-be-done with HubSpot.

But wait, there’s more to the story for SaaS companies.

Why SaaS companies are investing in media brands

I've cataloged 26 media brands across 22 SaaS companies following this strategy. From Salesforce+ to Pendo's acquisition of Mind the Product, SaaS companies have either launched or acquired a media arm.

What’s the scoop?

1. Building an audience on rented property is risky and expensive.
Like most SaaS companies, social and search are two primary distribution channels. These are essential properties to start with, but should not be the end game.

One change to the algorithm, and suddenly your content stops ranking high. Or pull back your spend and the reach goes with it. Plus, constantly running marketing campaigns to stay in front of your audience can keep your customer acquisition cost pricey.

Owning a media property means owning the relationship with your audience - no middleman required.

2. Content channels are becoming increasingly more crowded.
Attention is all you need but it's becoming harder to come by. Especially nowadays, with most B2B companies pushing content that sounds the same. You've seen it. Boring. Vanilla. Filled with corporate jargon. And there's a lot of it out there (trust me, I filter it out for you).

But when you can't capture attention, you can't build trust. To stand out, your content needs personality and a unique style, pulling readers in rather than pushing content down their feed.

This idea of differentiated content is the appeal of established media brands – they already have distinctive voices and engaged audiences.

3. Buyers are making purchasing decisions way before talking to vendors.
According to 6sense's latest B2B Buyer Experience research, buyers are spending ~70% of their time doing independent research. By the time buyers engage with vendors, 81% have already selected their vendor of choice.

If you aren’t creating content that informs your audience during that research phase, content that helps rather than sells, then you don’t even make the shortlist. By owning a publication that buyers already trust to inform their decisions, 

All pretty good stuff here. Hopefully, this helps get the creative juices flowing.

But here’s the sauce to impress your boss.

TOP READS FROM LAST WEEK

1. The age of outcome based pricing (Link)

2. I’m hearing whispers that AI SDRs aren’t living up to the hype (Link)

3. The racecar growth framework (Link)