The Marketing Tactics That Scale (And The Ones That Don't)

The scrappy techniques that got you your first customers won’t work at 10x the size.

But you can’t skip doing the scrappy things first.

It’s a perplexing problem and one that small business owners regularly run into. And this tempts many people into dropping money on five channels at once, hoping something sticks. Or running after the latest growth hack or hiring expensive consultants before they know what works and what doesn’t.

It’s true that you need to let go of all the manual stuff that takes up your time. But it’s also true that if you scale too early, you’ll burn through your budget faster than anything.

So how do you acknowledge these two facts and still move forward?

Let’s talk about what scales well and what doesn’t.

You can’t do everything at once. This is why scope control is so important to marketing.

But Brian Balfour, who ran growth at Hubspot, said it better than me. In his article on how to scale customer acquisition, the very first headline reads “do not test a lot of channels at once.”

Yes, you have to try new things to potentially succeed. But you also have to give each channel real focus so you can experiment and learn what works.

In Balfour’s writing, he uses the example of running Facebook ads, saying that this requires testing different images and messages every couple days across different audiences. SEO means publishing content consistently for months and building links.

For many businesses with tight resources, you simply can't do both well simultaneously when you're already running the business.

Balfour, in a separate article, points out that in his work with Boundless, a company with $10M in funding, they only tested TWO channels at once. And I don’t know about you, but most businesses in the US don’t start with $10M in funding—they start with a bank loan or self investment, and fewer people than Boundless likely had.

Which, of course, begs the question: which channel do you start with?

According to research from Lenny Rachitsky analyzing marketplace companies, there are three channels that scale better than the rest:

Everything else, including PR stunts, one-off partnerships, and even direct sales, are harder to use as the basis of a reliable marketing engine.

Sometimes advertising can be a hard sell for small business because the costs associated with it are very clear. And it can feel difficult to pay a big company like Meta or Google to win business.

But there’s a reason advertising is the most scalable marketing channel. You can turn it on and off like a faucet and control the flow of leads by using your budget like the handle. Once you truly master the channel, you can adjust the budget so you’re always serving customers at or near capacity.

The math is simple. If it costs you less to acquire a customer than they're worth to you (and you get that money back within a year or so), then paid advertising is worth it.

Here is the path to scaling ads:

If you want to learn more about how this works, check out these two posts:

Half of successful marketplace companies use SEO as a major growth channel.

And marketplace companies are far from the only ones who can use SEO for growth. A cooking site went from zero to 1 million monthly impressions in 15 months. The HR software company Airmason saw a 1,300% traffic increase in seven months (an unusually fast result).

But you need to have realistic expectations around the timeline upfront:

Thumbtack committed their entire 12-person team to SEO for over a year. They built thousands of pages targeting specific keywords, hired people to curate reviews and content, ran surveys to get links from other sites.

The payoff ultimately ended up being millions of monthly visitors. SEO became how they got most of their customers by year three.

Their co-founder Sander Daniels put it this way: "We chose deliberately to put the entirety of our engineering, product, design, marketing, and operations resources—which were maybe 12 people at the time—against success in this one channel."

That's not "let's try some SEO" alongside five other things. That's all-in commitment.

Here’s the path to scaling SEO:

Referrals and word-of-mouth are hard to win, but when they work, they really work.

Dropbox went from 100,000 to 4,000,000 users in 15 months. That’s 3,900% growth.

They tried paid marketing first. It cost $233-338 to get a customer. Their product only cost $99/year. That would mean waiting 30+ months to get their money back on each new customer.

The math wasn’t mathing.

But they noticed something—namely, a third of their users already came from referrals without any program in place. People naturally wanted to share it. In fact, I was one of them, because Dropbox was giving out 2 GB of storage for free when I was in college and it was very useful!

So they built a simple two-sided referral program. When you invited a friend and they signed up, you both got 500MB of storage. In the early 2010s, before cloud storage was extremely inexpensive on a per-GB basis, this was a very generous offer. And you could earn up to 16GB free through referrals.

This worked because referrals were:

The result was a massive increase in referrals.

And this doesn’t just work for software companies, to be clear. Referrals are the #1 source of work for many of my clients in home services, and the #2 source of business for my own agency as well as my long-time client, the order fulfillment center, Fulfillrite.

Paul Graham's essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" is worth reading if you haven't. His main point is that almost every successful business started with the founders doing things manually that would never work at scale.

Stripe's founders had a famous approach: when someone wanted to try their product, the Collison brothers would literally take their laptop and install Stripe on the spot.

You definitely can’t go doing that with thousands of customers. But it was exactly right for the first hundred, and they had to start somewhere.

Airbnb's founders went door-to-door in New York with a camera, meeting hosts and taking professional photos of their apartments. This only lasted 30 days, but that was enough to change the trajectory of the company.

So if you’re doing things like this to grow your business, I really want you to know: that’s OK. In fact, depending on where you are in your business growth journey, you might be doing exactly the right thing.

But you and I both know that these tactics cannot scale.

You can't personally respond to every customer email when you're getting 50 a day. You can't hand-hold every new user through setup when you have hundreds signing up. Response times slow down. Quality drops. Your own time becomes the bottleneck.

To borrow a phrase from Brian Chesky of Airbnb: "do it until it hurts, then automate it away."

Keep these three rules in mind:

Before heavily investing in any given marketing channel, here are five questions you can ask yourself before you proceed:

Then once you start testing and get some good data, here’s a quick cheat sheet to tell you when to double down and when to abandon ship.

Double down if:

Abandon ship if:

The trick is giving your channels long enough to show results, but not waiting so long that you tie up money when it can be best spent elsewhere. I talk about this more in How To Know Your Marketing Is Working (Before Revenue Shows Up).

Not every marketing tactic is going to scale. There’s nothing wrong with that at all.

But if you’re serious about growing your company, you’re going to want at least one marketing tactic that does. And figuring out which one is right for you is no easy task.

It takes time, testing, experimentation, and a whole lot of patience.

But if you don’t know where to start, I’d personally look at paid ads, SEO, and referrals first. There’s a very good chance that one of those channels is compatible with your business model.

Find the one that works for you, and you’d be amazed at just how fast things can ramp up.