9 Marketing Moves I'd Bet My Life On (And How to Run Each One)
AI discovery, relaunches, viral formats, alternative pages, founder-led sales, product loops, co-marketing, free tools, and dinners. The 9 marketing moves that keep working.
Most marketing plans are a list of channels. Blog, LinkedIn, paid ads, newsletter, maybe a podcast. Six months later nothing has compounded, and the team is arguing about whether the problem is the copy or the budget.
The problem is usually that none of it was a move. A move is a specific bet with a reason it works, a clear first step, and a way to tell if it's working.
Here are the nine I'd bet my life on:
| # | Move | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Get discovered on AI platforms, app stores, and by agents | That's where buyers start looking now |
| 2 | Relaunch around new use cases | New angle = new reason to talk about you |
| 3 | Pair your product with viral formats and trends | Borrow attention instead of building it from zero |
| 4 | Build high-intent use-case and alternative pages | Catch buyers who already know what they want |
| 5 | Do founder-led sales until you know why people buy | Everything else depends on this answer |
| 6 | Build product loops | Every user brings in the next one |
| 7 | Co-market with trusted companies | Rent trust you haven't earned yet |
| 8 | Ship free tools that solve real problems | Value first, product second |
| 9 | Host events and dinners with top customers | Relationships turn customers into advocates |
None of these are new. That's the point. They keep working because they're built on how people actually find, trust, and buy things.
1. Get Discovered on AI Platforms, App Stores, and by AI Agents
The bet: The search bar isn't the front door anymore. Buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini for recommendations. They browse integration marketplaces and app stores. And more and more, AI agents shortlist tools on their behalf.
If you're not in those answers, you're not on the shortlist.
How to run it:
- Ask the models. Run the 20 prompts your buyers would type ("best X for Y", "X alternatives", "how do I do Z") across the major assistants. Write down who gets mentioned and which sources get cited.
- Show up where they read. Models pull from comparison articles, Reddit threads, review sites, docs, and listicles. Get your product into the sources that already get cited.
- Make your site easy to parse. Clear "what it is / who it's for / pricing" pages, structured data, and an
llms.txtfile so agents can read your docs without guessing. - List everywhere you integrate. Zapier, Slack, HubSpot, Shopify, Chrome Web Store, the GPT store, MCP directories. Every marketplace listing is a free discovery surface with built-in intent.
Tip: Re-run the same prompt set every month. It's the closest thing to a rank tracker for AI search, and it shows you which content actually moved the needle.
We go deeper on this in Beyond SEO: building AI trust equity and in our SEO and link building work.
2. Relaunch the Product Around New Use Cases
The bet: You only get one launch, but you can get many relaunches. Same product, new packaging, new audience, new reason to post.
A project management tool is one launch. "The project manager for video agencies," "the content calendar for solo creators," and "the client portal for freelancers" are three more.
How to run it:
- Look at your users and find the use case you didn't plan for. Support tickets and onboarding answers are full of these.
- Build a landing page, a demo, and a template for that one use case.
- Launch it like it's a new product: Product Hunt, X, LinkedIn, the communities where that audience hangs out.
- Repeat every 6 to 8 weeks with a different use case.
Each relaunch gives your audience something new to share, and gives you a fresh test of which segment responds hardest.
3. Make YouTube and Short-Form Content That Rides Viral Formats
The bet: Nobody wants to watch your product demo. Lots of people want to watch a format they already love, with your product in it.
The formats that work are already proven: "I tried X for 30 days," "rating every tool in Y," "building Z in 10 minutes," reaction videos, before/after, side-by-side comparisons, and whatever trend is running this week.
How to run it:
- Start with the format, not the product. Scroll your audience's feed for a week and save every format that keeps coming back.
- Put the product in the middle, not the start. It should be the tool that makes the video possible, not the subject of the video.
- Ship volume. Short-form is a numbers game. Ten rough videos teach you more than one polished one.
- Turn winners into long-form. When a short clip pops, expand it into a full YouTube video. That's where search traffic and trust build up over years.
If you want this run as a system, our content creation and UGC content teams build exactly this kind of pipeline.
4. Build High-Intent Landing Pages for Use Cases and Competitor Alternatives
The bet: Someone searching "[competitor] alternative" or "[tool] for [job]" has already decided to buy something. They just haven't decided what. These are the highest-intent visitors you'll ever get.
The pages to build:
| Page type | Example query | What the page needs |
|---|---|---|
| Alternative | "Notion alternative for agencies" | Honest comparison, who should switch, migration help |
| Versus | "Airtable vs Notion" | Side-by-side table, clear winner per use case |
| Use case | "CRM for real estate agents" | Workflows, templates, and proof for that one job |
| Integration | "Slack + Jira automation" | What it does, setup steps, a working example |
How to run it:
- Be honest. Say where the competitor is better. Buyers can tell, and so can the models that summarize your page.
- Make each page actually different. A template with the competitor name swapped out won't rank and won't convert.
- Put a demo, a template, or a free trial above the fold. Someone this ready to buy shouldn't have to scroll.
5. Do Founder-Led Sales Until You Understand Exactly Why Customers Buy
The bet: Every other move on this list depends on knowing why people buy. Not why you think they buy. The real reason, in their words.
You only learn that by selling it yourself.
What you're listening for on every call:
- The trigger: What happened that made them start looking this week?
- The alternative: What were they doing before? What else did they look at?
- The words: How do they describe the problem? Steal their exact phrasing.
- The objection: What almost stopped them?
- The moment: When did they decide yes?
After 20 to 30 calls, patterns show up. Those patterns become your positioning, your landing page headlines, your ad hooks, and your sales script.
Rule of thumb: Don't hand sales off until you can predict, before the call, whether someone will buy and why. Paul Graham's Do Things That Don't Scale makes the same case.
When you're ready to hand it off, sales support and SaaS sales scaling are how we help teams make that jump without losing what the founder learned.
6. Build Product Loops That Naturally Bring In the Next User
The bet: The cheapest user to acquire is the one your current user brings in by simply using the product.
Classic examples:
- Calendly: every booking link sent is an ad shown to someone who needs one.
- Loom: every video shared puts the product in front of the viewer.
- Dropbox: shared folders pull collaborators in, and referrals pay out in storage.
- Canva and Figma: shared designs and files invite people to edit, comment, and sign up.
How to find your loop: Ask, "When someone uses our product, who else sees the output?" That person is your next user. Now make it as easy as possible for them to try it themselves: a "made with" link, a shareable result, a guest view that turns into a signup.
A loop beats a campaign because it doesn't stop when the budget does.
7. Co-Market With Companies That Have Earned Trust in the Market
The bet: Trust takes years to build. You can borrow some of it in a week by partnering with a company your buyers already trust.
Formats that work:
- Joint webinars or workshops on a problem both audiences have
- Integration launches announced by both companies
- Co-written reports or benchmarks using both companies' data
- Newsletter and audience swaps
- Bundles or exclusive offers for each other's customers
How to pick partners: Same buyer, different product, no overlap in what you sell. Start with tools your customers already use alongside yours. Bring a concrete idea and offer to do most of the work. Partners say yes to easy wins.
8. Create Free Tools That Solve Real Problems
The bet: A free tool that solves one real problem gets bookmarked, shared, and linked to for years. A blog post gets read once.
HubSpot's Website Grader is the classic: put in your URL, get a score and a list of fixes. Millions of marketers used it, and every one of them met HubSpot while doing so.
What to build:
| Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Templates | Pitch deck, content calendar, onboarding email sequence, SOPs |
| Generators | Headline generator, invoice generator, policy generator |
| Calculators | ROI, pricing, CAC payback, savings |
| Graders and checkers | Website grader, email deliverability checker, SEO audit |
| Interactive tools | Quizzes, configurators, mini versions of your product |
How to run it:
- Pick a problem your buyer has just before they need your product.
- Make it work without a signup. Gate the extra stuff (the full report, the export, the saved version), not the core result.
- Give it its own page with a clear name so it ranks and gets cited. Tools are some of the most-linked pages on the web.
With AI coding tools, a useful free tool is now a weekend of work, not a quarter. Our automation team builds these for clients regularly.
9. Host Events and Dinners With Your Top Customers
The bet: A dinner with eight of your best customers does more for retention, referrals, and product direction than most campaigns do in a quarter.
People who have broken bread with you defend you in Slack groups, take your reference calls, and tell you the truth about your roadmap.
How to run it:
- Keep it small. 8 to 12 people. Big enough for good conversation, small enough that everyone talks.
- Invite a mix. Your top customers, a few prospects who look like them, and one or two interesting guests people want to meet.
- No pitch. Pick a topic the room cares about and let them talk. You're the host, not the speaker.
- Follow up personally. A note the next day, intros you promised, and a photo from the night.
- Do it in every city you sell in. Then do it again next quarter.
If you'd like this handled end to end, our events management team runs these for clients.
Common Mistakes
- Trying all nine at once. Pick two. Run them properly for a quarter. Add a third once the first two are working.
- Skipping #5. Without founder-led sales, every other move is a guess. You'll write the wrong pages, pick the wrong partners, and build the wrong free tools.
- Treating relaunches as rebrands. You're not changing the product. You're telling a new group of people why it's for them.
- Copy-paste alternative pages. Thin pages don't rank, don't get cited by AI, and don't convert.
- Free tools nobody needs. Build for a real problem you've heard about on sales calls, not a keyword you found in a tool.
- Events with a pitch deck. The moment it feels like a sales event, the room goes quiet.
Where to Start
If you're early: #5, then #4. Learn why people buy, then build pages for the buyers who are already looking.
If you have traction: #6 and #8. Build the loop and the free tool so growth doesn't depend on your next campaign.
If you're established: #1, #7, and #9. Make sure you're in the AI answers, borrow trust from partners, and turn your best customers into your loudest advocates.
Nine moves. Pick two. Run them properly.
If you'd rather have a team run them with you, take a look at our growth strategy work or book a strategy call.