Paid Marketing

Paid marketing is any channel where you pay to reach an audience. It covers a wide range of tactics from search ads and social campaigns to newsletter sponsorships and influencer partnerships.

Paid channels fall into two broad categories: audience-based and performance-based.

Audience-based channels

Any channel where you pay for access to someone else's audience. Native advertising, influencer marketing, and paid content sponsorships fall into this category. Success is measured by audience fit, engagement quality, and downstream pipeline and not conversion rate alone. Attribution is harder and the CAC/LTV framework doesn't map cleanly onto these.

Performance-based channels

Performance-based channels are any channel where you pay per click, impression, or conversion. Success is measured through direct unit economics: cost per acquisition (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and payback period. Paid search, paid social, and programmatic display fall into this category.

Turning on performance channels

Before turning on paid acquisition, you should be able to answer three questions:

1. Do you know why users stay?
2. Do you know why they leave?
3. Do you have a cohort old enough to reliably estimate LTV?

If the answer to any of these is "not yet," paid won't solve the problem. It will make it more expensive. You need at least one cohort old enough to show what 6- and 12-month retention actually looks like.