Over the years we've noticed that the businesses seeing the strongest results tend to share a handful of common marketing habits. They're not revolutionary, but they are effective. These are the practices we come back to time and time again because they consistently drive growth.

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Spoiler alert: all of these things you’ll have heard us talk about before. And you’re going to keep hearing us talk about them because they’re practices we’re passionate about!

1. Talk to your customers, regularly 

Nothing beats direct customer insight. And most of the time it’s free to do so there’s really no excuse. But even if you don’t have any customers yet, find prospects to speak to. It still blows my mind how many founders and marketers we speak with that don’t do this on a regular basis. 

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This isn't about gathering formal feedback or pitching to people; it's about understanding their world. The best marketing insights come from asking customers about their daily challenges, not your product.

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Here's how to make it a consistent habit:

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• Set up a "customer coffee hour" – block out an hour a week for customer calls (2 x 30 minute conversations) 
• Create a discussion guide for each conversation (we’ve got some useful tips on this here)
• Rotate team members so the insight isn’t siloed - everyone from founders and product to sales, marketing and customer service will benefit from this exercise
• If you have a CRM system, set up an automated campaign to schedule calls with customers or prospects each week
• Use one of the many AI transcription tools to capture the call and help extract the key insights (we’re currently enjoying Granola.ai, Otter.ai and Tl;Dv)
• After each call, spend 5 minutes documenting key insights in a shared doc. Over time, this becomes an invaluable resource for your content, product, and sales teams 

This can also be a really good way to collect reviews for your website!

2. Using AI to supercharge your work

For small teams with big ambitions, using AI well is fast becoming a necessity. And we’re not talking about just using AI tools to churn out a load of half baked content. It’s about using it in the right ways to give small marketing teams extra capacity to focus on creativity without adding cost. 

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Here’s our current stack: 

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• Granola AI for meeting notes - summarising key decisions made, action items and next steps 
• Tl;Dv for customer interviews - recording calls, capturing transcripts and enabling useful interrogation of the discussions 
• ChatGPT to aid research - summarising reports and processing large volumes of data like interview transcripts 
• Claude AI for content brainstorming, outline creation, and draft refinement

3. Master the art of content repurposing

To be completely honest we’ve still got work to do here! It’s so easy to fall into the trap of focusing on creating net-new content all the time - but the reality is, creating a great piece of content that is actually useful and unique is hard and takes a lot of effort. So to really see the return of that investment, you need to squeeze every last drop of value out of it! And that means repurposing it as much as you can.  

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Here’s how we do it: 

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Start with a "pillar" piece (let’s take a podcast or a webinar as an example), then break it down into smaller pieces of content, shared in different formats across different channels to maximise its visibility: 

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• Create a full transcript and add it to your website as a blog, optimised for any SEO opportunities (you could also look at other blogging platforms to share it on as well - e.g. Medium, Substack - wherever your audience are already spending time, engaging with content)
• Create several short-form, text based social media posts and spread these across your content schedule over the next couple of weeks 
• Edit down several short video clips of key segments 
• Share the highlights on your email newsletter 
• Create snippets your sales team can use in outreach or nurture 
• Look at if / where it might play a role in any customer onboarding materials

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The key is planning for repurposing from the start. When we create any major content piece, we now have a checklist of at least 8 ways we'll repurpose it.

4. Focusing on consistency over perfection

Consistency beats sporadic brilliance every time. Especially when it comes to platforms like LinkedIn. It can take some time to start seeing any impact, and it’s tempting to pull back when it feels like it’s not working. But persisting and striving for consistency really is the key. Here's how we maintain it:

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• Create clear content and campaign calendars (we use a simple Notion template)
• Set realistic posting schedules you can actually maintain
• See our previous point about repurposing content… don’t start from a blank page each time you need to create a post, build a backlog of ‘ready to go’ posts that you can role out when you're short on time or short on inspiration
• Track only 3-4 key metrics to avoid data paralysis - we look for reach/impressions and engagement (comments)
• Schedule monthly reviews to make sure you have time to look at what worked, what didn’t and then adjust and optimise 

5. Make time for reflection

The best marketers aren't just doers – they're learners. The initiatives and experiments that don’t work are just as interesting and valuable as the things that do. And making time for reflection is key here. Here's how we do it: 

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Monthly marketing retros:

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• Schedule 60-90 minutes of uninterrupted time
• Review metrics against goals
• Document specific wins, challenges and actions to take forward

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We use a simple framework called "The 4 Whats":

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• What worked? (Document successes to replicate)
• What didn't? (Be honest about failures)
• What did we learn? (Extract insights)
• What's next? (Turn insights into action)

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Top tip: Document all of this - a simple Google doc or Notion page is all you need! Capture key insights, successful campaigns, and lessons learned. This becomes super useful overtime when you’re planning new initiatives or onboarding new team members.

Getting started

The magic happens when these habits work together. For example, one customer conversation leads to a blog post, which becomes multiple social posts, which triggers experiments with different formats, all enhanced by AI tools – creating a flywheel effect with minimal additional effort.

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But don't try to implement everything at once. Pick one habit to focus on this month. I suggest starting with customer conversations – they naturally fuel everything else.

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If you'd like help implementing any of these habits in your own business, we'd love to chat.

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Which of these habits are already part of your marketing approach?