Can Mainstream Marketing Routines Benefit Your Startup?

Matt Mroczek
written by
Matt Mroczek
last updated
July 15, 2020

Marketing for startups is a lot like being lost in the woods, looking for a way out. With every step you take, it’s hard to know if you’re headed on the path to success or deeper into the fog. The secret to finding traction with your marketing is to keep marching forward, every single day. Below you’ll learn how you can increase your marketing velocity with daily marketing routines.

Matt Lo: We have our own routines and I wrote a blog about this back in November about the top five marketing routines you can have, but it’s pretty interesting that we have developed off that blog our own subset of routines that are only pertinent to us.

Why don’t you think more businesses create their own set of routines? Why do they just follow whatever the top posts say on Google?

Matt Mroczek: I think a lot of the times Businesses or Marketers are going to delegate a task too early to identify a process or a routine that’s going to lead to success.

Matt Lo: That scaling too fast.

Matt Mroczek: Exactly! So they’re trying to say, ‘Hey you solve this!’ and I’m going to tell you how to do it. And when you do it wrong, then I’ll admit to overstepping my boundaries and ask you to do it however you feel comfortable. ‘Do whatever gets results!’

And now you’re asking a key player to perform an action that they might not be prepared to. If they’re only a great writer, you can’t ask them to understand the audience, identify the customer pain, and all the other steps that go into it.

Now you’re putting them in a position to fail when really you should be the one proving out these systems and routines, validating that they get results and then hiring out to do it.

For any business owner or marketer who’s looking for a little bit more clarity into what they should and should not be looking at. What’s one daily, one weekly, and one monthly routine that they can add say tomorrow?

Matt Lo: The first one with daily is go on twitter and search for trends or search for problems that your product might solve. For example with ChipBot it might be frustrations with my chat or issues with with Live Chat and I’ll search Twitter and look for common pain points. So we keep validating our thesis.

On a weekly basis what you want to be doing is measuring the weekly gains of your efforts. So when we create content we measure shares comments and DM’s (direct messages). We want to measure that week to week. We also want a measure of the overall impact; meaning is our marketing effort bringing on new users? Is it bringing conversions?

So again that’s a sort of week to week ritual that you want to do. Usually, we do it like almost every Friday.

On a month to month basis, you want to validate the overarching strategy. So for us, we have a content framework that has a list of ways we can position our brand, ways we can communicate our brand. We validate that every month. That should be a very common ritual that a marketer a business owner should do. Nothing is ever static in the marketing world. You’ve always wanted to continuously validate.

Matt Mroczek: So for me at least if I get too stuck in a routine, the output is not going to be as great because I’m too stuck into just doing the work and I’m not really thinking new, fresh, or creative. Do you agree that that can’t happen?

Matt Lo: Yes! How I mitigate against this is that my routines need to be rather abstract. For example, one routine I do often is validate customers.

That’s it! Period!

No direction on beyond that. That means I could be validating a potential customer who works in e-commerce. Someone who could hate our products. Someone who uses our product but could churn out later. I don’t know.

The ideas is every week I’m just always working on it.

Matt Mroczek: And the ideas is that keeping it open ended gives you that creative freedom…

Matt Lo: And then once I once I see that there is maybe more value to invest in or spend more time in one particular area of routines… I might decide to say ‘Hey we need to invest some capital to hire a resource or hire a marketer to perform these tasks at a better cadence.’

Then from my end, I can deallocate that from my schedule and focus more on other chaotic tasks.

What are your top three tactics that you do on a day to day basis or week to week basis and tactics?

Like for example one of my tactics is I will tend to search on Quora for very particular pain points and then I will reply to questions I believe that could gain some upvotes later on.

Matt Mroczek: One that we mentioned is search and engage and that can be on anything Quora, Twitter, LinkedIn… It’s anywhere that your target persona is voicing something wherever they’re communicating.

Another one of my favorite ones is actually in ChipBot itself. And that’s grown over time. It started off as a weekly routine and now I do it more frequently and what I’m looking at is our reporting and our search terms and what I’m looking for is half queued search terms.

So, a common thing I see is the user is trying to type out Demo but I only see De… or Dem… and that’s a good thing because they’re clicking the insight, they’re going further down the funnel, and that’s what we want!

And my third one is starting to comment on post more frequently. One of the constraints I have is time. So I don’t always have time to for a full video or full blog post or anything to that nature. That doesn’t mean that I am sitting on the sidelines.

I can either under the ChipBot account or under my own just find a good post and start writing. And I’ve been surprised at how many followers and connection requests responses I get simply from being a part of the conversation where it’s so easy to just scroll right through and forget about it.

Matt Mroczek: When you have a routine and start seeing some success with it. Whatever that metric is. Is that something that you should then spend more time on? Add more people too? Outsource it?

Once you start seeing traction, what do you do and how do you make sure not to ignore the other marketing channels or the other marketing activities?

Matt Lo: You work harder. You can’t really ignore it. The beauty of a startup is you can pivot really quickly. The bad thing about it is you now have to look in a lot of places at once.

It’s really hard looking left and right same time. And once you add looking top, bottom and forward too, it’s really hard. That’s why I brought you on with ChipBot and we sort of try to do it together.

But yeah you’re going to miss opportunities because you don’t have enough resources or enough manpower. That’s a typical story.

The idea is that the channels that you are winning it – Dominate them! And then take the money you make from those channels to invest in a new one.

Matt Mroczek: How do you identify a bad routine or bad habit that you’ve fallen into?

Matt Lo: That’s a tough question. Routines are largely experimental from whoever is executing it because it’s usually… For me like I took some of Content Frameworks routines, I took a little bit what Neil Patel does and then looked at what startups are doing and sort of combined them and made my own routines.

When I did that I didn’t really know if they work and I just started following them systematically until I felt like I could write a blog about it.

And that’s when I realized how this actually works. I could have gotten lucky on first time or the really second time for knowing what works. I think other people who may do it and then feel like you’re not getting results, you just need to keep changing. You need to keep making some tough decisions and say well if this isn’t actually moving the needle let’s change something.

And you keep changing something until something sticks and then you can keep moving on. Marketing is an art and a science, so it involves a lot of creativity on your end.

Matt Mroczek: And your review that every week, every month, or every quarter?

Matt Lo: It varies.

Not every quarter and not every month. It’s two that’s too slow. It could be every week. For me it was. I think 10 days

Matt Mroczek: For startups and small businesses and teams of say 10 or less – Are Marketing Routines the secret to success?

Matt Lo: Yeah! So for startups and very early stage companies, routines are your number one way to measure your persistence because you get to compare week-to-week, how much effort you’re putting into your marking or not.

Easiest trap you can fall – Right when you launch your company, you get this high of like we launched and you get some early customers that you’ve been bragging about and then problems occur.

And all your attention is now on those problems. And during that time, you’re marketing usually dies.

If you’re following routines and then doing a retro every week, saying what’s working what’s not. You really can measure how much effort do you actually put in. For some people, it’s time tracking. For us, we just look at metrics some. Recently we’ve been looking at the output with metrics.

How many times have we commented or posted on a community forum? If you’re measuring that week to week, you get a really good insight either at your monthly retro or you quarterly retro to see like, ‘How much work do you actually put in your company?’

And that’s really the secret of Marketing Routines. It’s not just about seeing your marketing grow or seeing or building a habit… It’s seeing how much work are you putting. Are you actually working hard at this? Are you hustling for the next customer?

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Matt Mroczek
Matt Mroczek

Matt Mroczek recently left the marketing agency world where he was overseeing national campaigns for some of your favorite household brands. His scrappy, can-do attitude is what drives and pushes him to successfully growth hack any situation.

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