If Marketing Is 80% of Success, Here's Where I'd Spend the 80%

Making something great is only half the job. People have to know it exists.

Most founders accept that, then spend their marketing time on the wrong 80%: new tools, new channels, new content calendars, a rebrand. Activity that feels like marketing but doesn't move anyone closer to buying.

Here's where I'd actually spend it:

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1. Get Painfully Clear on Positioning

One sentence should tell me:

• WHO this is for
• WHAT it helps them do
• WHY I'd choose it over the alternatives

{Product} helps {specific who} {do specific what}
without {the pain of the alternative}.

Compare:

❌ "An AI-powered platform for modern teams to unlock productivity."

✅ "Meeting notes for sales teams that update your CRM automatically, so reps stop doing admin after every call."

The second one tells me if I'm the buyer in about two seconds. The first one could be any of 400 startups.

The test: Read your homepage headline to someone in your market. If they can't repeat back who it's for and why it's better, it isn't clear yet. Keep cutting until they can.

Everything else on this list gets easier once this is right. Your content has a point of view, your ads have an angle, and your sales calls stop opening with ten minutes of explaining what you do.

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2. Steal Your Language From Customers

Your customers have already written your best copy. You just need to collect it.

Where to look:

• Sales call recordings and notes
• Reviews (yours and your competitors', especially the 3-star ones)
• Support tickets
• Reddit threads and comments
• DMs, replies, and onboarding survey answers

What to save, word for word:

Keep a shared doc or spreadsheet and paste the exact phrases in. Don't summarize, don't clean them up. The messy, specific wording is the valuable part.

Then write from it. Headlines, ad hooks, email subject lines, landing page sections. When a buyer reads copy built from their own words, it feels like you're reading their mind. That's because you are.

Tip: Reddit is the best free source of unfiltered customer language on the internet. People say things there they'd never say on a sales call. Our Reddit marketing team mines it for this every week.

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3. Pick One Distribution Channel and Get Unusually Good at It

X, YouTube, LinkedIn, short-form, SEO. Pick whichever one already has your buyers, and go deep.

Depth beats being mediocre everywhere. Five channels at 20% effort each gets you five accounts nobody follows. One channel at 100% gets you an audience.

How to pick:

1. Where do your best customers already spend time? Ask them.
2. Which format can you realistically produce every week for a year?
3. Which channel compounds? SEO and YouTube keep paying off for years. Feeds reset every day.

What "unusually good" means:

• You know the formats that work there, and why.
• You post on a schedule you never miss.
• You study the top accounts in your space and know exactly what they do differently.
• You've done it long enough to have real data, not vibes.

Once that channel is working and mostly runs on a system, add a second one. Not before.

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4. Spend Almost as Much Time Packaging as Creating

The hook. The title. The thumbnail. The first three seconds.

Nobody gets value from something they never click.

Most people spend ten hours making a video and ten minutes on the title and thumbnail. Then they wonder why it got 200 views. The packaging decides whether anyone sees the work at all.

A simple rule: For every piece, write at least ten hooks or titles before picking one.

Packaging isn't clickbait. Clickbait is a promise the content doesn't keep. Good packaging is just making a real promise clearly enough that the right person stops scrolling.

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5. Build Around Repeated Problems, Not Random Content Ideas

If customers ask the same question 20 times, that isn't a support problem. It's a content plan.

That one question is probably:

• a post that answers it in depth
• a landing page for people searching for it
• an ad that leads with it
• an email in your onboarding sequence
• a sales asset your team sends before the call

How to run it:

1. Every week, pull the questions from sales calls, support, and DMs.
2. Tally them. The top five repeat questions become next month's content.
3. Build every asset type from each one.

Random content ideas come from what you find interesting. Repeated problems come from what buyers are actively trying to solve. Only one of those reliably turns into revenue.

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6. Study Your Outliers

When one post gets 10x the normal reach, or one ad crushes everything else, don't "move on." That's the most important data you'll get all quarter.

Break it down:

Then make more. Same topic, new hook. Same hook, new topic. Same format, different angle. Most winners have five to ten more versions hiding inside them.

Your outliers are the market telling you what it wants. Your averages are just noise.

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7. Turn One Good Idea Into 10 Pieces

Good ideas should travel.

Article
  → 3–5 X posts (one per key point)
  → YouTube video walking through it
  → 3–5 short clips from the video
  → Newsletter issue
  → LinkedIn carousel
  → Sales email for prospects with that problem

One idea, ten assets, a week of distribution.

This isn't lazy. Most of your audience missed the first version. The people who saw it will happily see it again in a different format. And the idea gets sharper every time you rewrite it for a new channel.

Rule: Spend your creative energy on finding ideas worth spreading. Spend your system energy on spreading them. Our content creation team builds exactly this kind of repurposing pipeline.

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8. Collect Proof Constantly

Marketing gets WAY easier when you don't have to manufacture credibility.

What to collect:

• Screenshots of nice DMs, tweets, Slack messages, and emails
• Customer quotes from calls and reviews
• Numbers: results, time saved, money made
• Before/after comparisons
• Use cases you never expected

How to make it a habit:

• Make a #wins channel in Slack. Anyone on the team drops proof there the moment they see it.
• After every good call, ask: "Mind if I quote you on that?"
• Check in with happy customers at 30 and 90 days and ask what changed.

Then put proof everywhere: landing pages, ads, sales decks, onboarding emails, social posts. A real screenshot from a real customer does more than any headline you'll ever write.

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9. Move People Somewhere You Own

Social gets you discovered. Email, community, and your site let you reach people again without asking an algorithm for permission.

How to move people:

• Give them a reason: a template, a free tool, a newsletter worth reading, a private community.
• Link to it everywhere: profile bio, pinned post, end of every video, bottom of every article.
• Once they're in, keep showing up. A weekly email that people actually open beats a 100k-follower account that sees 2% of your posts.

We cover what to send once they sign up in the 7-email nurture sequence we use after every signup. If you want help building the list and the community, see our email marketing and community building work.

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10. Keep the Loop Running

This is what ties the other nine together:

customer → insight → content → attention → conversation → sale → more customer insight

• Customers tell you what they struggle with.
• That becomes insight: positioning, language, repeated problems.
• Insight becomes content that's packaged well and spread across your channel.
• Content earns attention.
• Attention starts conversations: DMs, replies, demo calls.
• Conversations turn into sales.
• New customers give you more insight, and the loop starts again.

Every turn of the loop makes your positioning sharper, your content more relevant, and your sales calls easier. Teams that keep it running get better every month. Teams that break it (marketing that never talks to sales, content that never hears from customers) stay stuck making guesses.

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Common Mistakes

• Skipping positioning because it feels slow. Every other step is weaker without it.
• Paraphrasing customers. "Streamline your workflow" is your words. "I'm sick of copying data between six tabs" is theirs. Use theirs.
• Starting on five channels at once. You'll be mediocre on all of them by month three.
• Treating packaging as an afterthought. The title is not the last five minutes of the job.
• Ignoring winners. Moving on from an outlier is like finding gold and walking away to look for silver.
• Collecting proof "later." Later never comes. Screenshot it now.
• Building only on rented land. One algorithm change shouldn't be able to wipe out your pipeline.

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Where to Start This Week

1. Write your one-sentence positioning. Test it on three people.
2. Start a customer language doc. Add 20 exact phrases from calls, reviews, and Reddit.
3. Pick your one channel.
4. Pick the most-asked customer question and turn it into one piece, packaged properly, then cut it into ten.
5. Start a #wins channel and add an email signup everywhere you post.

Making something great is only half the job. People have to know it exists.

For more plays, see 9 marketing moves I'd bet my life on. If you'd rather have a team run this loop with you, look at our growth strategy work or book a strategy call.