My name’s Mark Valasik and this is my fourth edition of Marketing Right Side Up (or MKTRSU) newsletter (and also Youtube channel, and TikTok and Instagram). I help brands create honest and meaningful marketing strategies in a world of dishonesty and short-term tactics

Today, we have a different kind of a newsletter. 

First of all, 30 days of my content creation summed up in a couple numbers for you to crunch in my Linkedin post. 
30 days, 39 short form videos, 4 long form videos, 3 newsletters, 110 800+ impressions, 65 000+ views and more subscribers than hours of sleep :’D
Not too shabby if I do say so myself and some of the learnings were quite surprising (i.e. TikTok hating short-short form content).

Second of all, my retrospective introspection and therapy session all in one bundled as 5 mistakes I made as a digital marketing manager / CMO and lessons for you to not do them as well. In a 20 minute “course” video to be watched here, and in a shorter summary below:

And third of all, here’s your weekly dose of Social Media One Liners (official name I’ve just decided to go with).

Learn from my 5 mistakes I made as a B2B SaaS Chief Marketing Officer, if you can.

Today's post veers from the usual, diving into the core lessons I've absorbed through my role as a Chief Marketing Officer at Kontentino. I'm here to share five key mistakes and the insights they granted, which I hope will steer you away from common pitfalls. Each of these points is dissected more IN DEPTH in my latest video, so feel free to watch it instead (video placed ABOVE) 

1. The Necessity of Structure

In startups and small businesses, wearing multiple hats is a given, but juggling them without a structure is a recipe for chaos. I learned this the hard way. Despite my early career confidence in my memory, the sheer number of tasks and opened cases soon became unmanageable. This led me to realize the crucial role of structure in maintaining sanity more than efficiency. For instance, the necessity of keeping structured documentation and setting up calendar events FOR EVERYTHING became apparent when routine tasks began to slip through the cracks, like our team’s 1on1s that initially were of the highest priority, as my goal was to fix a broken, unhappy team, but with progressively happier team, this goal started to be less and less of a priority. Eventually causing 1on1s to skip months or even quarters, which then resulted in lower team satisfaction (paradoxically).

Same goes for setting up time slots in the calendar for watching Youtube videos or reading industry blogs to educate yourself. Always felt guilty about pushing it in front of me with all the more pressing issues, but with making it “official” this pressure disappeared and resulted in better mental setup as well. 

Also, Dashboard in Google Sheets (if you use the Google Docs environment) as your single source of truth? Absolute killer tool! (pasting the link to a doc and pressing ‘tab’ creates a nice shortcut link instead of fugly URLs btw!)

2. Loving the Problem, Not the Solution

As marketers, we often fall in love with our crafted solutions and lose sight of the actual problems. My career taught me time and time again to focus on the problem rather than getting overly attached to one solution. This realization hit home during the rebranding project at Kontinentino, where my attachment to the process began affecting my mental health, despite the successful outcome. While the rebranding looks great, performs great and was released as intended, it would have probably been done the same way if I left earlier. 

Same goes for my “content creation journey”. What started as a side-gig while I’m on my paternity leave for 6 months, quickly turned into an obsession on my end with spending every waking hour of free time to research, analyze, create, polish and publish my content pieces. And this obsession quickly overshadowed the primary goal of these 6 months - spending quality time with my almost-2yo daughter. So naturally, I took a step back :D 

3. The Pitfalls of Benchmark Obsession

Obsessing over industry benchmarks can distract from your unique goals and capabilities. In my experience, while benchmarks are useful for gauging industry standards, they should not dictate your strategy. The focus should always remain on your company's specific needs and the unique value you bring to your customers. While it’s great to know your enemies, there’s usually infinite differentiating factors impacting the end-number. Country, financing, team size, ARPA, pricing, product etc.

Do not obsess, do not compare in everything. Take it as a data source, get inspired, but don’t beat yourself dead over not being able to outperform those benchmarks. The race is elsewhere, don’t tire yourself sprinting to the venue.

4. Setting Double Goals

High-level goals are crucial for business direction, but they need to be broken down into actionable and CONTROLLABLE steps for your team. Control as in, you have the control over how many content assets you will output, NOT over how many people will read it/click it/convert from it. I learned that setting realistic, tangible goals that align with individual team roles enables better focus and productivity, rather than overwhelming the team with broad objectives that feel out of reach. 

Want to grow MRR by 20%? Cool. But don’t expect raking up content production or ad spend by 20% to deliver on the result. Especially with digital omnichannel and tens of ad sets running simultaneously, the impact of individual content piece or one month’s ad spend WON’T translate into 20% growth. Rather the opposite actually. Translate the higher sales goals into strategic changes. 

Want to grow MRR by 20%? Focus more on bottom of the funnel content that can be retargeting the existing leads for example. Always set double goals.

5. Done is always better than Perfect

Lastly, the pursuit of perfection can be a major stumbling block. I knew that 'done is better than perfect' but reeeally hated the fact it’s true :) I’m a sucker for polished things. But the “done” approach not only accelerates output but also alleviates the pressure on your team, fostering a more creative and productive environment. It’s about finding the balance between quality and efficiency, which can be crucial in dynamic market conditions. The problem is if you yourself create unobtainable quality goals for well, yourself. Then you can fall into a vicious loop. 

Striving for perfection is great if there’s time and resources for it. And while having some sort of a “quality standard” is great, the difference between 80% “done” job and “100%” perfect job is usually just more time spent on the perfect one. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Bonus tip:

Always, ALWAYS go omni-channel. What’s omni-channel you ask? Well, google it, duh. 

But for real - OMNI channel represents ALL (or at least MORE) channels within your marketing mix. So:

• Don’t rely just on paid ads, as they are hard to scale (and recent changes do weird stuff to broad match display prioritization, completely omitting ad rank converting all keywords to broad match for searches identical to keyword ).

• Don’t rely just on SEO and organic traffic as recent addition of AI Overview in SERP does fucky-wucky things to organic placements and completely shits on exact match keyword placements, preferring massively the AI BS generated from YEARS old Reddit threads as part of a $60 million Google deal to train AI data on).

• Don’t rely on organic social, as the algorithms change all the time (see my previous newsletter / video about how algorithms work)

• Don’t rely on backlinks only as in, who tf would do that??

• Don’t rely on direct sales only etc. etc. You get the picture.

Build strong mixes, where attribution is a bitch but iterative process can bring quick local results and therefore help scaling. Build strong funnels, automate processes as much as possible. Build strong brands not vulnerable to a single point of failure. Because those failures happen every day.

Reflecting on these lessons has been cathartic and enlightening. I hope that by sharing these insights, I can help you navigate your marketing roles more effectively and avoid some of the mistakes I made. If you can learn from the mistakes of others.

If this post resonates with you, or if you have your own lessons to share, please subscribe, comment below, and become part of this growing community :) 

Mark.