A marketing hack is a tip, trick, or strategy designed to help improve your marketing workflows and work more efficiently.
According to a 2026 white paper from Iterable, two-thirds of marketers say they’re now doing more with less budget and fewer resources. The right marketing hacks let you automate repetitive work, uncover better customer insights, and free up time for the strategic and creative thinking that drives growth.
“As someone working in a nimble environment like a startup, the most important thing you can do is to give yourself some oxygen so that you don’t get stuck in a rut,” says David Baker, former chief revenue and marketing officer at the beauty brand Beekman 1802.
Here are seven of David’s top marketing hacks to help optimize your work as a marketer and operate at your creative best.
7 practical marketing hacks for efficiency and effectiveness
- Automate meeting notes and follow-up
- Connect conversations with AI
- Invest in customer analytics
- Let your tools remember for you
- Step away to think differently
- Don’t wait for perfect data
- Remember what matters
Based on David’s experience growing Beekman 1802, these seven marketing hacks can help you work smarter. They combine AI-powered tools, five-minute automations, and daily habits you can incorporate into your workflow right away:
1. Automate meeting notes and follow-up
AI note-taking apps can transcribe meetings and calls, automatically summarize content, and highlight critical pieces of information.
“One of the first and most practical hacks I suggest is leveraging the power of a note-taker app,” says David.
David recommends configuring your tool to ensure that immediate action items are summarized for you in a list, so “you don’t have to spend time regathering your thoughts.”
You can also connect your note-taking app to other tools to automatically act on those action items. You might automate drafts of client-facing post-call summary emails or configure your project management software to create and assign tasks based on identified action items.
2. Connect conversations with AI
Once you’ve captured meeting and call notes, David recommends using AI to “find the connective tissue between conversations” and organize business communications into a searchable knowledge base.
“I have a tool that goes through all transcriptions, and anytime something is mentioned several times, it starts to build a wiki page for that,” says David. “If I want to pull up a topic I’ve mentioned across a dozen different meetings over the course of a week, those all get pulled into one single reference.”
You can use your system to surface the information that matters and keep track of valuable ideas across multiple conversations.
“It’s like having a chief of staff whisper in my ear everything I need to know about the person who’s walking up and giving me a handshake,” says David.
David built his tool with Claude, but you don’t need to create your own from scratch. He recommends consulting Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki and Gary Tan’s Gbrain for ideas.
3. Invest in customer analytics
David suggests investing in tools that help you understand and use your customer data, specifically recommending the customer analytics platform Lifetimely and the analytics add-on Better Reports, both available in the Shopify App Store.
Lifetimely processes Shopify data at a cohort level, helping businesses understand how certain types of customers behave. For example, at a previous company, David found that new customers who purchased mascara were more likely to make a subsequent purchase than those who purchased foundation. So, they started including a free mascara with foundation orders.
“When I do that, they come back and buy at least one of the two things,” David says. “Instead of losing the customer after the first purchase, I’m identifying which item is stickier and putting together a bundle strategy.”
David also recommends automating recurring reports with a tool like Better Reports so key metrics are always available without requiring manual work. Better Reports works with Shopify Analytics and allows you to build custom reports and schedule them to run regularly.
“It’s really made it easier for me to understand all of my Shopify data,” David says.
4. Let your tools remember for you
Every unanswered email or pending task takes up mental space. David recommends using built-in reminder features so you don’t have to remember every outstanding request yourself, helping keep work from falling through the cracks.
“Outlook, Gmail, and Slack all have schedule, bookmark, snooze, and remind me features,” he says. These features make it easier to revisit conversations and to-do lists when it’s time to follow up without having to rely on your memory.
“When I send something out to someone, and I know they owe me something, I will snooze that email thread to come back to me in a reasonable amount of time,” he says.
5. Step away to think differently
Sometimes the best marketing ideas come outside of work. David recommends stepping away from your day-to-day concerns to make room for new perspectives and inspiration.
“Sit down and read a physical book written more than 50 or 100 years ago, whether that’s Meditations by Marcus Aurelius or anything else that takes you out of the realm of what you’re doing,” he says. “You need to open yourself up to inspiration.”
The point is to stop thinking about your business and engage with some of the most significant intellectual and creative work in history. When you return to your marketing work, you’ll bring a fresh perspective.
“I think the worst you can do when it comes to taking time to read is to grab the business book at the airport,” says David. “Read something that has stood the test of time.”
To capture those moments of inspiration, David also keeps a commonplace book, a compilation of meaningful quotations and notes.
“Having this as a regular practice inspires you to apply that lesson you’ve learned in a random book to your company,” he says. “It gives you more chances to have that flash of genius, to connect different ideas in such a beautiful way.”
6. Don’t wait for perfect data
Data is a powerful tool, but what matters is not only how you use it but that you use it.
“Don’t let analysis paralysis keep you from taking action,” says David. “I think the danger of the data-driven world we live in is that it’s easy to try and wait for the data to be perfect.”
Instead of waiting for certainty, David suggests using A/B testing to experiment.
“I think you have to test and learn; you have to take a leap,” he says. “We take the approach, ’Let’s see what happens when we do this.’ A/B testing’s super valuable in that regard.”
7. Remember what matters
Marketing hacks can save you time and free you up for more strategic work, but they’re not an end in themselves. Don’t let them distract you from what matters.
“The best marketing hack is to stop looking for hacks,” says David. He encourages marketers to be wary of a one-size-fits-all marketing hack that doesn’t consider the context of your business.
Instead, he suggests consistently recentering your thinking on the fundamental purpose of marketing.
“Focus on who your consumer is and how you can best solve their challenges, and then speak to those challenges with empathy and kindness,” he says.
The best approaches—and hacks—for your business will flow from that.
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