Do I Actually Need a Marketing Director? Your business is doing plenty of marketing. You’ve got a website, social media, perhaps an agency, some Google Ads, a CRM with several hundred mysterious features and, somewhere, a marketing plan that nobody has opened since February. But who’s actually in charge of it all? In the first…
Marketing has become obsessed with speed. More leads. More traffic. More followers. Faster growth. Immediate ROI. Preferably by Thursday. But businesses aren’t built in quarterly marketing dashboards. The strongest marketing strategies are usually the ones that can keep working month after month and year after year without continually demanding more money, more people and more…
One slightly inconvenient thing about organic marketing is that it doesn’t always produce results immediately. You publish an article. Nothing dramatic happens. You improve your SEO. The phone doesn’t instantly start ringing. You share useful advice on LinkedIn. Nobody arrives at your office waving a purchase order. And that’s usually the point where someone asks:…
At some point, marketing can no longer be something someone does when they have time. The Managing Director is overseeing the website. Sales is producing its own materials. An agency is running advertising. Someone is posting on LinkedIn. HubSpot has been set up, although nobody is entirely sure who did it. Technically, you’re doing marketing.…
Businesses invest enormous amounts of time and money trying to attract attention. SEO. Advertising. Social media. Content. Email. Events. AI. CRM systems. All of them can be useful. But none of them can compensate for something far more fundamental: People need to trust you. Customers rarely buy simply because they have seen enough marketing. They…
Being noticed is relatively easy. Being remembered is considerably harder. Businesses have never had more ways to reach customers. Websites, LinkedIn, email, advertising, video, podcasts, events, and now AI can put your business in front of thousands of people. But visibility doesn’t automatically create memorability. A potential customer can see your business today and forget…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve become unusually popular. Not with actual people, unfortunately. With AI sales agents. I’ve been receiving more and more emails and messages from automated agents trying to generate leads for their owners. And some of them are, to put it politely, not quite ready to be allowed out unsupervised. Messages…
Businesses understandably want marketing to deliver growth. More enquiries. More opportunities. More customers. More revenue. Better margins. Greater market share. But there is a surprisingly common and fairly obvious problem: You cannot reliably measure business growth if you cannot measure the activity that is supposed to be creating it. Yet many businesses begin investing in…
Startups are very good at making things work. At least initially. The founder takes care of some marketing, a freelancer works on content, and an agency manages paid ads. Someone sets up HubSpot, a few automations are added, and AI starts to play a role. Before you know it, you have something that technically counts…
Family businesses often have something marketers spend years trying to manufacture. Trust. They have history, reputation, long-standing customer relationships and genuine stories about where the business came from. Some have customers who have been with them for decades. That’s an extraordinary marketing asset, but there’s also a potential problem. The business may have evolved considerably…