Why I Like Working in a Small Business

I currently work in a small business, and there are a few reasons why I really enjoy it.

Firstly, the role is varied. I work in marketing, but because we’re a small business, everyone sometimes has to pitch in. On any given day, I could also find myself helping with IT, sales, customer service, product data or something else entirely. It keeps the job interesting, and you tend to learn far more than you would if you stayed inside a narrow job description.

Secondly, there’s the level of involvement. A small tweak to what you do, how you do it or, in my case, how you promote a product, can make a real and sometimes immediate difference to sales and profit. You can often see the effect of your work quite quickly, which makes it feel more worthwhile.

Finally, innovation is welcomed. Good ideas don’t always have to pass through endless layers of management, meetings and approval. If something looks worth trying, there’s often a genuine opportunity to test it, learn from it and put it into practice.

I Dominated Google for 13 years!

I’ve just revisited an old post I wrote about bad SEO promises, and discovered that it’s now 13 years old.

The post used a completely invented word, fuzzyalarmzip, to show how easy it can be to rank number one on Google for a keyword nobody actually searches for.

Thirteen years later, I’m still number one.

So there we are: 13 years of dominating Google, absolutely no competition, and almost certainly no useful traffic whatsoever. Get me, I'm great at this SEO stuff :-)

It may be an extreme example, but the point still stands. A number-one ranking means very little if nobody is searching for the phrase, or if the traffic it brings has no value.

Possibly the most successful useless SEO campaign of all time.

Why I’ve Fallen in Love With Data

At work, I’ve fallen in love with data.

That might sound strange because I’ve dealt with data throughout my marketing career. I’ve been responsible for collecting it, managing it, presenting it and using it, so why the sudden love-in?

I think there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, over the past few years I’ve come to realise just how important accurate product data is to us, our customers and the construction industry as a whole.

Years ago, I attended a marketing summit where a small part of the discussion covered compliance. One thought from that session has always stayed with me: when people don’t know exactly what products they’re specifying, buying or using, the consequences can be far more serious than an incorrect description on a website.

I think I now fully embrace that idea. I want the way we describe, represent and present our products to be as accurate as possible. I question things, challenge information and sometimes examine the smallest details with what might be described as slightly irritating persistence.

That tenacity has helped stop us launching a couple of products that could potentially have been dangerous, though, so I can live with occasionally annoying my colleagues.

It also means that every product requiring a Safety Data Sheet should have one that is accurate, up to date and written to current, and where possible future, standards. Virtually every product should also have a Technical Data Sheet explaining clearly how it should be used safely and correctly.

So yes, right now I’m having a deep and unapologetic love affair with data.

How I Decide What To Write In Newsletters

Newsletters aren’t just about finding something to say once a month and hoping people click. At their best, they’re strategic storytelling devices. They help you share useful information with customers and prospects in a format that’s easy to read, easy to understand, and, ideally, useful enough that they’d actually miss it if it stopped arriving.

For me, a good newsletter should tell people something about your industry, your business, your products, or your customers that they wouldn’t easily get anywhere else. It’s about getting your story out into the market, but doing it in a way that gives the reader something back.

If you’re going to mention products, try not to just say “here’s a product, please buy it”. Can you teach people something new, different, or genuinely useful about it? Can you explain where it came from, why it exists, what problem it solves, or why people use it in a certain way? Sometimes the most ordinary product has a decent story behind it, you just have to dig a little.

If you’re struggling for content, post roundups are often a good place to start. They work particularly well for small, local businesses because you don’t always need to invent a big campaign. You can simply pay attention to what your customers already care about.

And if you’re a local business, your local area is your superpower. Locality and community are two of the strongest drivers of relevance in newsletter content, so don’t sleep on them. Talk about what your customers are talking about. Promote the events they go to. Share a bit of local history. Mention the things that make your town, village, city, or region feel familiar to the people reading.

The other useful thing about newsletters is that, with clever calls to action, you can start to understand what your customers actually engage with. Which links do they click? Which topics get a response? Which offers are ignored? Over time, that starts to tell you what kind of content you should create more of.

So when I’m deciding what to write in a newsletter, I’m not just looking for “content”. I’m looking for the useful story. The thing that helps, explains, teaches, reminds, or connects.

And if you’re really struggling with newsletter copywriting, it might be worth talking to a small agency like Yorkshire Writers. They’re the people behind this Digital Garden, so I probably would say that, but still… newsletters are exactly the sort of thing that benefit from a bit of outside thinking.

Linkbaiting That Actually Worked

Linkbaiting is basically the art (or sometimes dark art) of creating something that makes people want to click, share, link, or react. At its worst, it’s cheap headlines engineered purely to drag people in, usually with loaded words like “secret”, “urgent”, “shocking”, or a suspiciously neat number in the title.

At its best, though, linkbaiting is just a good hook. Something useful, interesting, funny, controversial, or timely enough to make someone stop what they’re doing and pay attention.

Years ago, I admit it, I turned very slightly to the dark side and did a little bit of baiting myself. In my defence, it was only an experiment. Also in my defence... it worked.

This was back when I worked for a small independent software vendor, and we wanted to get more database administrators onto the website. We had something relevant for them, a short free guide, and the business sold ODBC and JDBC drivers, so it wasn’t a random audience we were chasing. These were exactly the sort of people who might one day need what we offered.

I could have gone into forums and started pushing links around, but that would have felt clumsy. I had no relationship with those people, and if some stranger had dropped into a discussion with a salesy link, most of them would probably have ignored it. Fair enough too.

Instead, I used LinkedIn.

The 1st step was the bait. I slightly amended my LinkedIn profile so it clearly mentioned that I worked with a business developing ODBC and JDBC drivers. Nothing too heavy, just enough that if the right person landed on my profile, they would understand what we did. In truth, that’s still a useful tip today: your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t just say what your job title is, it should give the right people a reason to be curious.

We also made sure the free guide for database administrators was easy to find on the company website. That bit mattered. There’s no point drawing people in if they land on a page that gives them nothing useful.

Then came the simple bit. I searched LinkedIn for database administrators and visited their profiles, one by one.

LinkedIn, being LinkedIn, would then show some of those people that I had viewed their profile. Some would ignore it, of course, but others would naturally click back to see who I was. When they did, they saw the short mention of ODBC and JDBC drivers, and from there a small number clicked through to the company page or website.

That was the whole tactic.

It wasn’t clever in a “look at me, I’ve cracked the internet” sort of way. It was just curiosity, relevance, and timing. The people I viewed were people with a genuine professional connection to the thing we offered, and the thing we offered them was at least potentially useful.

Would I describe it as pure linkbait? Probably. Would I describe it as spam? Not really, because the targeting was relevant and there was something useful at the other end. That distinction is important.

Good linkbait shouldn’t trick people. It should catch their attention, then reward that attention with something worthwhile. A free guide, a useful article, a proper answer to a common problem, or even just a genuinely interesting point of view.

The lesson from that little experiment is still true. You don’t always need a huge campaign to get attention online. Sometimes you just need to understand where your audience already spends time, give them a small reason to notice you, and make sure there’s something useful waiting when they do.

That’s the bit too many people miss. The bait gets the click, but the value is what makes the visit matter.

Blogging For Business Owners

If you run a small business, there’s a fair chance you’ve thought about blogging at some point. Maybe someone told you it would help with Google. Maybe you’ve seen competitors doing it. Or maybe you just know there are things you could explain better than anyone else in your industry.

And that’s really where blogging starts to make sense.

A good business blog isn’t just about throwing words onto a website and hoping search engines reward you. It’s a way to talk directly to your market, your prospects, and even your existing customers. It gives you space to explain what you do, answer common questions, share useful advice, show a bit of personality, and quietly remind people that you know your stuff.

Search engines do like fresh, useful content, of course. A regularly updated blog can help bring more pages into your website, create more opportunities to be found, and give people more reasons to spend time with you before they ever pick up the phone or send an enquiry.

But blogging for business owners has one big trap: it’s very easy to start without a plan.

You write one post, then another, then life gets busy. The blog sits there for six months, looking a bit abandoned, and suddenly something that was meant to help your business starts to make it look like nobody’s home.

That’s why it helps to keep things simple from the start. Before you begin, think about the type of content you actually want to write. What questions do customers ask you all the time? What do people misunderstand about your product or service? What advice could you give that would genuinely help someone make a better decision?

You don’t need to publish every day. For most small businesses, even 2 to 4 useful posts a month is a strong starting point. The important thing is consistency, not volume. It’s far better to write something useful once a fortnight than to blast out six thin posts in a week and then disappear.

It’s also worth thinking about how you’ll use the blog once it’s published. Will you share posts on social media? Link to them from email newsletters? Send them to customers when they ask a common question? A good blog post can do more than sit quietly on your website; it can become a helpful sales tool, a customer service shortcut, and a small proof point that you understand your market.

If writing doesn’t come naturally, that doesn’t mean blogging isn’t for you. Some business owners are full of good ideas but struggle to get them into shape. That’s where getting support from people who understand writing can help, whether that’s someone in-house, a freelancer, or a specialist service such as Yorkshire Writers.

The main thing is to stay focused. Know why you’re blogging, know who you’re writing for, and don’t turn it into a chore you secretly resent. Done properly, a business blog can build trust, improve visibility, and give your website a bit more life.

Start small, keep it useful, and give people a reason to come back.

Nowt To Do With Me, Springs and Hinges

I said something to a work colleague today that took me straight back more than thirty years, and I thought I’d better get the story down before it disappears forever.

I started working for BT, or British Telecom, or British Telecommunications plc depending on how you remember it, back in the days before everything had been smoothed out by the internet. I was there until 1997, when I moved to GPT, (GEC Plessey Telecommunications). That’s a whole other story.

Back in the 80s and 90s, BT still had those old red telephone boxes dotted all over the place. They’re remembered now as lovely bits of British street furniture, very iconic back in the day, but anyone who actually used them will remember a slightly different reality.

They usually smelt of wee. You also felt like you might catch something just by standing in one for too long. And, if you did manage to survive the smell, you then had to battle your way back out through a door held shut by springs so strong you practically needed to be Geoff Capes to open it (anyone under 50 may need to look him up). It was just as difficult sometimes to open these things, and the silly little handles didn't really give you any purchase!

Every so often, our BT office in Leeds would get calls from customers complaining that people were struggling to open the phone box doors, and they wanted someone to do something about it.

One of the departments we had back then was Directories. They managed Directory Enquiries, where operators gave out telephone numbers, and Directory Production, which involved producing those enormous paper phone books that used to land on everyone’s doorstep. Pre-internet life must look almost prehistoric now.

Anyway, the chap who headed up the Directories team in Leeds used to get loads of these “phone box door” calls transferred through to him from the switchboard. I’ve no idea why, other than every phone box had a paper directory in it, so someone must have decided it was vaguely connected.

It wasn’t.

Every now and again, you’d hear him answer one of these calls with something along the lines of:

“Nowt to do with me. Springs and hinges.”

I may have paraphrased that slightly, but that was the gist of it.

The funny thing is, we actually had an engineering team that looked after the springs and hinges in phone boxes. That was a real thing. Somewhere inside BT, there were people whose job included making sure the doors on red telephone boxes opened and closed properly.

So now, every so often, when someone asks me something that has absolutely nothing to do with me, I still find myself saying, “Nowt to do with me. Springs and hinges.”, which I did this morning, and remembering this story brought a smile to my face.

No big reason for this story, really. But that’s what a digital garden is for, isn’t it? A little bit of history, a little bit of nonsense, and something small that made me chuckle today.

The Building Blocks of Better SEO

A short, practical guide to the layers that help product pages rank better in Google.

I was recently asked to look at SEO for a couple of product ranges for our New Zealand business. Nothing unusual there. Product SEO is one of those jobs that sounds simple at first, then quickly turns into a pile of small, connected jobs.

You can’t just add a keyword to a title, write a quick paragraph, and expect Google to suddenly fall in love with the page. Sometimes that helps, but proper SEO is built in layers. Some layers have a bigger ranking impact than others, but they all support each other.

The image below is a simple way of thinking about it.

1. Helpful, high-quality content

This is usually the biggest piece. A product page needs to be useful to the person landing on it. That means clear product details, practical descriptions, specifications, FAQs, and anything that helps the buyer make a decision.

For construction and trade products, this might include sizes, materials, use cases, compatibility, pack quantities, safety information, installation notes, and the type of customer or job the product is best suited for.

Google’s own guidance talks about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, rather than content written mainly to manipulate rankings. That’s a useful test for product pages. Would this page genuinely help a buyer, or is it just a thin page with a few search terms sprinkled in?

2. Authority and trust signals

Good content works better when the wider web gives Google reasons to trust the site. Relevant links, trade mentions, customer references, reviews, supplier relationships, and brand mentions can all help build confidence around a business.

For a B2B construction product range, this doesn’t have to mean chasing hundreds of random backlinks. A link or mention from a relevant merchant, trade customer, industry partner, buying group, case study, supplier page, or local business profile may be far more useful than a pile of weak directory links.

Google also says links help it discover pages and understand relevance, so internal and external linking still matter when they’re natural, crawlable, and useful. 

3. Site architecture and internal linking

Even strong product pages can struggle if they’re buried too deep or disconnected from the rest of the site.

A sensible structure helps both users and search engines understand what the business sells. Categories, subcategories, product ranges, and supporting guides should link together in a way that feels obvious.

For example, a temporary fencing page might naturally link to construction barriers, pedestrian barriers, road cones, safety signage, and relevant support articles. This isn’t just an SEO trick. It helps customers move around the site and find related products.

4. Keyword research and search intent

Keyword research isn’t about stuffing pages with phrases. It’s about understanding how customers search.

In the New Zealand market, people may use different language from UK customers. They may search by product name, use case, category, regulation, or problem. That matters. A page targeting “temporary fencing” may need different wording from one targeting “site fencing”, “construction fencing”, or “crowd control barriers”.

The aim is to map each page to the right search intent. Product pages should target buying or specification searches. Guides and FAQs can target research searches. Category pages can sit between the two.

5. Technical foundations

The technical side doesn’t always feel glamorous, but it can quietly hold everything else back.

Pages need to be crawlable, indexable, fast enough, mobile-friendly, secure, and easy for Google to understand. Titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt text, clean URLs, canonical tags, redirects, and structured data all play their part.

Google’s Search Essentials highlight the need for crawlable links, indexable content, and words that people would use when searching for your content. In plain English: Google needs to access the page, understand the page, and see that it matches what people are looking for.

Supporting signals

There are also smaller supporting signals that can help strengthen the overall picture.

Social mentions probably won’t transform rankings on their own, but they can increase visibility and lead to trade mentions, customer links, and brand searches. Schema markup can help search engines understand page content. Image optimisation can bring traffic through image search and improve page performance. Analytics helps show what is working. Regular updates keep pages accurate and useful.

None of these should replace the bigger layers, but they’re worth doing properly.

A simple SEO process for product ranges

For a product range, I’d keep the process fairly straightforward:

1. Check whether the page can be crawled and indexed.
2. Review the current title, H1, headings, meta description, and URL.
3. Research how customers in that market actually search for the product.
4. Map one main keyword theme to each page.
5. Improve the product content so it answers real buyer questions.
6. Add useful internal links from related categories, products, and guides.
7. Look for genuine trade, supplier, customer, or partner mentions.
8. Add or improve images, alt text, FAQs, and schema where useful.
9. Track rankings, impressions, clicks, and enquiries over time.
10. Review and update the page when the product, market, or Google guidance changes.

The main point

SEO works best when all the layers are in place. A technically sound page with thin content won’t do much. A brilliant guide that nobody links to or can easily find may also struggle. A page packed with keywords but written for nobody in particular is unlikely to build trust.

For product SEO, the best starting point is still simple: make the page genuinely useful, make sure Google can understand it, and connect it properly to the rest of the site.

That won’t guarantee rankings overnight, but it gives the page a much better chance.

Attention Tax

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about interruptions at work; not just obvious interruptions like phone calls, Teams messages, or someone asking “got a minute?” (although they can be a pain too), but the hidden cost that comes after the interruption.

I think most workplaces still treat interruptions as a simple time problem, where if somebody interrupts you for 10 minutes, then supposedly you've lost 10 minutes of work.

But that isn’t really how it works is it. Well not for me anyway!

You'll notice it especially if you’re doing deeper work ... writing, planning, problem solving, analysing data, designing something, trying to properly think something through ... the interruption itself is only part of the damage.

There’s also the refocus time afterwards.

You have to mentally reload the task back into your brain. Remember where you were. Rebuild the momentum. Re-enter the thought process you were already halfway through before somebody derailed it.

Sometimes a 2 minute interruption can cost 20 minutes of useful thinking.

I’ve started thinking of this as an “Attention Tax”.

Every interruption taxes your concentration a little bit. One interruption is manageable. Ten in a day starts fragmenting your thinking completely.

And I think this is partly why some days feel mentally exhausting even if you’ve technically “done loads”, you haven’t spent the day doing productive work, you’ve spent the day rebuilding momentum over and over again.

Modern workplaces almost seem designed around interruption now.

Side note: I remember when I started by career in British Telecom in 1987, been told that when it was still the civil service, managers had flags attached to their intrays, and if a red flag was showing, you couldn't talk to them ... I sometimes wish I had that here. 

Emails. Teams notifications. Meetings. “Quick questions”. Artificial urgency. Constant deadline pressure.

We also seem to reward responsiveness, it's deemed to be a good things if you accept the interruption and rude if you don't, but I’m not convinced we reward depth anymore.

I touched on some of this already in my post about why I hate deadlines, but I think there’s probably a bigger idea buried in all this somewhere.

This is definitely a seed post for now. I think there’s more to explore here.

I Hate Deadlines

I honestly don't think there are enough negative words to get across how much I hate deadlines.

Especially short deadlines. Usually I get these at work when someone else hasn't passed a task to me as early as they could have done, or they’ve overpromised on a delivery, usually to a customer, or someone else hasn't done something so it suddenly falls to me.

These last-minute or urgent tasks seem to be getting more and more common. They can, and often do, leave me feeling completely drained. I can go home physically and mentally exhausted, with no energy to do anything personally fulfilling.

Now don't get me wrong, sometimes these last-minute tasks can be a challenge, and that can actually be exciting. I love that side of my role. I've moved away from a strategic role to a more tactical one, so I do enjoy these sorts of tasks ... just not too many urgent ones in the same week.

Anyway, my conclusion through all this is that I hate deadlines. I know we need them, but only when they are used properly.

I remember being told many years ago that deadlines should really only be used when something genuinely bad will happen if you miss them. Not just because someone says, “I sent you an email last week, have you done it yet?” “No.” “Well, could you look at it today for me please?” ... why? Just because you asked me to do something ast week and I haven't yet, well perhaps in the list of tasks I have to complete, YOUR task isn't important!

And don't even get me started on the term "ASAP". That word should be banned because almost everyone uses it wrongly.

I actually find deadlines work best when they are external and carry real consequences. If you miss them, you damage the reputation of the business, lose income, or severely embarrass both the business and yourself. Again though, not when someone else has overpromised something to a customer or supplier.

Do you also find that deadlines are often set arbitrarily by people with very little technical context, or by people who don't really understand your role and what's involved? I do!

I tend to find that a task takes as long as it takes. Setting an arbitrary deadline, especially a tight one, usually just means the work won't be as good.

As part of my thinking (or ranting) about time and time management at work, I've also written about what I'm currently calling Attention Tax.

ASAP … is that really what you want?

I really struggle with the term “ASAP”.

People use it all the time in (so called) professional environments, but it does not tell me anything useful. It sounds urgent, but it gives me no clear direction on your timescales and I end up guessing what you mean, and that might mean that I miss your deadline.

If you work with me, it is worth knowing this. The term winds me up so much, mainly because most of the time it is being used to mean something else.

The issue is simple. “ASAP” stands for “as soon as possible”, which really means I will get to it when my current workload allows. If I am fully booked until Thursday, then Friday morning is the earliest I can realistically do it.

That is not me being awkward. That is just how time works.

The problem is that most people do not use it that way. When someone writes “ASAP”, what they usually mean is “I need this now”. They are trying to show urgency, but they are doing it without giving a proper deadline, proper instructions.

That is where it falls apart.

If you want something done quickly, you need to be clear about when you need it. Without that, I have to make a judgement call. I have to weigh it up against everything else I am doing, and I might get that call wrong.

There is also a knock-on effect. If something genuinely urgent comes in after your request, it will take priority. Your task then moves back, because it was never tied to a clear time in the first place.

So the word meant to speed things up can actually slow them down.

There is a straightforward fix.

Say what you mean.

If you need something by a certain time, write the time. If it is urgent, say how urgent it is in a way that I can act on.

“Send me those files ASAP” becomes “Send me those files by 4pm today.”

“I need a reply ASAP” becomes “Please reply by midday tomorrow so I can finish this.”

“ASAP please” becomes “This is high priority. Can you do this in the next two hours?”

Now I know where it fits. I can plan properly, and you are more likely to get what you need.

If you really do mean “whenever you can fit it in”, then fine, say “ASAP”. Just be aware that it might not be today, or even this week.

If there is a deadline, say it.

Being clear is not a small thing. It shows respect for other people’s time, it removes guesswork, and it keeps work moving.

“ASAP” is not clear. It is vague, and vague is where problems start.

You can also read about why I hate deadlines! 

Why Everyone Thinks They Can Do Marketing

…and why most of them are kidding themselves

Somewhere along the way, marketing got mistaken for “posting stuff online.” or a simple email out to all your customers meant that you've launched a product ... all this is social medias fault, it made marketing (or promotion) feel accessible to all, tools made it feel easy, and now it seems like anyone with a login thinks they’ve cracked it.

Blame the platforms. Blame Canva. Blame AI tools like ChatGPT and the rest of them. You can knock up something that looks decent in minutes, so it feels like the hard part’s done before you’ve even started thinking.

Write something. Generate an image. Add a hashtag. Post something. Sit back and wait for the sales to roll in.

That’s the expectation. That’s also where it starts going wrong.

The tools are easy. The thinking isn’t.

The problem isn’t the tools. They’re brilliant for what they do. But they don’t replace thinking, and they don’t build a strategy for you.

Without a plan, you’re just making noise. You’re putting things out there without any real direction, and hoping something sticks.

I’ve seen it more times than I can count. Nice-looking posts, clean design, plenty of activity… and absolutely nothing coming back from it. No engagement, no leads, no sales.

Non-marketing folk clammer for Followers and Engagement - it's all bullshit. I tell anyone that starts working with me in marketing that if only one person follows me, and they are a journalist, and they engage with everything i do, I would be VERY happy. 

Once you actually step back and work out who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to say, and why it matters, things start to move. It’s never the font or the colours. It’s always the thinking behind it.

Social media didn’t create marketers. It created confidence.

One post does well and suddenly someone’s a marketing expert. You see it everywhere now, especially on social media. I've had a couple of Tik-Tok posts go viral, I'm no fecking expert on the platform, I have very little idea what I'm doing on it - but sometimes you get lucky.

A meme lands, something gets shared a few times, and next thing they’re selling “growth strategies” in their bio. It looks convincing on the surface, but there’s usually not much underneath it.

Posting content is not marketing. Marketing is understanding why people buy, what stops them buying, and what makes them trust you over someone else.

Likes might feel good, but they don’t pay the bills. Revenue does.

AI has made this worse, not better

This is the bit a lot of people won’t say out loud. AI hasn’t made everyone better at marketing, it’s just made everyone faster at producing, at best, very average content.

Most people don’t know what to ask, so they get surface-level answers back. Slightly off, slightly generic, and usually missing the point… but written well enough that it feels right.

And that’s the danger. Because it sounds good, people assume it is good, and out it goes.

AI is only as good as the prompt behind it. If you don’t understand marketing, you won’t spot when the answer’s wrong. You’ll just publish it and wonder why nothing happens.

That’s why so much AI content looks the part but doesn’t deliver. It’s been written without any real understanding behind it.

Marketing is slow. That’s the part nobody likes

There’s this idea that marketing should deliver instant results. Run something today, see the spike tomorrow.

In reality, it’s slower and a lot less glamorous. It’s testing, tweaking, reviewing, and going again. Over and over.

Some of it’s creative, sure. But a big chunk of it is looking at what didn’t work, digging into the numbers, and figuring out why. God I love the numbers stuff.

That’s where the real progress comes from. Not the “publish” button.

What you actually need (and what most people skip)

When you strip it back, proper marketing comes down to a few core things. None of them are particularly flashy, but all of them matter.

You need to know who you’re talking to. Not “everyone” or “anyone who might buy”, but actual people with specific needs and problems.

You need to understand how you’re different. And no, “we care more” isn’t a strategy. Everyone says that.

You need messaging that lands. Something that makes people stop and think, “that’s exactly what I need.”

And you need data. What’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. If you’re not measuring it, you’re guessing.

You’re probably not going viral

It’s worth saying this plainly. Going viral is not a strategy. It’s luck. I know - it happened to me.

I just love it when Sales asks me to create a post or video that will go viral, I'm sure my face gives away the fact that they have just admitted they know nothing about marketing :-) 

I admit, it happens to some, but most businesses grow through consistent, steady improvements. Better targeting, clearer messaging, smarter decisions.

It’s not flashy, but it works. And it lasts.

It’s not about pretty posts

People love the creative side of marketing. The visuals, the layouts, the clever copy. And yes, that stuff matters.

But if it doesn’t perform, it doesn’t matter how good it looks. You need to know who clicked, who converted, and who came back.

Without that, you’re just decorating the internet and hoping for the best.

A quick reality check

I’ve been doing this for 35-ish years. I know what the feck I’m talking about.

Knowing how to use a platform doesn’t make you a marketer. And your cousin’s aunty spending two weeks in a marketing office doesn’t count as experience either.

This is a craft. It takes time to learn, and even longer to get properly good at.

The reality

Marketing is easy to start, and that’s the problem. It gives the impression anyone can do it well.

They can’t. It’s strategy, psychology, data, and execution all working together. Miss one of those, and the whole thing weakens.

The tools have opened the door. Knowing what to do once you’re through it… that’s the difference.