They would, however, quite like you to answer their email. Marketing technology is impressive. CRM platforms. Automation. Analytics. AI. Personalisation. Attribution software. Social scheduling. SEO tools, dashboards displaying information from other dashboards. A modern marketing stack can resemble the control room of a small nuclear facility. Your customers don’t care. Nobody Has Ever Been Impressed…
These days, we can measure just about everything in marketing. But actually understanding what it all means is still optional and often ignored. Marketing has never had more data. Clicks. Impressions. Reach. Engagement. Open rates. Conversion rates. Scroll depth. Attribution. Customer lifetime value. We can even track exactly how far someone scrolls down a webpage…
Because apparently simple marketing isn’t impressive unless it comes with a dashboard. Marketing has become extraordinarily sophisticated. We have automation, attribution models, CRM systems, AI, predictive analytics, personalisation, heat maps and dashboards displaying the outputs from other dashboards. This is progress. Probably. The problem is that somewhere along the way, we may have started confusing…
Book Review : Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong by Martin Lindstrom. We like to believe we’re rational consumers. We compare prices. Read reviews. Consider the alternatives. Weigh up the pros and cons. Make an informed decision. Then we buy something because the packaging felt nice. Buyology: How Everything We…
Marketing used to be relatively straightforward. Understand your customers. Create something valuable. Tell people about it. Make it easy for them to buy. Today, apparently, this requires seventeen software subscriptions, six dashboards, an omnichannel strategy and a diagram that only really makes sense when printed at A1. In Episode 15 of The Overthinker’s Guide to…
Because apparently, customers have opinions, and now they have Wi-Fi. There was a time when businesses had rather more control over their reputation. You created the advertising. You wrote the brochure. You chose the photographs of suspiciously happy people shaking hands in meeting rooms. Then you told everyone how wonderful you were. Today, things are…
Which is slightly inconvenient if you work in marketing. Marketing departments are very good at telling stories. We write campaigns. Create videos. Develop case studies. Carefully craft brand messages and spend unreasonable amounts of time deciding whether “transform” sounds more impressive than “improve.” But some of the best marketing stories aren’t created by marketers at…
There is a wonderfully comforting moment in marketing when somebody becomes a customer. The lead converts. The CRM changes status. A dashboard turns slightly greener. Someone in Sales says, “Got them.” And Marketing quietly wanders off to find another unsuspecting prospect. Job done. Except, of course, it isn’t, because getting someone to buy from you…
Book Review : Hegarty on Advertising – Turning Intelligence into Magic by Sir John Hegarty. Advertising has spent much of the last twenty years enthusiastically announcing its own death. Television was dead. Print was dead. Agencies were dead. Then social media arrived, and apparently everything changed. Then AI arrived, and apparently everything changed again. And…
Because eventually someone actually has to deal with you. There’s a comforting idea in marketing that almost any business problem can be solved with more marketing. Sales slowing down? Advertise. Competitor getting noisy? Advertise. Customers unhappy? Advertise harder. Unfortunately, there comes a point where another campaign is rather like putting a fresh coat of paint…