From speaking to lots of business owners, there’s a typical marketing pattern that comes up time and again. It goes something like this: Ads are too expensive, so they look at SEO. SEO takes time, so they look at AI SEO. Social feels hard, so they ignore it. Website conversion is unclear, so they change the offer. The offer doesn’t instantly work, so they pause the campaign. Then they start again somewhere else. It can be any mix of marketing activity. Email marketing, flyers

How do you assess whether an email campaign has worked? The typical answer is simple enough. You send an email, someone opens it, clicks the product being promoted, then buys it. Lovely when it happens. But if that is the only way you judge the campaign, you’re underestimating what email is actually doing. An email about one product doesn’t only create demand for that one product. It can remind someone to reorder something they already use. It can send them back to the websit

In the wake of WordStream/LocaliQ’s latest Google and Microsoft paid ads benchmark report, it’s tempting to ask the usual questions. Is our click-through rate good? Is our cost per acquisition too high? Should our conversion rate be better? How do we compare with everyone else in our sector? Benchmarks give businesses a market reference point, especially when campaign costs rise or results start to fluctuate. They can help marketers, business owners and internal teams underst

Discounts are easy to defend in the short term. They create movement, give people a reason to act and can make a quiet sales period look more productive than it really is. If stock needs shifting, cash flow needs protecting or a campaign needs a stronger hook, a reduction can feel like the most direct lever available. The problem isn’t that discounts exist. The problem starts when they become the main reason people buy. Used occasionally, discounts can remove hesitation. Used

We often look at and judge advertising by its surface qualities first. Does it look professional? Is the photography strong? Has it been well designed and laid out? Is the campaign distinctive enough to impress internally? These are not irrelevant questions, but they are not the most important ones. A campaign can be attractive, well produced and creatively assured while still doing a poor commercial job. Jaguar’s recent “Copy Nothing” campaign is a useful example of this. It