Goldilocks Syndrome shows up again. Social media feels difficult to maintain, so it gradually gets pushed aside. It’s one of the easiest areas of marketing to avoid because it never really feels finished. A website can be treated as a project. An advertising campaign has a start date, a budget and a set of results to review. An email campaign is written, scheduled and sent. Social media keeps asking for more, which can make it feel too demanding. There’s always another post t

If you’re trying to make fast money from the internet, SEO probably isn’t the move for you. That doesn’t make SEO bad, it just has a specific role to play. This is where we see another version of Goldilocks Syndrome. Paid ads feel too expensive, so businesses start looking at SEO. SEO then feels too slow, so AI SEO looks like a low-effort shortcut. SEO is attractive because Google search carries intent. Someone searching on Google is normally trying to solve a problem. They m

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

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

There is a common expectation in service business marketing that one advert, one post or one website visit should be able to convert a prospect straight into a sale. The idea is that someone sees the advert, understands the offer, trusts the business, decides the timing is right and then enquires, commits and hands over a few thousand pounds. It is lovely in theory, but it is not usually how people buy professional services. For most service-based businesses, especially in B2