Being ‘data-led’ isn’t just impossible, it’s not even desirable!
Marketers describing themselves as ‘data-led’ or ‘data-driven’ is now so common as to almost be a cliche, and is just one of a myriad examples of the industry co-opting the vocabulary of the sciences (A/B testing, big data, regression analysis…). I’m not certain what underpins this shift, and in the spirit of pushing against it […]
What does ‘Strategy’ even mean?
Strategy would be simpler…if only we spoke the same language Strategy is a meaningless word. Actually, it’s worse than that – strategy is a word with too much meaning. “Too many definitions, too many interpretations, by too many people. It’s out of control” – Alex M H Smith, ‘No Bullsh*t Strategy’ I really like Alex […]
Setting Better KPIs: Four Simple Rules
On the face of it, KPIs are incredibly simple and yet so many marketers seem to over-complicate matters. As a result, they either have a mess of conflicting KPIs or, in more extreme cases, they fail to define any at all. There may be a number of good reasons for this, and often there are […]
My New Year’s Resolution: Fewer Cookies
It’s been eight years since I wrote about the promise of attribution in moving us towards truly omni-channel campaigns. Now that I’m older and, hopefully, wiser, I’ve begun to wonder if I was wrong about one fundamental aspect of the whole thing in the first place: do we really need to be able to assign […]
Farewell to a Beloved Ranking Factor: In Memory of Backlinks?
At a very basic level, we’ve generally viewed backlinks as digital ‘votes’, pretty much an indicator to search engines that others view the content or site positively. Way back in the depths of time (well, in pre-Penguin days anyway), everything was therefore fairly straightforward when it came to links: the more links pointed at a […]
Keyword research in the Helpful Content era
Now that the dust has settled on the latest Helpful Content Update, albeit only into more dust kicked up by the October Core and Spam Updates, it’s probably a good time to think about what’s changed and what this means for our approach to search marketing. What is the helpful content system? In Google’s own […]
Strategists Anonymous: The Maintenance Steps
This is the third in a three-part series detailing a twelve-step programme of digital strategy. If you want to remind yourself of the earlier steps, you can find Steps 1-3 here and Steps 4-9 here. Once you have established a clear strategy and tactics in each of your existing plans, all that remains is to […]
Strategists Anonymous: The Action Steps
This is the second in a three-part series detailing a twelve-step programme of digital strategy. If you want to remind yourself of the first three steps, you can find that article here Now that you understand the problem and you have accepted the solution lies in this programme, it’s time for you to take some […]
Strategists Anonymous: The Understanding Steps
If you’ve found yourself clicking on this article then there’s a good chance that you’re ready to take some steps to improve your approach to your digital marketing strategy. The first three steps are all about understanding the root of the problem and seeing that there is a solution. When you’ve completed these steps, you’ll […]
Strategists Anonymous: A 12-Step Programme of Digital Strategy
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” – Sun Tzu Any business stakeholder will tell you that strategy is important but, when you really dig into it, too many plans are actually a series of tactics packaged together as ‘strategy’. This is due to fundamental […]