In marketing we often talk about personalising our marketing activities – which is a good thing. We all want to be like Amazon – those emails all seem like they have been personally curated for my interests and tastes. That’s a good thing. But often the extent of personalisation in corporate email stops at: inserting the person’s first name in the email subject line Which as you may...
Value
Whenever I start doubting[1] my value[2] to customers, I remind myself that there’s plenty of thriving businesses charging a lot of money for things that would have been laughed at years ago. Here’s a company[3] that sells ‘luxury orthopaedic dog beds’ – I’m not making this up. If you have a dog you probably want to buy them one, if you don’t have a dog you perhaps think this is...
Modern Websites are built on a CRM
Sales and Marketing websites that is If you’d asked people 10 years ago what was the mark of a modern website, most probably would have ended up talking about how websites needed to work on mobile devices. At that time the conversation was around whether to have responsive websites, versus mobile-specific websites (ie remember all those m.companydomain.com sites). These days we all take...
Artisanal content
The Content Opportunity (Artisanal Content lol) I’ve mentioned this previously, but it seems more than ever the rise of AI content slop is creating an opportunity for people who create high value content. With every new, ‘easier’, scalable way to do anything there’s sometimes an equal and opposite opportunity to focus on the old, ‘harder’, manual way to do something. It’s why we have...
Marketing Managers
Here’s a simple high level job description for a Marketing Manager: Understand the business and the problem it solves Prepare the marketing strategy (who, problem, solution, where, when) Organise the implementation (ie execution including measurement) Glean insights that enable you to improve Rinse and repeat Most of this is done regardless of company size. For small businesses you’ll be involved...
RevOps malarkey
Ask 10 people what RevOps is and you’ll get 11 different answers Perhaps it’s a geography thing, but here in Australia, across our clients, large and small, very few of them have a person with ‘RevOps’ in their title. And when they do, it doesn’t seem like they have much authority – it seems more of a token role that the business seems to be testing. Up there with ‘Head of Special Projects’...
Internet strategy
An interesting read from Noah Smith, usefully summarising the demise of the internet as we have known it. Now it has degraded into a hot mess of ads, misinformation, laughable summarising and walled gardens. So long beautiful, open internet. How to respond then? Good question, and one I’m pondering at the moment. I don’t have the answer yet (or perhaps won’t ever) but it does...
HP ink cartridge customers
Love this take from the Sizzle regarding customers who purchase consumables of a brand. Essentially: the brand considers you as an investment when you purchase a printer (ie they’ll make a return on you in the future when you keep purchasing more ink). Whilst it’s definitely true (as it is for all companies that sell a loss leader – as most printers are), customers generally...
Content Quantity starts to repel
I’m a big Alex Hormozi fan. Have been for a while. However, I’ve noticed a change in my response to his content, as it has grown in quantity lately (ie last year or so). Whereas before I used to watch all his clips, especially YouTube, these days there’s soooo much content that I don’t watch any of it. There’s a strange feeling of overwhelm that dilutes the perceived...
Plagiarism as a Strategy
We received this request a little while back: The email had a competitor’s brochure attached. Essentially the brief was: take the competitor’s brochure, switch out branding, spin the content. We declined (of course). I’m all for taking inspiration from others, but it’s concerning when a company has no differentiation and instead feels that copy and paste is a worthwhile...