Are We Interviewing The Best Marketers Out Of Marketing?
Marketing job adverts are full of familiar language. Businesses want creative thinkers, strategic minds, people who challenge convention, see what others miss and are comfortable questioning established thinking. Then the interview starts. The candidate is expected to build rapport quickly with a room full of strangers, interpret questions they have never seen before, think immediately, […]
Why Marketing Budgets Get Bigger Without Marketing Getting Better
One of the more frustrating situations for any business leader is reaching the point where the marketing budget has increased substantially over several years, the team is larger, the technology stack is more sophisticated and the organisation is investing in more channels than ever before, yet there is still very little confidence that marketing itself […]
Why Modern Marketing Is More Complicated Than It Looks
I understand why marketing can look simpler from outside the function than it often feels from inside it. Most of what the rest of the business sees is the output: an advert, a website, an email, a landing page, a campaign, a brochure or a report. The finished item can look relatively straightforward, so when […]
The Marketing Metric Nobody Measures: Expectation
One of the most important areas of marketing to get right is expectation. That means setting it properly, aligning it across the business, managing it as circumstances change and, occasionally, challenging it when what is being asked bears little relationship to the budget, resource or timescale available. The longer I have worked in marketing, the […]
Fractional CMO vs Marketing Agency: Which Does Your Business Actually Need?
When a business decides that marketing needs to improve, appointing an agency is often one of the first options considered. It is an understandable response. There are agencies specialising in almost every area of modern marketing, from SEO and paid media to PR, content, websites, branding and social media. If the business needs additional expertise […]
Why Your Website Should Be Treated as a Revenue Generating Asset, Not a Digital Brochure
Too many businesses still treat their website like a polite nod to the internet. A few nice brand colours. A homepage. A services page. A contact form. Job done. It is not job done. A website should not exist purely to prove your business is real. It should work. It should attract the right people, […]
The Future of SEO in an AI First Search Landscape
There is a lazy narrative circulating that SEO is dying. It makes for good headlines. It does not make for a good strategy. What is actually happening is more nuanced and more structural. Search is not disappearing. It is being re-engineered. The traditional model of ranking ten blue links against a fixed keyword is giving […]
Align, Don’t Merge: Why Sales and Marketing Need Separate Leaders (and Strategic Unity)
Business leaders often see sales and marketing as two sides of the same coin, both aimed at driving revenue, and some attempt to simplify by combining them under one role. A recent job posting for a Head of Sales and Marketing exemplifies this trend. On paper, it covered everything from managing sales pipelines and forecasts […]
Is Your Marketing Department Performing as It Should?
A Fractional CMO’s Guide to Spotting the Warning Signs and Fixing Them Properly After more than 20 years leading marketing functions across regulated, complex and fast-moving businesses, I’ve learned one thing very clearly: Most companies do not have a marketing problem. They have a marketing leadership problem. On paper, everything looks fine. There’s a team. […]
What Makes a Good Website: A Fractional CMO’s View
Most people judge a website on how it looks. I judge it on how much money it makes you. A website either drives growth or drains your budget. There is no middle ground. As a Chartered Marketer and Fractional CMO with technical design and web development knowledge, I look at websites very differently from a […]