Behavioural science gives us thousands of studies about how people act. It’s particularly useful for marketers because self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, so surveys can’t be the only source of our customer research. From these studies, we can glean a few directives for our marketing that don’t require hours upon hours of reading dense research papers. […]
The phrase ‘customer feedforward’ may make you feel sick. I admit I feel a little queasy myself. But it’s a subtle yet important distinction from the traditional customer feedback. What the frack is customer feedforward? I saw this phrase quoted from Thomas Barta, co-author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader. And I forgive […]
Expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT). Those should really be the keywords for anyone’s content production, but they are in fact the Google quality score rules. Particularly on pages that deal with transactions or high-stakes advice. EAT and page quality have always been important but algorithm changes over the last year reflect Google’s insistence that EAT […]
Sprint is a concept often used in agile development teams to deliver projects in a continuous, iterative way. Each part of a big project is broken into sprints – a set block of time in which all planning, development, testing and review happens. I’ve used this approach for optimising a customer journey design within a […]
When anyone talks about the societal detriment brought about by social media, it’s likely that doing things ‘for likes’ will be mentioned. Posting a picture of every meal before eating it, cold, for the likes. Gym selfies, for the likes. Shelfies, for the likes. It’s been the subject of dystopian (but seemingly impending) fantasy in […]
In such an obvious move that I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming, Instagram will start phasing paid posts into the Explore tab. Explore is where millions of us spend aimless hours scrolling and tapping, scrolling and tapping. Until now, Instagram has filled Explore with algorithmically curated content designed to delight our personal tastes. […]
Because we’re such busy creatures, humans do a lot of things based on memory, bias and instinct. It saves time to make unconscious decisions. No one makes decisions solely with reason but, as businesses, we try to sell with reason. Yes, reason makes an appearance in consumer habits. But there are also the very important […]
Third-party blogging platforms like Medium are EASY. So, so easy compared with building yourself a content platform. Suspiciously easy, you could say. Setting up an account on Medium = five minutes of effort and zero money before you’re creating beautiful articles that have the potential to be seen by millions. What’s not to like, for […]
There’s nothing worse than empty content that clearly has no expertise behind it. Writers sure know a lot but we don’t know everything and certainly not in-depth. For content that’s genuinely unique and genuinely helpful to your target audience, you need subject matter experts. Within a business, there are experts on all parts of the […]
You’ve got your logo. You’ve got a website, a colour palette, custom-embroidered polos – isn’t that job done on branding? Nope. That’s the housekeeping done. Now it’s time to grow your brand identity with brand artefacts. What is a brand artefact? If your logo is a memory-jogger that reminds people who you are and what […]