Ideas on marketing, business, and growth

Use AI to make your team better first, then decide what that means for staffing. If AI reliably does the work at the same quality...

It should change who your marketing targets, what it promises, which objections it answers and how it says things. In a business where people close...

Something about the new site is probably making it harder for search engines to reach, index or understand your pages than the old one did....

Sometimes, yes, and it depends on how you pay. If you pay by the hour and the same work now takes half the time, the...

Yes, it can, if you can be patient and if brand is really what’s holding you back. When the right buyers already know you and...

Judge it on whether a person clearly owns it: someone read every word, checked the facts that matter, can defend every claim, and cut it...

Go through them one by one and ask two questions of each: would someone you’d want as a customer find this useful, and does it...

Fund fewer channels properly before you add more, and keep just enough spread that if one platform changes, it won’t bury you. In practice that...

Sometimes you shouldn’t. AI and the newer site builders can get a decent-looking website live in an afternoon for very little money, so for a...

Should you hire one marketing agency to handle everything, or the best specialists you can find for each individual channel? If you have a really...

Maybe not. A website that feels broken may only need a handful of pages rewritten or the navigation reorganized, and a full redesign would cost...

The short answer to fractional CMO vs full-time CMO: if marketing needs a leader every day and there’s a team to lead, hire a full-time...

A lot of AI projects fail for reasons a leadership team can influence: nobody defined the problem, nobody owns the work, nothing was measured before...

Measuring AI ROI comes down to six moves: set a baseline before the pilot starts measure each kind of payoff separately subtract the work AI...

If you want to know whether ChatGPT recommends your company, you can find out a lot on your own before you hire anyone or buy...

A good agency brief fits on a page or two. It covers: what your business is what isn’t working what result would make the work...

How much does a marketing agency cost? There’s no single honest number. Published guides put monthly retainers anywhere from about $1,000 to well over $10,000,...

Generative engine optimization (GEO, also called answer engine optimization or AI SEO) means getting your company mentioned, recommended and accurately described in the answers AI...

How many leads do you need? Start with the revenue goal and work backward: subtract what existing customers and dependable referrals will bring in; the...

How much should a company spend on marketing? The big surveys put the average between about 8% and 9% of revenue: 7.8% in Gartner’s 2026...

Partway through a proposal review at my agency, a buyer asked us how we had failed our customers. They wanted a real project where the...