marketing explained properly

I worked in fitness long before I worked in marketing. I have spent more than 20 years in the fitness industry and around 10 years working in marketing. I have worked on gym floors, coached clients, managed clubs, sold memberships and eventually become a gym owner. Marketing did not introduce me to the commercial realities of running a fitness business. Fitness introduced me to marketing, long before I started using terms such as customer journeys, conversion rates and retent

Marketing automation often gets sold as a way to send more messages with less effort. That is one benefit. It is not the most important one. The real value of automation is consistency. It helps a business respond at the right moment, provide relevant information and make sure important tasks do not depend on someone remembering to do them. When automation is planned properly, the customer gets a better experience and the team wastes fewer opportunities. When it is planned ba

Most businesses have a CRM. Far fewer use it particularly well. Customer details go in. Sales notes are added occasionally. Enquiries sit at different stages of a pipeline, some of which have not been updated since last summer. Every so often, someone exports the data into a spreadsheet because that somehow feels easier. Technically, the business has a CRM. In practice, it has an expensive address book. A useful CRM should do far more than store names, email addresses and tel

Your email platform says a campaign generated £12,000 in revenue. Google Analytics says email generated £7,000. Your ecommerce platform reports something different again. So which number is correct? Possibly all of them, according to their own rules. Possibly none of them, if you are trying to work out whether the email actually caused £12,000 of additional sales. This is the problem with marketing attribution. Every platform has its own way of deciding which channel receives

There is always another marketing channel a business could be using. A new social platform starts gaining attention. A competitor launches a podcast. Someone suggests the business should be sending more emails. A member of the team has read that every company now needs a YouTube channel. Before long, the marketing plan has become a collection of platforms rather than a clear strategy. The business is posting on Instagram, occasionally updating LinkedIn, sending an email when

Marketing has changed considerably since the 7 Ps were introduced. We now have social media, email automation, ecommerce, influencers, AI, retargeting and more data than most businesses know what to do with. Yet plenty of businesses still struggle with the basics. They post regularly but have no clear message. They run paid campaigns before fixing their customer journey. They invest in new software while leads sit unanswered in their CRM. They offer discounts because they hav