Content Marketing Marketing Tactics

Best Practices Are Meaningless Without Audience Research

There isn’t actually anything “wrong” with best practices. Best practices are general guidelines for what to do in order to ensure a general baseline of success. The problem comes when you employ best practices without personalization or a point of view. Then you’re just leading with some statistically average decision and marketing to… nobody in particular. Certainly not bad enough…
Startups

Digital Agency New Business Still a Concern, Referrals Still Rule for Lead Gen and Are Sales Pipelines Finally Recovering?

Recently, Rand and I released the results of the State of Digital Agencies survey for 2025. Our goal of this annual survey is simple – get a temperate check on the digital agency world and give folks a benchmark for how they’re performing compared to their peers. If you’ve missed the launch post, you can catch up it here: The…
AI/LLMs Marketing

Why Everyone Prompts AI Differently (Even When They Want the Same Thing)

Recently, I ran a tiny experiment. I asked eight mom friends — people very similar to me socioeconomically and with kids around the same age — to look up local basketball leagues for their kids. My only instructions were to search as though they really wanted a good answer. (And of course, “good” is subjective.) Every single one of them…