Category: 5-Minute Whiteboards

5-Minute Whiteboards Advertising Marketing Psychology

Demand-Creation vs. Demand-Converting Marketing

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
One of the fundamental mistakes I see executives and marketing leaders make over and over is investing in the wrong part of the demand funnel. In this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard, I’ll walk through an example of demand creation at the top vs. middle/bottom of the funnel, and explain why it’s critical to understand whether you have one of two problems:…
5-Minute Whiteboards Agencies Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

How to Use Mental Jujitsu to Convince Your Boss/Team/Client to Make the Right Marketing Investments

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“How do I convince my boss/team/client to invest in my audience’s true sources of influence? Especially when those sources are so hard to prove attribution?” Friend, I hear you. So, for this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard, how about we try a little mental jujitsu to get everyone aligned on the reality of how the modern web works, and how people make…
5-Minute Whiteboards Industry Marketing Predictions

Unpopular Opinion: Public Relations is the Future of Marketing

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Public relations is a dying trade. Mainstream media has less influence than ever. Pitching for coverage is a thankless, fruitless task. Yeah, well, I think PR is poised for a massive comeback. Here’s why: Traditional media may have less influence, but diverse, distributed sources of influence have never, NEVER held more sway over opinions and buying behavior. The 2.5 hours…
5-Minute Whiteboards Industry Marketing Zero Click

Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s weird times in the digital marketing universe. For decades, traffic and sales went together like peanut butter and jelly, cacio and pepe, palak and paneer. But, in the last few years, we’ve seen a deeply strange trend where the two have become unbound. In example after example, traffic can fall while revenue rises. Why is this happening? And is…
5-Minute Whiteboards Content Marketing Industry Marketing Zero Click

Why Do We Need Zero Click Marketing?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
You’ve heard of zero click marketing — and yes, you definitely heard it here first. We’re talking about creating standalone value in the platforms where people hang out, instead of dropping teasers and links in hopes that people will be compelled to click over to your site. It’s marketing where people already are and speaking to them in a way…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Research Tactics

The Biggest Mistake We Make When Asking: “Where Are My Customers?”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s January, and that means many marketers are tasked with a project to identify new channels and sources of influence for new potential investments. This year is likely more active than most given the decline of Google search traffic, the rise of AI, the Twitter exodus, and the meteoric growth of Threads and Bluesky. But, far too many times, we…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing SparkToro Tactics

How Can My Brand Appear in Answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Other AI/LLM Tools?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s no surprise that marketers, founders, and business owners are starting to ask how their brands can be returned in the answers given by AI/LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. But it’s downright shocking how difficult it is to find high-quality, accurate information about how to do this. Granted, you could just ask ChatGPT (the first answer is decent,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Advertising Data Industry Marketing Predictions

Is Google Losing Search Market Share?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A recent Wall Street Journal made the top of feeds in the digital marketing world, claiming that Google is on the precipice of losing the lead in the search advertising wars. Supposedly, in 2025, for the first time, Google may fall under 50% of market share in search advertising (according to an eMarketer report the WSJ cites). The WSJ points…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Marketing Predictions SEO Tactics

How to Fight Back Against a Traffic-Less Web

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Surveys, studies, analytics… they all show the same thing: getting traffic on the web is harder than ever and it’s getting worse much faster in the last 2 years than the decade before. Site owners are faced with two options: compete for the scraps Google and the other platforms provide, or play the game differently by engaging in Zero-Click answers,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Agencies Marketing Tactics

How Do We Anchor Content Marketing Efforts in a Multi-Platform Distribution World?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week, I’m taking a full 8 minutes because I want to address an incredibly important email from Russell Wojcik of Liquibase that came in reply to my previous 5-Minute Whiteboard on Content Marketing Evolving Beyond SEO: What distribution point do we rally around if it’s not just keyword rankings in Google? It’s a fair question because, for many content…

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