The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel

I like the marketing funnel. It’s a great analogy, and has served me well for years. I *STILL* think it works reasonably well as a way to describe how businesses experience the various points at which they engage/interact with users before they become customers. But, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend it’s a reasonable way to…
Marketing Startups Zero Click

The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem

There’s a reason zero-click content has taken over your feed, your marketing strategy, and increasingly, your job description. It’s not just because it performs better (although yeah, that is part of it). It’s because it’s the only reliable path forward in a digital ecosystem that’s hoarding traffic and eroding trust. Welcome to the Zero-Trust Internet Today’s platforms will crush your…

Exactly What to Measure with Lift Based Marketing Investments

How do you earn budget if attribution is dead and traffic is vanity metric? Lift-based experimentation. That’s when, rather than try to assign a weight to every potential channel or tactic you (or an algorithm) think contributed to a particular conversion, you measure the lift in conversions that happen after a particular tactic or channel begins. Weirdly, it’s less precise,…

Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up?

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…

Why Do We Need Zero Click Marketing?

Zero Click Marketing is now a book! You can preorder it today, and you’ll get it in the fall. 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…

Content Marketing Needs to Evolve Beyond SEO

I’m tired of seeing blog posts, videos, webinars, articles, guides, resources, social posts whose entire raison d’etre is an attempt to rank for keywords in Google. It limits our creativity AND the likelihood that meaningful marketing improvements will happen. Content marketing is bigger than SEO. I’m tired of 99% of my LinkedIn feed pretending it’s not. This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard…

When Attribution Is a Fool’s Errand, Zero-Click Marketing Is the Way

Zero Click Marketing is now a book! You can preorder it today, and you’ll get it in the fall. “Zero-Click Marketing sounds good and all, but how do I get executive buy-in?” I hear that question a lot. I think it signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what zero-click marketing is. When I first wrote about Zero-Click Content back in July…

Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century.

Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we’ve got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I’m being intentionally provocative. But it’s because things really have changed in the last decade, yet too many of us are still asked to invest in marketing as though it’s 2014. In just seven minutes, I’m going to try to change your mind…
Marketing Tactics Zero Click

The Smarter-Not-Harder Guide to Content Marketing in 2024

Classic content marketing is dead. I don’t say that lightly. Most digital marketing techniques don’t truly die, but the old way of doing content marketing–finding high-volume keywords, then writing blog posts that target those keywords and trying to get your post ranking in Google for them; dead. Why? Because Google is no longer the primary or largest source of information…