Research, methodology, and the thinking behind the work.
This is where we share the thinking behind what we build. Not marketing advice repackaged from someone else's blog. Original research, real campaign data, and the methodology that makes AA2 campaigns outperform from month one.
Writing this one might lose me some friends in the industry. That's fine. I'd rather be honest than popular. I've spent over a decade in marketing. I've worked inside agencies, alongside agencies,...
StrategyA business brokerage came to us with a straightforward problem. They had one website, one brand, and one market. They were good at what they did, but every piece of content, every SEO effort, and...
AIThere's a strange dance happening in marketing right now. Half the industry is using AI for everything and pretending they're not. The other half is pretending they use AI when really a junior...
StrategyEveryone wants to automate. It's the first word out of most prospects' mouths when they call. "We need to automate our email." "We need to automate our follow-ups." "We need to automate our...
TelemarketingOutsourced telemarketing has a reputation problem. It's earned, mostly. The industry spent two decades burning through call lists with undertrained graduates reading from scripts, annoying everyone,...
DataMost businesses treat their prospect database the way they treat their office printer. It's there, it works (mostly), and nobody thinks about it until it breaks. This is a problem. Because your...
AITwo years ago, if you'd told me that a single person could run data builds for a seal manufacturer, email campaigns for a print provider, telemarketing oversight for a golf networking business, live...
BusinessLast December I published predictions for 2025 and graded myself honestly in last month's retrospective. Three As and a B. Not bad. Let's see if I can keep the streak going. These predictions aren't...
BusinessTwelve months ago, in this publication's December 2024 issue, I made four predictions for the year ahead. AI content would flood the market, data ownership would matter more, telemarketing would make...
AIChatGPT now processes over 10 million search queries per day. Perplexity handles another 4 million. Google's AI Overviews appear on roughly 40% of informational searches. Microsoft Copilot is...
TechnologyFor eighteen months, we used a well-known email marketing platform for client campaigns. I'm not going to name it because the problems weren't unique to that platform. They're systemic across the...
TechnologyA client sent me a marketing report last year. It was from their previous agency. Forty-two pages. Beautifully designed. Full of graphs showing impressions, reach, engagement rate, and click-through...
BusinessBusiness Asset Disposal Relief, formerly Entrepreneurs' Relief, is about to get more expensive. The rate is rising from 10% to 14% in April 2026. That's not speculation. It's in the Autumn Budget....
AILet me be uncomfortably honest for a moment. The thing I do for a living, running a marketing agency, is being reshaped by AI faster than almost anyone in the industry is willing to admit publicly....
DataFifty thousand is an approximate number. It might be closer to 55,000 at this point, spread across a dozen client campaigns over the past two years, targeting industries from manufacturing to...
TechnologyEvery business I work with has a CRM. Almost none of them actually use it. The typical pattern goes like this. Someone buys HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or whatever the sales rep convinced them...
BusinessEvery January, the same conversation happens. A business owner decides this is the year they take marketing seriously. They set a budget, usually somewhere between £1,000 and £5,000 a month, and then...
ContentLast year a retail e-learning platform came to us with a content problem. They had a decent product, a clear market, and absolutely no content to support their sales process. No blog, no social...
TelemarketingRoughly 73% of B2B sales teams reduced or eliminated cold calling from their outreach strategy between 2020 and 2024. The reasons were predictable: remote working made office lines unreliable,...
ContentLinkedIn changed its algorithm in late 2024, and most people didn't notice. The platform started weighting saves more heavily than likes, comments, or shares in determining how far a post reaches. A...
TechnologyThere's a particular kind of meeting I've had too many times this year. A business owner sits down, opens their laptop, and shows me seven different tools they're paying for. CRM here, email platform...
DataApollo raised its prices again in January. The Professional plan went from $79 to $99 per month. Enterprise, already expensive, crept up further. ZoomInfo's contracts have been quietly shifting...
TechnologyGoogle changed the rules and barely told anyone. Since May 2024, AI Overviews have been appearing at the top of search results for an increasing number of queries. That box of AI-generated text above...
TelemarketingBack in December I predicted that telemarketing would have a renaissance in 2025. Two months in, and I'm already being proved right, though not for the reasons I expected. The prediction was based on...
DataMost prospect lists are rubbish. There, I said it. Thousands of rows in a spreadsheet, half the emails bouncing, job titles that haven't been accurate since 2022, and no meaningful way to tell who...
AISomething happened to the internet around October 2024. You could feel it if you were paying attention. Blog posts started sounding the same. LinkedIn feeds filled up with articles that hit every...
BusinessPrediction articles are usually written by people who've spent the year reading about marketing rather than doing it. They predict vague trends ("AI will continue to grow") with the confidence of...
Content"Hi {{first_name}}" is not personalisation. It's a merge field. Every email platform on the market can insert a first name. Every recipient on the planet knows this. Nobody has ever thought "they...
BusinessOctober arrives and every SME in the country starts having the same internal argument. "How much should we spend on marketing next year?" The finance person wants to cut it. The sales person wants to...
StrategyThere's a category of prospect that most businesses overlook entirely: people who are already buying what you sell, just from someone else. Think about it. A company that's already using a...
DataEvery limited company in the UK is required to file accounts, annual returns, and director information with Companies House. All of it is publicly available. Free to search. Free to download. And...
TechnologyMost marketing dashboards are designed to make people feel good. Open rates up 12%. Impressions hit 50,000. Social followers growing steadily. A wall of green arrows and upward trends. These...
AITwelve months ago, a junior marketer at a typical SME might spend their week doing data entry, pulling basic reports, drafting social media posts, researching competitors on LinkedIn, and formatting...
BusinessJuly and August are when B2B marketing goes on holiday. Email open rates drop. Decision makers are out of office. LinkedIn goes quiet. Most businesses respond by doing the same: scaling back...
DataIndustry average click-through rate for B2B email campaigns sits somewhere between 2% and 3%. That's not a controversial number. MailChimp, HubSpot, Campaign Monitor: they all report similar...
TechnologyTwo years ago, you could send cold emails from your main business domain with a basic email platform and get decent inbox placement. That era is over. Gmail and Microsoft both tightened their...
StrategyMost leads don't die because they weren't interested. They die because nobody followed up. That sounds too simple to be true. But after working with dozens of SMEs over the past few years, I can tell...
StrategyThe temptation to skip research is always there. A new client signs up, they're excited, they want campaigns running by next week. The pressure to produce visible output quickly is enormous. And it...
DataZoomInfo charges around $15,000 a year for a professional licence. Apollo is cheaper but still runs into the thousands. Lusha, Cognism, Clearbit: all subscription-based, all positioning themselves as...
StrategyMost B2B websites make the same mistake. They describe what the company does, list its services, show some logos, and include a "Contact Us" form at the bottom. They are, essentially, digital...
ContentThere's a version of email marketing that goes like this: write one email, send it to the entire list, hope for the best. It's quick. It's easy. And it produces results that are consistently,...
DataB2B contact data decays at roughly 30% per year. Some industries are worse. Tech and SaaS churn faster. Professional services slightly slower. But across the board, nearly a third of the data you...
AISix months ago, I'd have told you AI had no place in email marketing. Today, I use it every day. Not because I changed my mind. Because the tools got better, and I got honest about what they're good...
DataEvery business owner I meet tells me they have a CRM. Most of them say it with a slight wince, like admitting they own a gym membership they never use. The software is there. The contacts are in it....
TelemarketingSomewhere around 2018, the marketing world decided that telemarketing was dead. Cold calling was out. Automation was in. LinkedIn sequences, email drip campaigns, chatbots on every landing page. The...
