Building a Customer Experience Strategy From Scratch
A step-by-step approach to building a customer experience strategy for a business that has never had one, from mapping the journey to assigning real ownership.
The Archive
2023
A Practical Guide to Privacy-First Analytics
Individual-level tracking is gone for a share of your traffic. Here's how consent, first-party data, server-side tracking and modeling still give reliable data.
Why TikTok SEO Matters for Your Bottom Line
A senior Google executive admitted young users often search TikTok before Google. Here's the actual business case for optimizing videos to be found there.
A Practical Guide to Marketing Efficiency
Nine concrete ways to get more from a marketing budget in 2023, from fixing attribution to cutting tool overlap, in the order they pay back.
The State of Helpful Content SEO in 2023
Where Google's helpful content system stood by late 2023, from its August 2022 launch through the September 2023 update and what it meant for low-value sites.
How Short-Form Video Changed Digital Marketing in 2023
A year-in-review look at 2023's short-form video shifts: YouTube Shorts monetization, TikTok's congressional hearing and the first state ban attempt.
First-Party Data Mistakes: Consent Gaps and Silos
The most frequent ways businesses mishandled first-party data collection in 2023, from consent gaps to lists nobody ever emailed.
AI Content Creation: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for business owners weighing AI content creation in 2023, the year ChatGPT went mainstream and Google said quality beats method.
Why Email Automation Matters: The Revenue Math Behind It
Automated email is a tiny share of what most brands send, yet it drives a large share of email revenue. Here's the math behind that gap and why it happens.
ChatGPT for Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know
ChatGPT is still less than a year old, and most marketing teams are figuring out where it helps versus where it creates more risk than it saves in time.
Mastering Generative AI: A Marketer's Playbook
Eight months after ChatGPT hit 100 million users, most marketing teams have tried it, fewer have a real workflow and almost none solved brand-voice issues.
A Practical Guide to Brand Storytelling
How the StoryBrand framework's hero-and-guide structure works, why feature lists lose to narrative and how to build a brand story audiences don't tune out.
Marketing Automation in 2023: AI Drafting and CRM Sync
An operational playbook for running marketing automation across channels in 2023, from lead scoring and CRM sync to AI drafting without losing brand voice.
The State of Influencer ROI in 2023
Measuring influencer marketing got harder after iOS privacy changes and a tighter ad market forced 2023 budgets to justify themselves.
Email Automation: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for whether your business is ready for email automation in 2023, what it costs and the mistake of automating before you have the data.
Common Customer Experience Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Nine customer experience mistakes that keep showing up in otherwise well-run businesses, why each one happens and the specific fix for it.
The State of Privacy-First Analytics in 2023
A snapshot of where analytics stood in 2023: the forced move to GA4, consent mode, modeled conversions and a wave of new US state privacy laws.
TikTok SEO: What Every Business Needs to Know
Google's own executives said younger users are searching on TikTok instead of Google, and by 2023 businesses had to decide whether that applies to them.
The State of Marketing Efficiency in 2023
After a year of tech layoffs and rising interest rates, 2023 marketing budgets got measured against a much harder question: does this pay for itself.
Why Helpful Content SEO Matters for Your Bottom Line
The financial case for helpful content SEO: what Google's system penalized, and why sitewide demotion made unhelpful pages a balance-sheet problem.
The Rise of Short-Form Video: How TikTok's Algorithm Won
From Vine's six-second loops to TikTok's algorithm-driven feed: the decade-long path that made short-form video the default marketing format by 2023.
Case Study: Winning With First-Party Data
An illustrative walkthrough of how a mid-sized online retailer replaced shrinking retargeting audiences with an owned email and SMS program in 2023.
A Practical Guide to AI Content Creation
How the ChatGPT boom of 2023 forced marketers to separate AI as a drafting tool from AI as a content mill, and the workflow that keeps speed without SEO risk.
A Practical Guide to ChatGPT for Marketing
ChatGPT is the tool most marketers open first, and the gap between real value and generic filler comes down to how they prompt it. Here's what to ask for.
A Practical Guide to Generative AI for Marketing
ChatGPT put generative AI in front of every marketer overnight. Here's how it works, what it's good at, where it fails and how to avoid publishing wrong copy.