If you're the kind of person who thinks you've nailed running a marathon by simply buying some trainers, search or digital marketing is gonna hurt, and I mean really hurt.

In a previous life, I had a boss who had a number of great sayings. One of my favourites was, "sales causes marketing". I tried to argue with him on many occasions, mainly when I was trying to increase my marketing budget, but, I have to admit, he had a point.

Recently, we received an invitation to tender (ITT) to build a website, along with some search engine optimisation. The document we received was both prescriptive and naive, and the resulting site will, almost certainly, not be what the company needs. As a digital marketing agency we receive a lot of these documents, and unfortunately they all follow a similar and lamentable pattern.

As I was heading off to bed last night, my electricity smart meter was flashing green and red. Apparently, I'd gone over my planned budget for the day. The meter was telling me our home consumption for the day had been £15.00, something that would make our annual bill circa £5500. It's closer to £800.

As I many have mentioned one or two (hundred) times, your target market is not everybody. There is always some way or other that you can narrow down who you really want to speak to, even if everybody could, technically, buy what you provide.

A Customer Relationship Management or CRM tool makes sense for so many reasons. Just like personal organisers, such as Todoist, allow people to unclutter their brains by dumping tasks into an app, CRM systems do the same for businesses.

We recently received an invitation to tender to deliver some digital workshops to businesses in and around the area where one of our offices is located. In the document, there was a phrase that went something like, "You will help businesses source new suppliers for the delivery of a website." As I've said before in other blog posts, referring to digital agencies as suppliers doesn't sit very well with me.

If I had a tenner for every time I've seen a blog where the latest post was added about three years ago, I'd be writing this from a villa in the Bahamas. It happens all the time though. Great intentions fizzle out when time is short and it can be really hard to get back on track.

I'm an engineer, a problem solver, although I now work in the field of marketing. Digital marketing to be precise. That includes web design, inbound marketing, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, paid search such as Google Ads, social media marketing, and so on. In this post, I'm thinking about branding.

I got a WhatsApp message from a pal, last night. He's a local building contractor, a joiner, and a guy I've known for years. The message was, in some respects, like a rite of passage, because he got in touch with me asking me if I knew somebody who serviced oil-fired boilers, heating boilers, and I did. It's usually me asking him from something!

I'm heading off to work. It's Friday morning, so a good day, great stuff, the weekend's here. I'll get some fun stuff done at the weekend although plenty of fun stuff happens through the week to be honest.

Okay, so I'm on Lochnagar again, simply because I like coming up here. Today, as you can see in the video, visibility is just about zero. So after all the hard work of getting up the mountain, there's nothing to see.

In this video Red Evolution's Dave Robinson talks about getting to the top of the search engine rankings mountain from, you guessed it, the top of a mountain.

Just like you have to keep tending to your garden to get the most benefit from it, you need to keep looking after your website if you want it to work for your business. 

I ran a Business Booster Workshop last week in the impressive Aberdeen Town House, headquarters of the City Council. The very enthusiastic audience engaged right from the start and asked an interesting variety of questions.