STRATEGIC MARKETING CONSULTANT
Leadership & Capability for What’s Next
Is your marketing ready for what’s next?
MARKETING CONSULTANT
When a business has outgrown the way its marketing is structured, led or executed, the problem isn’t always obvious.
Marketing can become messy, reactive, underperforming or simply disconnected from where the business is going. The gaps might be in strategy, leadership, capability, structure, skills or execution.
That’s where I come in.
I work with CEOs and MDs to identify what’s holding marketing back, determine what needs to change and build the capability to support the business’s next phase of growth.
With two decades across strategy, digital, technology, execution and leadership, I bring the experience and perspective to see the bigger picture — and turn it into practical action.
MARKETING CONSULTING
I help CEOs and MDs understand what’s really holding marketing back and determine what needs to change. From strategy and structure to people, processes, agencies and execution, I bring the experience to turn complexity into clear priorities and practical action.
STRATEGIC PLANNING
Strategy only becomes useful when it translates into action. I develop practical plans that connect business objectives with strategic opportunities, priorities and actions — giving people the clarity and structure to move forward.
MARKETING LEADERSHIP
Strong marketing needs more than good ideas. It needs clear leadership, sound decisions and accountability. I work alongside leadership and marketing teams to establish direction, strengthen capability and align marketing with where the business is going.
→ Marketing Leadership
DIGITAL MARKETING
A strategic approach connects digital channels, customer experience and execution to the broader marketing strategy — creating a more coordinated approach to reaching, engaging and converting the right customers across the journey.
Marketing Consultant
MELISSA HOW
Two decades of experience across marketing strategy, digital, technology, execution and leadership.
Based in Melbourne, I work with established businesses across Australia and around the world, helping them prepare for what’s next.
I’ve worked across agencies, consulting, education and business ownership, seeing marketing from almost every angle. I’ve built and led teams, founded and ran a digital agency, launched an eCommerce business, advised established organisations and taught marketing at university.
That experience has shaped how I work today.
I know what good marketing looks like — and what happens when capability isn’t there. I’ve seen businesses with great strategies but no one able to execute them, talented teams without clear direction, agencies solving the wrong problem and leadership teams trying to manage marketing without the visibility they need.
My role is to see what’s really going on, identify what needs to change and help make it happen.
I work alongside CEOs, MDs and marketing teams to strengthen strategy, leadership, capability and execution. Sometimes that means solving a specific problem. Sometimes it means stepping back and looking at the marketing function as a whole.
My background in higher education has also shaped the way I work. Teaching Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing, Consumer Behaviour, Advertising and other disciplines at RMIT and Swinburne strengthened my ability to make complex marketing concepts clear, practical and useful to the people responsible for putting them into practice.
Marketing with…
PURPOSE & DIRECTION
Good marketing starts with knowing where the business is going. Strategy gives it direction. Leadership gives it momentum. Capability makes it possible.
HOW THE ENGAGEMENT WORKS
From strategy and direction through to implementation. It’s all about what’s best for the business.
The way I work depends on what the business needs, the challenges you’re facing and the capability already within the team. I can work alongside existing teams, provide strategic direction and oversight, or take a more hands-on role where additional support is needed.
COLLABERATIVE
Bringing people together: the people who understand the business, customers and existing activity, drawing on different perspectives and expertise.
CONNECTED
Considering the bigger picture: connecting strategy, marketing, digital, customer experience and execution rather than treating each element in isolation.
FLEXIBLE
Shaping the scope and role around the business: from a focused strategic engagement to ongoing direction, team support and oversight of implementation.
Let’s find out what’s holding marketing back
MARKETING & THE BIGGER PICTURE
September 8, 2026Marketing StrategyWhen Marketing Is Always Responding
In businesses that are constantly under pressure, marketing can start to look the same.
Something happens, and marketing responds.
A competitor launches something new. Marketing pivots.
Sales wants more leads. Marketing reacts.
A campaign underperforms. Marketing panics.
Someone in leadership has a new idea. Marketing hops to it.
The website needs changing. A new piece of content is needed. An event is coming up. There is a new product to promote. Someone has seen what another business is doing and thinks we should be doing it too.
So marketing responds.
None of these things are necessarily unreasonable.
In fact, many of them may be legitimate priorities. Good marketing should be responsive to business needs and what is happening in the market.
The problem is when responding becomes the way marketing operates.
When the next request takes priority over the work already planned.
When something urgent continually pushes something important further down the list.
When the team spends so much time reacting to what is happening now that there is very little capacity left to think about what should happen next.
This can be difficult to spot because the marketing team may look incredibly productive.
There is always something happening.
Campaigns are being launched. Content is being produced. Meetings are happening. Requests are being turned around. Tasks are being ticked off.
But underneath all that activity, marketing can gradually lose its strategic direction.
It becomes a function that responds under pressure rather than one that helps shape where the business is going.
And that has a cost.
The Cost You Can’t See on the Marketing Report
The cost of reactive marketing isn’t always obvious, and you won’t necessarily see it in the monthly report.
Instead, it shows up in what the team isn’t getting around to doing.
Strategic work gets pushed aside because there is another urgent request.
A campaign gets launched before the team has had time to properly think through the idea.
Customer research gets deferred because there is a deadline to meet.
A longer-term initiative keeps moving backwards because something more immediate has taken its place.
I’ve worked with marketing teams where the people are incredibly capable, conscientious, and genuinely committed to doing good work, but they are constantly compromising.
They aren’t lacking ideas, but they are lacking the space to think.
And the financial impact of that isn’t always immediate either.
A missed opportunity today may not show up in the numbers for months.
A weak proposition may continue to generate activity before the business realises it isn’t converting.
A campaign that was rushed may not reveal its full cost until the lost opportunities have accumulated.
By the time the impact is visible in revenue or profitability, the decisions that contributed to it can be long forgotten.
That makes reactive marketing particularly difficult to diagnose.
The team can appear to be delivering. The reports can look busy. The immediate numbers may not look alarming.
Meanwhile, the cost is accumulating somewhere else.
When every new request becomes a priority, the team has less opportunity to step back, look at what is happening and ask whether marketing is actually heading in the right direction.
And over time, that can have a much greater impact than the cost of any individual campaign.
Every Reaction Has a Consequence
One of the more difficult situations I encounter is when a marketing team is trying to solve the consequences of decisions it didn’t really make.
The sales team wants a campaign, so another campaign is commissioned.
Leadership isn’t happy with the messaging, so messaging gets changed.
More content is needed to support the new direction.
The website then needs updating.
Sales needs new materials.
The agency needs a new brief.
Before long, the team is spending a significant amount of time dealing with the consequences rather than moving towards a clear strategic objective.
And each decision can create another one.
The danger is that the chain of activity can feel justified at every step because each individual request makes sense.
The problem only becomes obvious when you step back and look at where all that activity is taking you.
Sometimes it is taking the business in a better direction.
Sometimes it is simply taking marketing further away from the strategy it started with.
This is particularly difficult when nobody stops to question the original assumption.
Was the campaign actually the right response?
Was changing the messaging the right answer?
Did the business need more content, or did it need to rethink the proposition?
Was the website really the problem?
Or were all of these decisions simply reactions to something that hadn’t been properly understood?
Reactive marketing can make every decision feel like a response to the one before it.
And eventually, the team can become so focused on keeping up that there is very little opportunity to decide what should happen next.
Some Things Should Be Responsive
None of this means marketing should ignore what is happening around it.
Markets change. Customers change. Competitors make moves. Campaigns don’t always perform as expected. New opportunities appear.
Good marketing needs to respond to those things.
The distinction is between being responsive and being reactive.
Responsive marketing notices what is changing and considers what it means.
Reactive marketing sees something change and immediately changes without careful consideration.
A competitor launches a new offer. A reactive response is to launch something similar. A responsive one asks whether the competitor has actually changed anything that matters to our customers.
A campaign underperforms. A reactive response is to change the campaign. A responsive one asks why it underperformed and whether the problem is the campaign, the proposition, the audience or something else.
I’ve found that the best marketing teams aren’t the ones that never change direction.
They’re the ones that know why they are changing it.
They have enough clarity about the strategy to assess what is happening rather than automatically responding to it.
Sometimes the right decision will be to change course.
The important thing is that the decision is being made because something has changed that genuinely matters – not simply because something new has demanded attention.
Don’t Let Urgency Set the Strategy
One of the hardest things about reactive marketing is that what is urgent can easily take priority over what actually matters.
When this happens often enough, it starts to determine where marketing spends its time.
And that can quietly shift the direction of the function.
The work that gets attention isn’t necessarily the work that matters most. It is simply the work that is demanding attention right now.
This is where leadership has an important role to play.
Marketing teams need to know what takes priority when everything can’t be a priority.
They need someone willing to make the call when a new request comes in and there isn’t capacity to do everything.
They also need permission to say no.
Not every request needs to become a marketing activity.
Not every opportunity needs to be pursued.
Not every problem needs immediate attention.
Sometimes the most valuable decision a marketing team can make is to stay focused on the priorities that have already been agreed.
Because strategy isn’t just about deciding what the business should do.
It is also about deciding what it should not allow to distract it.
When everything is urgent, nothing has a clear priority.
And when urgency starts setting the strategy, marketing can spend a lot of time moving without necessarily getting anywhere.
Marketing Shouldn’t Just React
Reactive marketing isn’t always a sign of a bad marketing team.
Often, it is a sign that the business hasn’t created the clarity and structure marketing needs to operate strategically.
There will always be unexpected requests, changing priorities and things that need attention.
The goal isn’t to eliminate those things.
It is to make sure they don’t automatically determine what marketing does next.
Good marketing should be responsive without being directionless.
It should be able to adapt without constantly starting again.
If marketing always feels like it is chasing the next thing, the answer may not be to give the team more resources or ask them to work harder.
It may be time to step back and ask a more fundamental question:
What is driving the marketing — the strategy, or whatever happens to be urgent today?
Because marketing shouldn’t just respond to what is happening.
It should help decide what happens next.
If your marketing feels reactive, it may be worth stepping back and asking why. As a marketing consultant and strategist, I help businesses clarify their priorities, identify what marketing should focus on and create a more strategic approach to growth. [...]
August 24, 2026Marketing StrategyActivity Isn’t the Same as Effectiveness
When something isn’t working, the instinct within marketing teams is often to do more.
More content. More campaigns. More channels. More reports. More meetings. More resources. More emails. More people. More agency support.
More, more, more.
It feels like progress because doing something is easier than stopping to work out whether you’re doing the right thing.
And in marketing, the pressure to do more can be particularly strong.
If we’re not getting enough leads, generate more.
If we’re not getting enough attention, publish more.
If the campaign isn’t working, run another one.
If the team is stretched, add another resource.
If the agency isn’t delivering, find another agency.
But sometimes the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough.
Sometimes more is simply more of the wrong thing.
And that is where businesses can get themselves into trouble.
Before adding more activity, more resources or more people, there is a more important question to answer:
What are we actually trying to fix?
The Comfort of More
There is something reassuring about doing more.
When results aren’t where they need to be, increasing activity can create the impression that the problem is being addressed. Busyness can feel like progress.
I’ve lost count of how often leadership has pointed to how busy a marketing team is as evidence that marketing is working — and then asked me: “But what are they actually doing?”
That contradiction is revealing.
Busyness is tangible. It is visible. And it gives everyone something to point to.
You can produce more content without becoming more relevant.
Run more campaigns without reaching the right customers.
Generate more leads without improving sales.
Add more people without improving the strategy.
And produce more reports without understanding what the numbers are actually telling you.
More can be incredibly comforting when what you really need is a better answer.
And stopping can feel uncomfortable.
When everyone is busy, pausing can look like doing nothing. It can feel counterintuitive to productivity. There is always another campaign to run, another request to respond to, another piece of work that could be added to the list.
But sometimes stopping is the most productive thing you can do.
Not stopping permanently. Stopping long enough to work out whether the thing you’re doing is actually the thing that needs to be done.
The danger is that once doing more becomes the default response, nobody stops to ask whether the underlying problem has been correctly identified.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe
One of the easiest mistakes in marketing is to treat the visible symptom as the problem.
Leads are down, so generate more leads.
Engagement is down, so produce more content.
Sales are down, so increase marketing activity.
The team is stretched, so add another person.
The agency isn’t delivering, so find another agency.
But the thing you’re seeing isn’t necessarily the thing that needs fixing.
Leads might be down because the proposition isn’t compelling.
Content might not be performing because it isn’t reaching the right audience.
Sales might be struggling because the customer journey or sales process isn’t working.
The team might be stretched because there is too much work — or because nobody has decided what matters most.
And an agency might be underperforming because the brief, strategy or expectations were never clear in the first place.
This is where good marketing requires diagnosis before action.
Not every problem needs more activity. Some need a better proposition. Some need a clearer strategy. Some need a different audience. Some need a change outside marketing altogether.
The question isn’t simply, “What can we do?” It is, “What needs to change?”
When leadership hasn’t made the decisions that set the direction, adding more activity rarely solves the underlying problem.
Until you know the answer, adding more is largely reactive and based on guesswork.
Is the Strategy Clear?
Before asking marketing to do more, it is worth asking whether everyone is clear about what marketing is actually supposed to achieve.
I’ve worked with teams where you can ask three people what marketing is there to do and get three different answers.
One thinks it’s about generating leads.
Another thinks it’s about building the brand.
Someone else is focused on supporting sales.
All of them may be working hard. All of them may have perfectly reasonable ideas about what marketing should be doing. But they aren’t necessarily working towards the same outcome.
And when that happens, more activity doesn’t create more effectiveness. It simply creates more activity in different directions.
A clear strategy gives marketing something to organise itself around.
It creates choices about where to focus, what to prioritise and what success should look like.
Without that clarity, marketing can become a collection of disconnected activities, each responding to a different expectation.
The answer isn’t necessarily another campaign or another resource.
It starts with agreeing what marketing is there to do.
Is the Proposition Strong Enough?
You can increase awareness of something without making it more compelling.
It’s common to see businesses invest heavily in getting more people to look at an offer before stopping to ask whether the offer gives those people a compelling reason to buy.
The assumption is often that the problem is awareness.
More advertising. More content. More traffic. More campaigns.
But if the proposition isn’t clear, relevant or differentiated, more exposure simply puts that weak proposition in front of more people.
Marketing can explain a proposition.
It can make it more visible.
It can help people understand why it matters.
But it can’t manufacture a reason for customers to care when the underlying offer doesn’t give them one.
Sometimes the answer isn’t to market the proposition harder.
It is to make the proposition better.
That might mean being clearer about the problem you’re solving, more specific about who you’re solving it for, or more compelling about why your solution is different.
Because no amount of marketing activity can compensate indefinitely for a proposition that doesn’t give the customer a good enough reason to buy.
Are We Reaching the Right People?
Sometimes the problem isn’t that marketing isn’t reaching enough people.
It’s that it isn’t reaching the right people.
A common frustration for me is seeing campaigns celebrated because they generated a large amount of traffic, only for the sales team to point out that very few of those visitors were actually qualified leads.
The campaign wasn’t necessarily poorly executed.
It may have been highly effective at generating the wrong outcome.
More reach doesn’t necessarily create more opportunity if you’re reaching people outside your target market.
The same applies to content, advertising and audience growth, particularly on social media. Large numbers can look impressive, but they don’t tell you whether marketing is attracting the people the business actually wants to win.
This is where focus becomes important.
Marketing doesn’t need to reach everyone. It needs to reach the people most likely to value what the business offers, have a need for it and be worth winning.
Sometimes the answer isn’t more reach. It’s better targeting, a clearer understanding of the customer and a more deliberate decision about where marketing should focus its effort.
Where Does the Problem Actually Sit?
Marketing doesn’t operate in isolation.
It can generate awareness, create demand, attract leads and help move customers through the buying process. But it doesn’t control everything that happens after that.
I’ve seen marketing teams put under pressure to generate more leads when the real constraint was further down the funnel.
The leads were coming in.
But they weren’t being followed up quickly enough. The sales process was inconsistent. Prospects weren’t getting the information they needed. Or the customer experience wasn’t matching the promise marketing was making.
Adding more leads to that system wasn’t going to solve the problem.
It was simply going to create more opportunities for the same problem to occur.
This is an important distinction because marketing can be responsible for marketing without being responsible for every outcome marketing influences.
Sometimes the constraint sits in sales.
Sometimes it sits in the product.
Sometimes it sits in pricing, customer experience, after-sales service or operations.
And sometimes the problem really is marketing.
The point is not to protect marketing from accountability.
It is to make sure the right problem is being solved by the part of the business that can actually solve it.
When More Resources Aren’t the Answer
When a marketing team is stretched, the instinct can be to add capacity.
Another person. Another agency. Another specialist. Another freelancer.
Sometimes that is exactly what is needed.
But I’ve also seen businesses add resources to a marketing function and discover that the team is just as overwhelmed six months later.
The problem wasn’t simply capacity.
There were too many competing priorities, too many requests, too many approval points and too much work that had accumulated without anyone deciding what could be left undone.
Adding another person didn’t remove any of that.
It simply created another person trying to navigate the same system.
Sometimes a team needs more resources.
Sometimes it needs fewer priorities.
Sometimes it needs better processes.
And sometimes it needs to stop doing work that isn’t creating enough value to justify the effort.
Before adding capacity, it is worth asking whether the problem is actually a shortage of people — or whether the organisation is asking too much of the people it already has.
More Isn’t Always the Wrong Answer
None of this means that doing more is always wrong.
Sometimes a business does need more marketing.
More reach. More investment. More people. More content. More campaigns.
The difference is knowing why.
Sometimes the fundamentals are sound, the strategy is clear, the proposition is strong and the target market is well understood — but the marketing simply doesn’t have enough reach or resources to achieve what the business wants.
In those situations, more was the right answer.
But it was a decision based on understanding what was missing, not a reaction to disappointing results.
More is useful when it addresses an identified constraint. It is wasteful when it is used to compensate for one that hasn’t been understood.
The goal isn’t to do less.
It’s to make sure that when you do more, you’re doing more of the right thing.
Make More Count
Good marketing isn’t about being busy.
It’s about making the right decisions, focusing effort where it matters and creating the conditions for marketing to work.
Sometimes that means doing more.
Sometimes it means doing less.
Sometimes it means fixing something that isn’t a marketing problem at all.
The important thing is knowing which one you need before you start adding more.
The best marketing teams aren’t necessarily the busiest.
They’re the ones that know what matters, why it matters and where their effort will have the greatest effect.
Don’t just do more marketing. Make the marketing you’re already doing work harder.
If your instinct is to do more marketing, it may be worth pausing and asking why. As a marketing consultant and strategist, I help businesses work out what needs to change, where marketing can make the greatest difference and how to redirect effort where it matters. [...]
August 21, 2026Business / Leadership / Marketing StrategyWhen Marketing Activity Is Masking a Leadership Vacuum
From time to time, I see something in my work with clients and their marketing teams.
And it is often the clearest evidence that the marketing problem isn’t actually a marketing problem.
It’s a leadership problem that marketing is being asked to absorb.
When leadership lacks clarity about where the business is going, what it wants to achieve, its priorities, or what matters most, marketing often responds in the only way it knows how: by doing more.
More campaigns. More content. More channels. More activity.
And because marketing activity is so visible, it can create the impression that something is being achieved.
The content calendar is full.
Campaigns are going out.
The website is being updated.
Social channels are active.
Reports are being produced.
Everyone is busy.
It can look like marketing is doing a great job.
But sometimes all that activity is masking a much more fundamental problem.
Nobody is really clear about the goals.
And when that happens, marketing can become incredibly busy without actually moving the business forward.
That is a dangerous distinction.
Because activity is not the same thing as progress.
The Marketing Activity Trap
When there isn’t a clear strategy, marketing often defaults to volume.
More articles. More LinkedIn posts. More emails. More campaigns. More social content. More reports. More “thought leadership”.
The logic is understandable. If we’re not sure exactly what will move the business forward, at least we can keep doing things that look like marketing.
And some of those things may genuinely be useful.
But without a clear strategy connecting them, they become activity for activity’s sake.
The team is measuring what it can produce rather than what it is trying to change.
And that can be incredibly seductive for leadership.
Because output is visible.
You can see the posts. You can count the campaigns. You can point to the website traffic. You can show that the marketing team is busy.
What is much harder to see is whether any of it is actually creating movement towards a meaningful business objective.
That is how a marketing function can become stretched beyond capacity while becoming increasingly ineffective.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the team isn’t working hard enough.
It may be that nobody has given them a clear enough answer to the most important question: What are we actually trying to achieve?
Urgency Strangles Strategy
One of the most damaging things a leadership team can do to a marketing function is to keep changing its mind about what matters most.
One month it’s brand.
Then leads.
Then it’s sales enablement.
Then it’s thought leadership.
Then there’s a new product launch.
Then someone decides the website needs to be rebuilt.
Then a competitor does something interesting and suddenly that becomes the priority.
None of these things are necessarily wrong. The problem is what happens when they are all treated as urgent, and the marketing team is expected to respond to each one without anything else coming off the list.
The result is constant reprioritisation.
Work gets started and then abandoned. Campaigns are interrupted. Strategies are changed before they have had time to work. Long-term initiatives are sacrificed for whatever has become the latest urgent request.
And eventually the marketing team learns an unfortunate lesson: Don’t get too attached to the strategy. It will probably change.
That’s when something important starts to happen.
People stop thinking strategically and start becoming reactive.
They stop asking, “What is the right thing to do?”
And start asking, “What does someone want us to do right now?”
That might keep everyone happy in the short term.
But it is not a strategy. It’s a response to the absence of one.
Who Is Making the Decisions?
Sometimes the problem isn’t that leadership is making too many decisions. It’s that nobody is making the important ones.
Leadership needs to make the fundamental choices that give marketing its direction: who the business is trying to win, what it wants to be known for, what it stands for, what differentiates it, and where it fits best. Only then can marketing make meaningful choices about where to focus and what to prioritise.
Marketing can’t answer strategic questions in isolation. It can bring insight, analyse the market, understand customers, develop positioning and make recommendations. But ultimately, some decisions belong to leadership.
But when those decisions aren’t made, marketing is left trying to operate in the gaps. The team starts filling in the blanks. One person makes an assumption. Another interprets something differently. Someone else takes their cue from the latest conversation with the CEO.
Before long, there’s several versions of the strategy – none of them quite official, but all of them influencing what gets done.
That is when a marketing team can start to feel like it is being pulled in every direction at once.
And the frustrating thing is that from the outside, it can look like the team simply isn’t focused.
But often, the lack of focus is a symptom of a lack of leadership clarity.
The Cost of Constant Uncertainty
When people work in an environment where priorities constantly change and decisions aren’t clear, they eventually adapt.
They stop investing too heavily in ideas because they don’t know whether those ideas will survive the next change in direction.
They become more cautious.
They seek approval before making decisions.
They produce what they know will be accepted rather than what they believe will be most effective.
And, eventually, they can stop challenging the direction altogether.
Not because they don’t have the expertise.
Because they’ve learned that thinking critically creates friction.
That’s a particularly dangerous point for a marketing team.
The organisation still has experienced people. It still has marketers with judgement, insight and ideas.
But it has created an environment where those capabilities aren’t being fully used.
The people are still there. The thinking is not.
What Gets Measured Gets Noticed
When leadership doesn’t have a clear way to assess whether marketing is working strategically, it often defaults to what is easiest to see and measure.
How much content was produced? How many campaigns went out? How much website traffic did we get? How many leads did marketing generate? How much engagement did the latest post receive?
None of these numbers are necessarily meaningless. The problem is what happens when they become substitutes for a more fundamental question: Is marketing helping us achieve what the business actually needs?
Visible activity becomes evidence of performance.
And once that happens, producing more becomes easier to justify than stopping to ask whether the activity is actually working.
The organisation can become very good at measuring the evidence of activity while missing the absence of progress.
Do Good Leaders Assume or Enquire?
When leadership doesn’t understand what marketing is doing, it is very easy to fill the gaps with assumptions.
Perhaps the team isn’t busy enough, quick enough, proactive enough, doing enough.
Perhaps the strategy isn’t working because marketing isn’t executing well enough.
And once those assumptions take hold, management intervention can feel entirely justified.
More requests. More scrutiny. More opinions about process, campaigns, content and individual pieces of work. More pressure to produce.
But there is a problem with assuming.
You can end up trying to fix something that isn’t broken.
The marketing team may not need more activity. It may need clearer strategic direction.
It may not need more oversight. It may need the space to do the work it was hired to do.
And it may not need to move faster. It may need leadership to stop changing the destination.
This is where good leadership requires something that is surprisingly easy to lose: curiosity.
Before deciding that marketing isn’t doing enough, ask.
Asking questions doesn’t mean leadership has to accept everything marketing says.
Quite the opposite.
Curiosity gives leadership the opportunity to understand the thinking behind the work, challenge it, test whether the strategy makes sense and make better decisions about where the organisation needs to go. It allows leadership to test assumptions rather than react to them.
The alternative is to manage what you can see.
And that is how micromanagement begins.
When Should Marketing Push Back?
Marketing cannot simply absorb every request, accommodate every shifting priority and continue producing activity.
At some point, it has to push back.
Not defensively. Not by saying no to everything.
By asking the questions that expose the lack of clarity: what is this supposed to achieve, why is it a priority, who are we trying to reach, what are we deprioritising to make room for it, and how will we know whether it worked?
These aren’t difficult questions.
But they can be uncomfortable questions when an organisation has become accustomed to equating activity with progress.
Good marketing leadership isn’t just about delivering what has been asked for.
Sometimes it means saying: “Before we do that, we need to understand why.”
Because if marketing keeps accepting every request without challenging the thinking behind it, it becomes part of the problem.
It helps maintain the illusion that the organisation has a strategy when it may only have a long list of activities.
The point isn’t to make leadership uncomfortable. It’s to make the work more effective.
And sometimes the most valuable thing marketing can do is create the conversation that nobody else is having.
Decide What Matters
Marketing can do a remarkable amount with limited resources. It can bring insight, build audiences, generate demand and turn strategy into action.
But it cannot decide what the business stands for, who it is trying to win, what matters most or where the organisation is going.
Those are leadership decisions.
And when they aren’t made, marketing fills the vacuum. It produces. It responds. It adapts. It stays busy.
Until eventually, activity starts to look like strategy.
The answer isn’t for leadership to stay out of marketing. Nor is it to take over the work. It is to ask better questions, make the decisions that only leadership can make, and give marketing the clarity and space to do its job.
And marketing has a responsibility too: to challenge assumptions, push back on activity without purpose and have the conversations that need to happen.
Because sometimes the most important thing a leadership team can do for marketing is decide what not to make it do.
If marketing isn’t moving the business forward, the answer isn’t always more marketing. As a marketing consultant, I help business leaders clarify their priorities, make better strategic decisions and give marketing the direction it needs to be effective. [...]
August 19, 2026AI / BusinessAI Was Supposed to Make Us Smarter. What If It’s Doing the Opposite – and Fast?
I am a proponent of AI.
I use it. I encourage clients to use it. I think it is one of the most consequential technologies we have seen in decades, and I have no interest in pretending we can, or should, put the genie back in the bottle.
But something has been happening in my work recently that has genuinely stunned me.
I work closely with a number of clients and their marketing teams, and I am seeing a pattern emerging. Not occasionally. Increasingly, strongly and alarmingly.
People are losing confidence in their own ability to think.
They are outsourcing, not just the execution of work to AI, but the thinking that is supposed to happen before the work.
And it has happened remarkably quickly.
The Illusion of Good Work
There is an obvious efficiency argument for AI.
Why spend three hours writing something when AI can produce a first draft in seconds?
Why manually research something when an AI tool can synthesise information almost instantly?
Why stare at a blank page when you can ask a machine to give you ten ideas?
All of this makes sense.
The problem starts when the AI stops being a tool for thinking and becomes a substitute for thinking.
I am seeing people increasingly ask AI what they should think rather than using it to help them think.
They ask it to solve the problem before they have properly defined the problem.
They ask it to develop the strategy before they have developed a point of view.
They ask it to write the answer before they have worked out what they actually want to say.
And then, perhaps most concerningly, they accept the answer.
There is no interrogation.
No disagreement.
No refinement.
No moment of: Hang on. That doesn’t feel right.
The machine has produced something plausible, so the work feels finished.
But plausible is not the same thing as good.
We are Outsourcing Judgement
This is where I think the real danger lies.
The most valuable part of professional work has never been the ability to produce words, slides, spreadsheets or documents.
It is judgement. Knowing what matters. Knowing what doesn’t.
Recognising when something is technically correct but strategically wrong.
Understanding the context that isn’t written down.
Seeing the contradiction.
Spotting the opportunity.
Knowing when to challenge the brief.
Knowing when an idea is interesting but won’t work.
Knowing when something sounds impressive but actually says nothing.
AI can help enormously with all of these things.
But it cannot relieve humans of responsibility for them.
When we continually outsource these decisions, something else happens: our own judgement begins to weaken.
Use It or Lose It
Think about any skill.
If you stop practising it, you get worse.
If you always use a calculator, you become less comfortable doing mental arithmetic.
If you never navigate without GPS, your sense of direction can deteriorate.
If you never write without autocomplete, you may become less confident constructing a sentence yourself.
If you never pick up a pencil, you may never be capable of hand – writing anything – something already evident in the younger generations.
Thinking is no different.
If you continually hand the difficult cognitive work to a machine, eventually you become less accustomed to doing that work yourself.
And perhaps less confident that you can.
What Happens in the Absence of Human Supervision
Once people become accustomed to AI doing the thinking, they also become less capable of reviewing the output.
This creates a particularly dangerous loop.
AI produces something. The human reviews it.
But the human no longer has enough confidence, knowledge or critical distance to properly evaluate it.
So the AI’s output becomes the benchmark against which itself is judged.
That is not oversight – it is automation without meaningful supervision.
And it is particularly easy to miss because the output often looks good.
The grammar is correct.
The formatting is polished.
The argument appears coherent.
The tone sounds professional.
There are no obvious errors.
But underneath the surface, there may be nothing particularly original, insightful or useful.
The work is fine.
And “fine” is becoming one of the biggest risks of the AI era.
Marketing is Especially Vulnerable
There is a seductive idea spreading through business that because AI can write, companies no longer need copywriters, communicators or marketing specialists.
I think this fundamentally misunderstands what those people are actually paid to do.
A great copywriter isn’t simply someone who can assemble grammatically correct sentences.
A great marketer isn’t someone who can produce a thousand social posts.
A communications professional isn’t simply a human interface for a language model.
The craft is much deeper than that.
Marketing sits at the intersection of strategy, psychology, culture, language, behaviour and business.
It requires an understanding of what people say they want versus what they actually respond to.
It requires nuance.
It requires context.
It requires taste.
It requires knowing when to say something and, equally importantly, when not to say it.
It requires an instinct for the difference between an idea that is merely clever and one that will actually change someone’s behaviour.
It requires understanding the customer as a human being rather than as a data point or a prompt.
AI can support all of this.
But it doesn’t magically acquire the experience, judgement and instinct of the people who have spent years developing those capabilities.
AI Doesn’t Replace Expertise. It Amplifies It.
This is the part I think businesses are getting wrong.
The arrival of AI doesn’t necessarily make expertise less valuable.
It can make expertise more valuable — but only when expertise remains in the loop.
If AI allows one experienced marketer to do the work that previously required five people, that doesn’t mean the answer is necessarily to remove the experienced marketer.
It means that person’s judgement can now be multiplied.
One person can explore more ideas.
Test more variations.
Analyse more information.
Move more quickly.
Produce more iterations.
Develop more sophisticated campaigns.
AI can dramatically increase the leverage of expertise.
But there needs to be expertise there to leverage.
Without it, you simply get more output.
And more output is not necessarily more value.
An Ocean of Content
There is another consequence that concerns me.
We are about to be flooded by an extraordinary amount of content that nobody particularly needs.
AI has made the marginal cost of producing content approach zero.
So organisations are going to produce more of it.
More articles.
More emails nobody asked for.
More social posts nobody reads.
More thought leadership that says nothing new.
More white papers nobody downloads.
More “insights” that contain no insight.
More content that sounds authoritative while adding absolutely nothing to the body of
knowledge or the conversation.
When Content Becomes Cheap, Ideas Become Scarce
An enormous proportion of it will be technically competent and intellectually empty.
AI slop.
And the irony is that businesses pursuing efficiency may end up making themselves less effective
Because when everyone can produce content, content itself becomes cheap.
What becomes scarce is something else.
A genuinely interesting idea.
A distinctive point of view.
A useful insight.
A human observation.
A piece of writing that understands its audience.
A campaign that makes someone feel something.
A strategy based on actual understanding rather than generated consensus.
In other words: original thinking.
The Competitive Advantage Won’t Be AI
Eventually, almost every serious organisation will have access to broadly similar AI capabilities. The tools will become cheaper, the models more capable and the interfaces easier to use. The competitive gap created simply by having AI will disappear.
So where will competitive advantage come from?
I think it will come from what organisations do with it.
The businesses that win will be the ones that combine powerful AI with exceptionally skilled humans.
They will use AI aggressively — but intelligently.
They will automate the repetitive.
Accelerate the research.
Generate possibilities.
Challenge assumptions.
Analyse information.
Create iterations.
But they will keep humans responsible for judgement.
They will retain people who understand customers, markets, psychology, language, culture and strategy.
People who can look at an AI – generated answer and say: No.
That’s technically good, but it’s wrong.
That’s interesting, but it won’t work.
That’s what everyone else is saying.
That’s not what our customers actually care about.
There’s a better idea here.
That human ability to discriminate between good and bad, useful and useless, original and derivative, persuasive and merely polished – that is going to become incredibly valuable.
Don’t Let the Machine Become the Thinker
I don’t think the answer is to use AI less. The answer is to use it better.
Use it to challenge your thinking, not replace it.
Ask it for alternatives after you have formed your own view.
Use it to find weaknesses in an argument you have developed.
Ask it to identify things you may have missed.
Use it to accelerate execution once the strategic thinking is done.
Let it help you explore.
Let it help you create.
Let it help you work faster.
But don’t hand over your judgement.
Don’t let the convenience of an instant answer eliminate the uncomfortable process of working out what you actually think.
And don’t confuse a machine’s ability to produce an answer with your responsibility to decide whether that answer is worth anything.
Because that distinction is going to matter enormously.
We are entering a world where producing content will be incredibly easy.
Thinking will not.
Critical Thinking Is the Competitive Advantage
I suspect that, before long, the organisations that have protected and developed their people’s ability to think critically will have a profound advantage over those that have simply automated it away.
The future doesn’t belong to businesses that use AI instead of skilled people.
It belongs to businesses that use AI through skilled people.
The former will produce more.
The latter will produce what matters.
And while everyone else is drowning in AI slop, the organisations that still know how to think will be charging ahead.
AI can make marketing faster, but it doesn’t make strategic thinking less important. As a strategic marketing consultant, I help businesses use AI to increase the capability of their marketing without outsourcing the judgement, expertise and thinking that make it effective. [...]
November 22, 2022Digital Marketing / Marketing StrategyIn 2022, digital marketing has evolved in so many ways. And the truth is that in 2023, things in the mar-tech world will be even more radical. New trends are emerging, and companies are being called upon to adapt or die.
In other words, you need fresh digital marketing strategies for your business. This plan should focus on a personalised customer experience. But also take advantage of the latest technologies, such as AI and machine learning.
And it’s not easy because competition is getting tougher by the day. That’s why, in this article, we take a look at the trends that will transform digital marketing in 2023 and beyond.
Are you ready to get ahead of the competition?
The Digital Marketing Trends You Must Know in 2023
From email marketing and social media to analytics and AI-driven chatbots, digital marketing is seemingly endless. But not all tools and strategies are equally effective for all businesses.
Terms like personalisation, customer behaviour, and buyer journey help marketers understand their customers. And customer needs are exactly what will drive digital marketing in 2023.
Let’s analyse the key digital marketing trends.
1. Customer Experience (CX)
If you’re familiar with marketing terms, you should know that Customer Experience (CX) is different from User Experience (UX).
Of course, there’s some overlap between the two terms. However, CX captures every touch-point the customer has with a brand, regardless of how brief. CX strategies encompass the customer’s needs, feelings, goals, and expectations across their full experience with a business:Brand awareness and research
Customer service
Sales funnel and support
Product purchase, delivery, and use
Communications and advertising
Content marketingUX, on the other hand, zeros in on the company’s systems, products, and services. It’s a practice that seeks to answer questions about the customer’s experience in terms of utility and ease of use.
In 2023, optimising the customer experience is simply a necessity. Of course, a company’s goal has always been to have satisfied customers. But digital marketing now offers more tools than ever.
That’s why CX is more than just a digital marketing trend. It’s a shift in marketing mindset. That’s why it’s tied to almost every other trend we will explore in this guide, from automation tools (live chat services, virtual assistants, etc.) to personalisation.
2. Email Marketing
In the past, the power of email marketing was underestimated. In some cases, email marketing was even considered a spammy, non-effective marketing strategy. Unfortunately, there was a reason for that. Cold email outreach used to be an unorganised effort to attract more clients using pushy emails.
Well, thankfully, that’s not the case anymore. If organised correctly, email marketing can easily be the most effective digital marketing strategy for a business in terms of return on investment (ROI).
Maybe the reason that more companies haven’t prioritised email marketing is that it is not the easiest digital marketing strategy. To use email marketing, you need to build an email list, understand your customer persona, and produce content that hits the mark.
However, an email list is a valuable asset. Unlike followers on social media, when you build a list, you’ll own that list forever.
Email marketing can also be highly automated thanks to CRM software like Mailchimp, Hubspot, etc. Even though marketing automation is only one factor that makes an email marketing strategy successful.
To build a successful email marketing program, consider: Personalisation and CX
Lead nurturing (buyer journey)
CRM data and analytics
Upsell and cross-sell opportunitiesWith around 4 billion email users globally and an exceptional ROI for both B2B and B2C companies, email marketing is projected to become even more popular in 2023.
3. Virtual Events
There’s no argument that the pandemic completely altered the marketing world. This was particularly evident in events with event organisers fully switching to virtual events in 2020 and 2021, out of necessity. Almost 70% of all B2B companies replaced some or most of their live events with virtual ones.
Now, two years later, virtual events still maintain their popularity. The reasons for that are plenty, but in particular, we know that virtual events are:More affordable (budget-friendly)
More accessible (global reach)
More efficient: saving time for both hosts and attendants
More flexible (interaction, post-event material, etc)
Better when it comes to lead generation and feedback collection
Measurable via analytics4. User-Generated Content
As mentioned earlier, CX is the driver of most of the 2023 digital marketing trends. However, if there is one strategy that is most keyed into CX, it’s got to be user-generated content (UGC).
This trend is all about building closer relationships with your customers. And the concept is pretty simple. It works like traditional word of mouth but digitally.
In short, UGS means that your loyal customers “promote” their connection with your brand in their personal online channels.
This can take a variety of forms. It may be a simple Instagram post in photo or video form, which features your product. Or it may be an endorsement or review. Nothing is left out.
UGC offers big advantages for startups, small businesses, and big brands alike. Firstly, there’s the credibility factor – consumers place a high degree of trust in word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers. Secondly, it’s unique content that can be curated and shared.
And user-generated content is also linked to the next trend we will explore: Conversational Marketing.
5. Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing is precisely what its name suggests. This digital marketing term is all about real-time, two-way communication between a company and its customers. As such, dialogue is an integral part of the overall customer experience.
In 2023, companies need to be accessible to their customers. This means you need to optimise your customer service.
There are no limits to conversational marketing, from chat boxes and live chats to virtual assistants, social media messaging, and personalised emails. Of course, a few years ago, this would have been a very difficult and expensive strategy, especially for small businesses.
Fortunately, that’s no longer the case today. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes in.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI-powered bots are becoming more accessible to businesses. Nowadays, you can easily set up a chatbot on your website or social media.
Of course, a chatbot is not conversational marketing. Remember that your customers need to build a strong relationship with your business. Chatbots simply can not replace your human communication with customers. But they can speed up specific processes.
AI is also an essential tool for CX, especially in terms of personalisation. For example, using data and analytics to predict customer behavior and automate customer segmentation.
In 2023, marketers will use AI in a variety of ways:For customer communication
For audience expansion
For audience targeting
For product recommendations
For optimisation of marketing strategies (AI reports)7. Video Content Marketing
The power of video is no secret. Videos are surpassing other forms of content when it comes to customer engagement, and have become an important tactic in SEO. Plus, video has taken over social media with 90% of businesses surveyed claiming that posting video had a stronger ROI.
Video marketing is particularly successful when it comes to attracting new leads. Around 70% of marketers believe that video marketing has a better return on investment than Google Ads. And as the owner of YouTube, Google has already embraced that fact, as evident in its SERPs.
Visual content is becoming more and more potent by the day. This is why video content marketing quickly made it into our top 2023 digital marketing trends.
8. End of 3rd-Party Cookies
The first time Google announced it would remove third-party cookies was in 2020. Since then, this action has been postponed again and again. But 2023 will finally be the end of third-party cookies in Chrome browser.
While it’s a necessary move towards privacy, the phasing out of 3rd-party cookies will most likely have multiple consequences in the digital marketing world. How? Well, third-party cookies are one of the best ways to gather user browsing activity and history. They keep track of user behaviour – not only purchases but also interests – and help advertisers target audiences.
Google has already announced an entirely different version of analytics, Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This new version will track the customer journey on both websites and apps. The transition is expected to take place on July 1, 2023.
9. Accessibility
Throughout this guide, we’ve referred to accessibility more than once. But, in this section, we will focus on how social responsibility, diversity, and inclusivity are becoming necessary in the digital marketing world.
In 2023, a business is expected to share its character and values with its customers. In other words, you are responsible for stating the social causes you support, your opinions on certain social matters, etc.
It becomes evident that accessibility is directly linked to personalisation. The more you interact with your audience, the stronger you’ll bond emotionally with your customers.
10. SEO trends
SEO is always playing a significant role in digital marketing. As we’ve mentioned in the past, the rules of SEO are changing fast. Of course, content quality is always a priority for Google and other search engines.
In 2023, we’re expecting to see a major shift when it comes to extracted page content and featured snippets. Google has been focusing on featured snippets since 2014. But, rich results are here to change featured snippets completely.
In other words, page listings are automatically enriched with additional visual or interactive elements such as videos, photos, lists, and so on. And this is only one of the SEO trends that will stand out in 2023.
In fact, this year, SERPs are expected to revolve around: AI and Machine Learning
Featured snippets
Long-form content
Predictive search11. Social Commerce
Most social media platforms offer several ways to advertise and sell your products or services directly. Just a few years ago, a well-designed, SEO-optimised website to sell products online was a must for all eCommerce businesses.
Well, that is no longer the case.
Social Commerce has now gone mainstream, driven largely by Millenials and Gen Z who prefer shopping within their social media environment. And the trend delivers a number of benefits for consumers and businesses alike:Social and interactive shopping experience.
The entire buyer journey takes place on just one platform.
User-generated content and collecting feedback.Wrap Up
Delivering a world-class customer experience should be a priority for marketers and businesses. And in 2023, we’re likely to see more CX strategies leaning towards automation and personalisation. With that said, the 11 biggest digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2023 include:Customer Experience (CX)
Email Marketing
Virtual Events
User-Generated Content (UGC)
Conversational Marketing
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Video Content Marketing
End of 3rd-Party Cookies
Accessibility
SEO trends
Social Commerce To remain competitive, it’s vitally important to keep on top of the latest trends in digital marketing and implement them effectively. So, if you haven’t already, now is the best time to start planning for a successful 2023. Find out How to write a digital marketing plan in six simple steps. [...]
September 12, 2022Business / Marketing Strategy
August 1, 2022Business / Digital MarketingIt’s not easy running a startup or small business. You face numerous challenges on a daily basis, and time is limited. So how do you juggle everything, especially when digital marketing has become a top priority for all businesses, regardless of their size or niche.
In 2022, terms like digital strategy are taking over the marketing world. And as more businesses invest in digital marketing, competition is naturally getting tougher.
Typically, there are two ways companies organise their marketing activities. They either have internal marketing resources or hire an external team to do the work for them.
In this article, we will analyse the second solution and help you decide if hiring a marketing agency makes good business sense.
What is a Marketing Agency?
A marketing agency or marketing company is a team of professionals that can help organise and implement a marketing plan. Such a plan will eventually help a business achieve certain goals.
So, you can think of a marketing agency as a campaign partner that can help your business take advantage of digital marketing opportunities. For example, you may want to optimise your website for Google using the latest SEO trends or improve your email marketing communications or sales conversions. An agency can help you with these types of objectives.A Marketing Agency’s Main Responsibilities
To examine what a marketing agency does, let’s have a look at the four main responsibilities:Planning phase: The team gets to understand the initial marketing needs and objectives of a client, and then conducts market research.
Implementing different marketing approaches: After the planning phase, the team builds a tailored marketing strategy for the client. This can include TOFU (Top of Funnel), MOFU (Middle of Funnel) and BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) approaches to promotion.
Result evaluation: A data analyst monitors the strategy via analytics, A/B planning, ROI measures, etc.
Readjusting efforts: At the end of a predetermined timeline, the team collects data and readjusts the marketing strategy (if needed) in a constant cycle of improvement.Now that we’ve examined what a marketing agency is and what it can do to help your business, let’s have a look at the main pros and cons of this option.
Advantages of Hiring a Marketing Agency
Hiring a marketing agency could result in a valuable partnership. The most significant advantages of such a partnership are:
1. Value for Money
Contrary to what you may think, hiring a marketing agency will likely save you money. There are two ways to look at this: time and value.
If the agency saves you time and can do things more efficiently, that has saved you money. So too, if the agency has specialised skills that make them more efficient and they know how to maximise results, then that is improving ROI.
This is especially true for startups and small businesses that usually don’t have an in-house team of marketing professionals. In such a case hiring a marketing agency makes a lot of sense.
2. Adding Professionals to Your Team
During the planning phase, the team will identify opportunities in your niche. From content marketing and SEO to paid advertising and web development, a marketing agency has usually tried it all, so they’ll know what to do. In other words, a marketing agency’s expertise can help develop a strategy that works best for your business case.
3. Improving Your ROI
Chances are that you have already allocated a budget for marketing purposes. Well, a top-notch marketing agency will help to optimise your marketing efforts while maximising limited budgets.
Sooner or later, strategies like content creation, SEO and email marketing will help improve your ROI. This will help your business generate new leads while saving money.
4. Saving You Time
We know that developing a marketing strategy internally sounds ideal. But in most cases, you do not have the time to do it. Outsourcing will automatically save you time and give you access to numerous marketing tools (analytics, keyword research software, etc.). This is very important regardless of the type, size or niche of your business.
Disadvantages of Hiring a Marketing Agency
Even though hiring a marketing agency comes with plenty of perks, in some cases, it might not be the best option. For example, if your company already has an in-house marketing team, hiring an agency is a significant additional expense.
However what if you have an internal team that is inexperienced or has skill gaps? What do you do?In this case, even larger companies can benefit from the guidance of a specialist from time to time. When they do they usually hire a professional consultant and not a marketing agency.
Another pitfall is when a marketing agency is not familiar with your niche or services/products. Of course, a top-notch team will start by thoroughly researching your market (industry, competitors, opportunities, etc.). But this will probably take some time.
Now that we have explored both the pros and cons of hiring a marketing agency, let us answer the initial question. Are marketing agencies worth the investment?
Making your Choice: Should you Invest in Outsourcing to a Marketing Agency in 2022?
Let’s start by mentioning the importance of digital marketing. With nearly 5 billion active internet users, and recent research showing that about 25% of the global population buys products and services online, the possibilities of digital marketing are endless.
But is hiring a marketing agency the best choice for your business in particular? Well, that depends.
For example, if you own a startup business and need a professional team to organise marketing tactics such as social media, hiring a marketing agency is a very wise decision. As we have seen, having an outsourced team of professional marketers will save you time and money in the long run.
But what if you have an in-house team and just need a professional to improve your strategies? In that case, you should opt for an experienced marketing strategist or mentor instead.
Wrap Up
It is undisputed that digital marketing is the future. Professional marketing agencies have the knowledge and tools you need to improve your marketing efforts. If you want to increase sales or strengthen your brand, a marketing agency can definitely help.
On the other hand, hiring an experienced marketing strategist is the best alternative if you have an internal team and just need to sharpen up results. So consider whether hiring a marketing consultant could be a better option.
Outsourcing can deliver much better marketing ROI. At the end of the day, whether you go with an agency, strategist or consultant, the decision comes down to your business needs and preferences. [...]
July 13, 2022SEOWhether you own a small blog or an eCommerce business, you have probably heard about Google’s algorithm updates. The thing about Google is that it is by far the most popular search engine. In just one month, Google records more than 80 billion visits. And its algorithm updates impact every website owner.
The Google algorithm is the most important SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) factor for any website, small or large. This article aims to explain how (and why) Google updates its algorithm and how to prepare your website for future algorithm updates.
What is Google’s Algorithm and How Does it Work
Let’s start with the basics and understand what Google’s algorithm actually is. You can think of Google as an endless database. In this database, there are billions of indexed pages. The algorithm helps Google’s users search for something and find the best result for their query.
But how exactly does this work? Well, the Google algorithm uses hundreds of filters to find the optimal answer to that query. Those filters are widely known as ranking factors. Let’s take a look at them.
Google Algorithm: Ranking Factors
Throughout the years, Google has been enhancing its algorithm with new ranking factors. This helps the platform to eliminate spammy, low-quality websites from its search results while promoting SEO-friendly ones.
When Google’s algorithm was developed, it was set to rank a website based on the number of backlinks. The more links pointing to a website, the higher it ranked in search results. But, it was too easy to cheat the system and the search results were flooded with irrelevant listings, which made it less efficient for users to find an answer. Since then, Google’s algorithm has been updated multiple times.In 2022, some of Google’s main ranking factors are:Content quality (readability, writing quality, length, visuals, etc.)
Mobile optimisation
Page speed and core vitals
User experience (UX)
Internal links (useful links pointing to other relevant pages)
Backlinks (external links signalling authority)
On-page optimisation (keywords, metadata, etc)Every time Google introduces a new update to its algorithm, some of the factors above are slightly modified to make the ranking process more “fair” (at least, by Google’s standards).
But, what does an update include? Let’s have a deeper look.
Google Algorithm Updates: Everything There Is To Know
Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are not static. This is the main reason why Google’s algorithm updates are very important for every website. Every once in a while, webmasters are called to adjust their SEO-related strategies according to the latest algorithm update.
What is an Algorithm Update?
As the name suggests, a Google algorithm update is nothing more than an update Google applies to the formula (or rules) it uses to rank web pages. In other words, an update is Google’s small (or sometimes large) tweaks and adjustments to the algorithm that sorts its listings.
Why?
Well, historically, certain websites found ways to manipulate Google SERPs. In that way, they helped their web pages rank higher for search enquiries when they shouldn’t. And this is exactly what a Google algorithm update aims to terminate.
In the last 10+ years, Google has been regularly optimising its algorithm. This is why it is important to have a look at the most important updates that took place during this period.
The Most Important Algorithm UpdatesPanda (2011): Back in 2011, Google improved its main ranking factors concerning plagiarism and spam. Since 2011, valuable content has always been Google’s top priority.Penguin (2012): A year later, Penguin focused on the quality and relevance of backlinks.Hummingbird (2013): With Hummingbird, the algorithm was improved to understand more than just keywords (goal: to eliminate SEO-tailored, low-quality posts).Mobile (2015): As the name suggests, Mobile introduced a new era when mobile optimisation started playing a crucial role in a page’s rank.RankBrain (2015): RankBrain was much more than just an algorithm update. With this new MLS (Machine Learning System), the algorithm was taught to take UX, content value and relevance into account.Bert (2019): Bert introduced a new (natural language) processing technology to the algorithm, employing machine learning to handle phrased search queries. This allowed Google’s algorithm to REALLY understand the context of keywords and searcher intent.Google Core Updates (2017-2022): Since 2017, Google has applied a few major changes to the algorithm’s core. The basic elements of the Google Core update usually revolve around a page’s mobile-friendliness, speed, safety, stability and interactivity.Google’s Algorithm Updates: Trends in 2022
It becomes evident why Google’s algorithm updates are a big thing for SEO efforts. Although Google’s tweaks aren’t always transparent, it is safe to say that a few elements will always play an important role in keyword rankings.
For starters, the quality of the content is very important. In 2022, long posts (1500+ words) that really aim at helping the reader deeply understand the topic usually perform much better. Mobile-friendliness is also a must for websites nowadays. The more mobile-friendly a page is, the better it will rank in Google.
Additionally, visuals (images, videos, infographics, etc.) and audio (e.g., podcast) also help pages rank higher in 2022. Finally, backlink quality (authority, no-follow/do-follow), internal links, and relevance play an important role in SEO.But, the next algorithm update could change some of the ranking factors above. So, what tips will help you prepare your website for upcoming SEO-related updates?
Preparing for an Algorithm Update: 5 Tips To Follow
There are a few things you can do to make sure that your rankings will be improved (or at least won’t be affected) after a Google algorithm update:Always focus on quality: By creating valuable content, you make sure that your pages will always rank higher than your competitors.
Aim on mobile-friendliness and UX: No matter what tweaks Google applies to the algorithm, responsiveness and user experience will always be important ranking factors.
Prioritise visual and audio content: Images, videos, infographics, and audio content are most likely the future of SEO.
Read the Google report: After every update, Google publishes a Web Vitals report explaining a few changes. Reading this report will help you understand the update better.
Hire an SEO strategist: By hiring a digital strategist, you won’t have to stress about any upcoming updates to the Google algorithm. A top-notch professional will adjust your SEO strategies accordingly and, therefore, save you time and money.Wrap Up
By reading this post, you have learned everything you need to know about Google’s algorithm and what those pesky updates are really all about. Most importantly you should be more confident knowing how to prepare for updates to come.
With SEO there are some very important things to keep in mind. Don’t try and cheat the system. Google prioritises quality, so if you are already creating valuable, helpful content and optimising well, you should have nothing to worry about! [...]