My marketing thoughts, my marketing projects and anything in between. Since that £150 logo project to now, my journey in marketing, always learning. 20 years and counting in marketing working with small, medium and large businesses. Get in touch today - info@nutsaboutmarketing.com

There is a conversation I have had with business owners countless times. I ask what they are doing with their marketing and the answer is usually something like, “We post on Facebook a few times a week, we’ve started doing more Reels and we probably need to get onto TikTok.” None of those things are necessarily wrong, but they do not really answer the question. They describe channels and activity rather than marketing itself. If I ask what your marketing looks like and you te

Most of the business conversation about artificial intelligence starts with productivity. AI can write an email faster, summarise a report, generate a presentation, create social posts, analyse a spreadsheet and turn a meeting transcript into a set of actions within seconds. Those capabilities are genuinely useful, and businesses would be foolish to ignore opportunities to remove repetitive work. However, I increasingly think efficiency may be one of the least interesting thi

Sport gives marketers an incredibly obvious piece of content every week: the result. Someone won, someone lost, someone scored, someone qualified, someone broke a record. Those moments matter enormously and deserve to be celebrated, but I do not think a strong sports brand can rely on the scoreboard alone. Results are unpredictable. Even the most successful organisations eventually lose, and if all the meaning attached to a sporting brand comes from winning, the marketing bec

Marketers love rebrands. There is something enormously satisfying about unveiling a new logo, typography, colour palette, photography style and strapline, particularly when everything is presented beautifully in a launch deck explaining how each design element represents confidence, optimism, humanity and forward momentum. The organisation sees a dramatic transformation, employees receive new templates and the LinkedIn announcement collects congratulations from other people w

One of the strange things about working in marketing is hearing organisations say that they do not know what to post about. In many cases, the problem is not a lack of stories. It is that nobody has built a reliable way of finding them. Working inside Cardiff Met Sport has reinforced that for me. Once you begin looking beyond fixtures and results, there are athletes, coaches, students, alumni, volunteers, researchers, events, competitions, community programmes, partnerships a

For years, marketers have been told variations of the same story. Your loyal customers are everything, twenty per cent of customers generate 80 per cent of your revenue, retention is cheaper than acquisition and the goal should be to create superfans who love the brand enough to become advocates. There is enough intuitive truth in that story to make it extraordinarily seductive, particularly because the customers who buy most frequently are the easiest people for organisation

One of the easiest sentences to write in a marketing plan is: “Our target audience is everyone.” It is also one of the least useful. There are products with enormous potential markets, of course, and broad reach is incredibly important for growing brands. But that does not mean every person has the same needs, motivations or value to a business. Segmentation is not about making your market artificially tiny. It is about recognising meaningful differences within it. I think th

Social media is incredibly useful, but I think many organisations have accidentally turned platforms they do not own into the centre of their entire content strategy. We create a post, publish it, watch the engagement for a day or two and then move on. Within a remarkably short period of time, a story that may have involved years of work, significant achievement or a fascinating individual has effectively disappeared down a timeline. That has increasingly made me think about

One of the biggest changes in how I think about marketing is that I no longer see strategy as a big document full of objectives, actions, channels and dates. Those things can all be useful, but they are not necessarily strategy. A plan tells you what you are going to do. Strategy should explain the choices behind it. That distinction sounds simple, but I think a lot of organisations struggle with it. You can have a beautifully presented marketing plan containing social media,

Some of the most difficult marketing conversations happen when an organisation is building something valuable but management wants to know exactly how much money that activity generated this month. I experienced this particularly strongly while working with a community sports organisation. Marketing was naturally expected to support commercial performance, but I saw the opportunity as being much wider than simply promoting the next fixture, selling the next ticket or finding