Tactics do not build trust

Three things I will keep saying, whether or not it is good for business. If you disagree with all three, we will not enjoy working together.

Plank one

Most marketing advice is sold by whoever owns the tactic

Ninety percent of the advice out there is somebody selling a particular tactic or a piece of software that they happen to know or happen to own. It is not usually dishonest. It is just that the tactic was chosen before anyone looked at your business.

And it always fails in the end, because the people selling it do not understand the importance of building trust. Trust was never part of the tactic, so nothing they sold you could produce it.

“Why did the thing you bought stop working in month four? Because nobody in the room was responsible for whether anyone believed you.”
Nick Burrage
Plank two

My own industry is the worst offender

Most SEO agencies think you can pump out weak content and, as long as the propeller heads are involved, everything will be fine. It will not be fine. I have watched an agency spend three years doing SEO on a four page website with nothing on it.

That is not an SEO problem. It is a nobody owns the meaning problem. The technical work of hitting the keywords still matters, and I have a senior team who do it properly. It just does not work on its own, and it never did.

Ask a supplier this before you sign
Who decides what my website actually says, and how will they find out what I would say to a customer standing in front of me?
Plank three

What I supply is bravery

People come to me thinking it is all about writing clever sales copy and sounding like Unilever, when they are two blokes in a shed. What it is really about is being true to yourself, and selling in a way nobody else in your market is brave enough to try.

So I give them the braveness to be them. The sentence that sells is almost always the one your competitors are too cautious to write, and it is usually already in your business, said out loud, to a customer, by you.

Brent’s website told a customer she would have to come in and try the bed. She had walked in intending to buy elsewhere. No agency writes a line that talks a buyer out of buying online. It sold the bed.

Why you cannot do this on your own

Reason one
You believe you are supposed to sound like a corporation.
Not because you lack confidence. Because everything you have ever read about business writing told you to take yourself out of it.
Reason two
Nobody in the building owns the admin of marketing.
At six staff there is no marketing hire to spare, so approvals, assets and video slip. That is a headcount problem, not a discipline problem, and it is the normal state of the businesses I like working with.
The same gap in money
Over £70,000 a year for one senior hire.
And they still cannot be a strategist, a writer, a technical lead and a producer at the same time.