Insights tagged ‘Digital Strategy’
-
Generative engine optimisation: separating sound practice from snake oil
A new three-letter acronym is stalking the marketing industry. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your content visible in AI-generated answers, such as those produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. The term was coined in a 20…
-
Automating your marketing 01: Paid Search Ads
Google has always wanted you to believe that running search ads is simple and not as complex as it actually is. Set a budget (a generous one!), choose some keywords, and let the machine handle the rest. To be fair, the machine has become exceptionally good at certain aspects of …
-
Received wisdom: classic frameworks under AI pressure 01: David C Baker
David C Baker has spent thirty years telling agency owners something they already suspected but lacked the courage to act on. You are not expensive enough, not focused enough in what you do. You are not sufficiently authoritative with your clients. The issue is not your work. Th…
-
Received wisdom: classic frameworks under AI pressure 02: Crabtree's LER
What happens to the labour efficiency ratio when labour isn’t the bottleneck? Greg Crabtree has spent decades telling agency owners something they did not want to hear. Your business is not a creative enterprise with a financial problem. It is a labour arbitrage operation with …
-
The production agent stack for sensitive environments: a field guide for 2026
What to actually deploy when mistakes carry consequences, and what to skip when they don’t. The agent era has diversified its tooling. Eighteen months ago, most teams assembled whatever tools worked and hoped for the best. That approach was acceptable when agents only drafted e…
-
Meta and Stripe want you to buy things from ads again
Meta and Stripe announced this week that they have built a native checkout experience inside Facebook ads, powered by Stripe’s infrastructure and the buyer’s saved Meta wallet credentials. A user sees an ad, taps “Buy now,” and purchases the item without leaving Facebook. If you…
-
Software was never meant to last forever
There is a particular kind of frustration that anyone who has worked inside a mid-sized organisation will recognise. You are eighteen months into a Salesforce implementation. The original scope was clean and reasonable. But somewhere around month four, somebody realised that you…
-
Fall back
What creative studios and dev shops (and probably everyone else, too) need to do to stay relevant in the AI era without becoming commoditized slop. What’s covered: Your people are your moat · Easy to do, hard to be the best · Quality and simplicity · Never look to others · Don…
-
On getting paid faster
These five cashflow levers are arguably the quickest, easiest wins when optimizing your service business. Frequency of online payment deposits Update your online payment system to deposit into your bank account daily instead of weekly. Or whatever the quickest interval availab…
-
Reading between the lines
There’s a lot to learn in a professional services business between the day you open your doors and the day you sell or retire or whatever it is you do next. And there are a million different angles you can take to improve the future based on the past. Here is a line graph of my…
-
The stuff between
Simply put, your service business in its most raw form look something like this: Stuff → Lead; Lead → stuff → Signed contract; Signed contract → stuff → Start; Start → stuff → Complete; Complete → stuff → Aftercare. And there’s a level of automation and organizatio…
-
Principles and systems to optimize your service business
One of the greatest challenges in starting and owning a service business is the shift from doing the work to building the business that does the work, and then optimizing that business to be better than everyone else doing similar work. In December of last year I sold the web d…
