Thoughts and Learning
Marketing
This excellent book is a must-read for anyone involved in product positioning. It gives a 10-point framework for a positioning exercise, as well as insights on how you can tell you have an issue.
There are so many tools available to marketers, aimed at helping manage content, analytics, budgets, CRM and more. I'm working through the MartechMap to get myself up to speed.
This book was a real game-changer for me. If you're focused on marketing a solution to a new problem, you must read it - it contains very useful advice that could save you from tons of pain.
If you're looking to increase website traffic and revenue from SEO, this book might have a game-changing idea for you. It's also a good refresher on SEO and why you need to take it seriously.
"Many companies think they have a marketing problem when they have a GTM problem." Amen to that. This book provides a foundation for how to get an iterative GTM process in place.
Account-based marketing is the most efficient way to market to prospects if you know which accounts you want to win. But it takes effort. This book explains how Snowflake does ABM.
Your customers don't care about your story - they care about THEIR story. If you're involved in developing messaging, marketing materials or taglines, this should be one of your go-to books.
What is product-led growth and how should you execute it? This book covers the pros and cons of PLG as a go-to-market strategy, along with practical advice on making it work.
Leadership
I’ve worked with interns for over 15 years and I’ve learned a lot from the experience. In this article I focus on the mistakes that are often made and how you can avoid them.
There are lots of lessons in leadership to be found in King Richard, the 2021 film about Richard Williams and how he guided his tennis star daughters, Venus and Serena, to success.
How do I improve my learning habits and encourage my team to do likewise? Marketers must keep learning but it often gets sidelined. Could reading Atomic Habits help?
Life
What's the single most important piece of advice I would give to anyone starting out in marketing today? READ LOADS OF BOOKS. In this article I explain why it's important and how I stop myself from stopping.
How did a personal blog project of mine end up in the New York Times, on BBC Breakfast and in countless other media outlets around the world? In this article I try and explain what happened (although I'm not entirely sure myself).
Why did I decide to take a sabbatical after 20 years of work? How did I benefit from the break and why did it make me a better employee when I went back to work? In this article I explain the upsides of taking time out.