Make social the engine room of growth I’m thrilled budgets are shifting to social; I’m less thrilled by the pressure on lean teams. The board isn’t being awkward, they’re being rational. They want growth. If social now commands a bigger slice of spend, the plumbing must match the promise.

(more fun, more pipeline) You’re in Q4, the calendar’s sprinting, Lead gen targets are huuuuuge, sales are nudging, and your to-do list is judging you. Breathe. We’re going to make social do the heavy lifting. Good news: social can still be your highest-quality pipeline if you keep things native,…

Social is increasingly about how content feels to the person on the other end (AKA Mood-based marketing). When you show up with a steady atmosphere (calm, confidence, small sparks of joy) people stick around and come back. And you can measure it properly: saves, meaningful comments, watch-time through key beats,…

B2B marketing success in 2025 depends on trust, not just reach. Buyers use social to research, value authentic video, and trust thought leadership more than ads. This roadmap shows how to build belief with content mixes, creators, and social proof—because trust is the KPI that drives growth.

If you still think Reddit is the wild west of the internet, you’re already behind. For years Reddit sat on the sidelines of marketing plans, overlooked in favour of shinier platforms. Too messy, too unpredictable, too risky. And guess what, while brands looked away, audiences didn’t. They piled in. And…

Twenty years ago, I started saying ‘social is the oil in the marketing engine’. Not the fuel. The oil. It reduces friction, carries signals, and makes everything run better. Back then it felt like a hunch. Today we can prove it. If you tune your social properly, you lift search,…

Travel discovery has moved. People still “Google,” but the real decisions are being shaped by what they see and ask in social, and then resolved by AI assistants that summarise it all for them. It’s the era of social search and Ai discoverability. If your brand isn’t showing up clearly…

How FS marketers stay discoverable when Google isn’t the starting point Sixty per cent of Google searches now end without a single click. Your prospects still have questions, but they’re finding answers on LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok and, increasingly, in ChatGPT’s neat little summaries. As I said on the recent LinkedIn…

Truth on Fire, and Brands Are in the Line of It We’re all in the truth business now. At Somerset House, on a chilly evening in June, I joined a panel to unpack the uncomfortable realities of misinformation and disinformation, and what brands can do about it. The session was…

You hit your KPIs. You smashed your impressions. You even got a nice jump in site traffic. And yet… …nothing. No extra budget. No nod from the board. Not even a “well done” from the CFO. Why? Because your data’s doing all the talking and none of the persuading.

Reflections from the 2025 Fintech Marketing Conference Speaker after speaker at this year’s Fintech Marketing Conference said the same thing in different ways: digital works. From account-based marketing to AI-powered retention to paid social that actually drives pipeline, it was clear that the opportunity is bloomin’ massive. So, here’s the…

(and actually win them over) It is a truth universally acknowledged (and quietly cursed under many a marketer’s breath) that CFOs find marketing baffling. Not because they do not understand business. Quite the opposite. It is because marketing too often speaks in a foreign tongue of impressions, engagement rates and…

We’ve all been there. You’ve pulled a marketing campaign apart, wrangled the data, triple-checked your charts, and packaged it into a tidy little deck. You hit your KPIs. You even exceeded your objectives. But in the boardroom? Silence. A polite nod. Maybe a vague comment about the branding. Because data…

For years, B2B marketing scoffed at influencer marketing. Too fluffy. Too consumer. Too… Instagram. And yet here we are. In 2025, over 51% of B2B campaigns now include B2B influencer marketing in some form (See Joel Harrison’s post). In content marketing and thought leadership categories, that number…

There was a time when hashtags ruled social media. Marketers would cram as many as they could into a post, hoping for a golden boost in reach. And for a while, it worked. Instagram posts with 11+ hashtags once saw a 79.5% engagement increase (Sprout Social, 2025).