This post was originally an email sent out to subscribers of Spice up your life, my weekly email.
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My wife gave me a right bollocking the other night.
She’d gone to bed early, and I came up later after watching a couple episodes of The Last Kingdom (Amy hates all the historical shit I watch, so I have to get it in after hours).
In bed, I opened my phone to have a quick look at what was going on in the world, and saw a news story that proper tickled me.
I tried to stifle the laughter, but it only made it worse. Inevitably, my convulsions woke Amy, who rightly showered me in a stream of expletives.
This was the story that did it:
I’m not sure why I found it so funny. I do tend to laugh and make jokes about inappropriate things (like when I shouted “I think that was a leg” as my uncle took his turn scattering my grandma’s ashes on Otley Chevin. Some people laughed).
Anyway, in the morning, once Amy had forgiven me, I realised we see these false reports of deaths all the time.
Almost every day on LinkedIn, some wannabe guru reads the eulogy of some form of marketing.
“Email is dead!”
“SEO is dead!”
“Organic social media is dead!”
Pay them as much attention as you would to whichever poor fool at that football club declared Petko Ganchev dead.
No form of marketing is dead.
Rather, these ‘gurus’ are:
- failing to adapt to changes
- trying to replicate a strategy that worked in one business, without any regard for differences in another
- saying controversial shit to get engagement
- just doing it wrong
For every form of marketing that we’re told is six feet under, you’ll find dozens of businesses using it to make a killing.
The key is to find what works for you, your offering, and your audience.
If you need help with that, well, some of your fellow subscribers to Spice Up Your Life are experts in solving marketing problems.
Let me know if you’d like to speak to one of them, and I’ll put you in touch.
In the meantime, I think I’m going to raise a glass to Petko, who took the news of his live burial remarkably well.
I think we all need a bit of his attitude in these bizarre times.