Blog
What we have worked out running marketing and building software
A marketing blog South Africa business owners can actually use. What we have learned running search, content, advertising and software for real businesses, including the parts that did not work.
Why we publish any of this
We took our client results off this website. That was a deliberate decision and it leaves us with a problem worth being honest about: we cannot prove what we are by pointing at a number. So we do the other thing, which is to show the working. A marketing blog South Africa business owners can use is one where you can tell, by reading it, whether the people writing it actually know the job.
That sets the rule for what goes up here. Every piece has to teach something you could act on without hiring anybody, and it has to be specific enough that being wrong would be embarrassing. General advice is safe, costs nothing to write and is worth exactly that. If a piece could have been published by any agency in the country, it does not go up.
It also means writing about the things that did not work. A tactic we stopped using, a figure that turned out to be stale, an assumption a client proved wrong. Those are the pieces we would want to read from somebody else, and they are the ones that are genuinely hard to fake.
Nothing here is gated. There is no form in front of it, no email required and no chapter withheld until you hand over a phone number. If a piece is worth reading it is worth reading now, and a business that has to trade your details for its own advice is telling you what it thinks the advice is worth. Take what is useful and do it yourself. If you would rather not, that is what the rest of the site is for.
What you will not find here
- Predictions about the year ahead. Nobody knows, and the ones who write them are not the ones doing the work.
- Lists of tools. The tool is almost never the reason something worked.
- Figures we cannot source. Where a number appears, it was checked before it went in, and it is somebody else’s research rather than our own client results.
- Anything written to hit a publishing schedule. We would rather post four times a year and be worth reading.
Would rather we just looked at yours?
Fifteen minutes, no pitch. What you are trying to grow, what is in the way, and an honest answer about whether we are the right people for it.