As well as running Apricot, I’m also fortunate enough to work as a coach on Seth Godin’s altMBA course.

One of the most powerful things, if not the most powerful thing, I’ve learned from him is to get into the habit of asking an incredibly important question. A question that when answered can provide crystal clarity to pretty much any scenario and act as a North Star, guiding and advising you.

The question?

“What’s it for?”

Yep, that’s it.

It sounds ridiculously simple but when applied to say, your business (I’ve asked myself “what is Apricot for?”), it can lead…

Attention is the Foundation of Effective Marketing

A lot of time, thought and effort is put into marketing — and with good reason.

If you don’t market your company in an intelligent way that’s appropriate to your audience, at best you’ll waste money — at worst, it could shut your doors.

But what is it we’re after, as marketers? What’s most important?

Engagement?

Relationships?

A return on investment?

All of those are important and necessary — but you wont get any of the above unless you have one thing:

Attention.

Attention is the cornerstone of effective marketing. It’s at the…

There was a time, a very recent time, when video on a website was considered a luxury – something nice to have yet not essential. A bit like the chocolate sprinkles on top of a cup cake.

It would sit there and some people would watch it and some wouldn’t. But it wouldn’t really do anything of any real substance.

Video owners wouldn’t be aware of important stats such as engagement levels or play rate – and especially not return on investment.

This led many to think that video “didn’t work”.

But now, video is evolving. It’s usage is becoming…

I’ve sat in many a client meeting to be asked:

“Can you make our video go viral?”

On the surface it seems like a legitimate question. But really, having a video go viral is an unwise goal to have for a project.

The best return on investments that we have seen for clients comes from the content being laser targeted as a particular audience and delivering an experience and/or great value.

To put it another way, it’s more important for a video to be seen by the right people, for the right reasons.

If you have this, you have a…

When I was a kid, there were times that I stayed in the library at break time and solved trigonometry problems, rather than playing football (or soccer, depending on where in the world you’re reading this from).

Don’t get me wrong, I love football — I just love numbers more….and running a video marketing agency, this is a handy thing.

Marketing as a discipline is math + creativity in a boiled down sense. The same goes for video marketing.

Tracking metrics and analysing them carefully can make or break a campaign.

However, of all of the metrics that we measure…