What I learnt in my 20th year of marketing businesses online

I designed my first website in 1995 with my best mate Simon.  We were hired by these guys that we'd met in a pub in Brighton to build a web page for their new business.  They paid us £50.  It was rubbish.

A lot's happened since then...

Because it's nearing that "reflective" time of year, I start to look back on the year both personally and in business.  I've realised that even after all this time, I'm still learning things on an almost weekly basis.  Sometimes I am not quick enough to feed that learning back into our processes, so let this list act as a sort of Note to Self, which might be useful to you too as you market your business online in 2016.

1. Until you've run 10 campaigns for a client and studied every axes of the data, you won't know what works best.  Stop assuming you have the knowledge upfront and structure your first campaign to glean the most possible data in the shortest amount of time.
2. Video, Video, Video, Video.  And I say again, Video.  Without video, you are missing out on conversions. Fact.
3. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile, Mobile. And I say again, Mobile. In almost every case, we should have started with the Mobile experience FIRST, then designed everything else upwards and outwards from there.
4. Retargeting is the secret sauce in a truly joined up campaign.  It's wonderful when used in the smartest possible way.
5. Some clients don't need SEO.  Question the brief, maybe they don't need a "pull" campaign at all. Perhaps what they need to do is "push" and educate their prospects in order to convert them.
6. Session Recoding reveals not-seen-elsewhere insights that can dramatically improve results!
7. You're not too old, and you haven't run out of ideas. Yet.

What did you learn this year?