What I got wrong about online marketing in 2018
In 2018 I published a piece on this site called "Step 1 - Online Marketing for businesses - 5 reasons you are (probably) going to need our help". You can still read it in the Internet Archive. Its argument was that online marketing is too big to learn yourself, so you should hire somebody, and that somebody was me. Two of its five reasons have aged well. Two were sales copy wearing the clothes of advice. One is now the opposite of what we tell people.
I'm going through it because an agency that never revisits what it said is just hoping nobody checks.
What it said
The five reasons, in the order I made them: don't try to learn it yourself, because you'll waste hours on forums and videos. Don't be on every social channel. Stop spending time on work that brings in no income. Stop agonising over your branding. And if you have more time than money, pay me to coach you instead.
The tone was of its time: capital letters, celebrity asides and an exclamation mark where an argument should have been.
The bit I'd now say the other way round
"Don't try and do it yourself" was the headline reason, and today it's the thing I'd most want to take back.
Plenty of this is genuinely doable by the person running the business, and often done better by them, because they know their customers. Claiming a Google Business Profile, keeping it right and asking customers for reviews is an afternoon's work with no fee attached, and our Business Profile guide walks through it. Setting up the handful of numbers that tell you whether anything is working is a morning, and five GA4 reports is the whole of it. We publish those because the alternative is charging people for things they could do themselves, which is a bad trade for both of us.
What hasn't changed is that some of it genuinely does take someone who does it all week: technical work on a site, running paid advertising with real money going through it, and the judgement about what to do next. The honest version of the 2018 claim is not "you'll need help", it's "work out which half you should keep".
The two that have held up
Don't be on every social channel. That was right in 2018 and it's righter now, because there are more channels and the day is no longer. Pick where your customers actually are, do that properly, and ignore the rest.
Stop doing work that brings in nothing. I made that point with a joke from a television comedy rather than with evidence, but the point stands, and it's now most of what a one-page marketing plan is for: deciding what you're not going to do.
The two that were sales copy
The branding reason and the coaching reason were both really the same sentence: here is a thing you find hard, and here is my invoice. Neither offered a test the reader could run for themselves, which is the thing I'd now insist on. If you can't tell somebody how to find out whether they need you, you're not giving advice.
What I'd write now in place of the branding one is the actual question, which is whether the problem is how the business looks or what it says, and that has a piece of its own.
What changed in between
Three things, and none of them was a new tactic.
The first is that the answer often arrives before the click, which has changed what being findable means rather than ending it. The second is that nearly every claim in marketing can now be checked against what the platform itself publishes, so there's less excuse for a piece like my 2018 one, which cited nothing at all. The third is that prices became something you can look up, including ours: what marketing costs in the UK exists because in 2018 I wouldn't have published a price list and I couldn't now defend not doing it.
Why this is here and not deleted
The eight oldest pieces on this site stay exactly as written, because rewriting the past is worse than being embarrassed by it. The 2018 posts were on an older version of the site that no longer exists, so this is a new piece about them rather than an edit of one.
If you want the current version of that 2018 advice, it's marketing for a small local business: what to do first, what can wait, and what to do yourself. And if you'd rather talk it through, our 90-day marketing plan is where we'd start.
I founded oXo Creatives, an independent marketing agency and consultancy, in 2013 and run it full-time. Until 2026 I ran it alongside senior in-house marketing roles at Google, PlayStation and King, partner management at Meta, and digital product at NatWest.
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