Marketing practice, written small
The file is kept in four parts: the method, the six practice documents, the working notes and the glossary. Each part is linked in the line above and again below.
A campaign is rarely lost in the place it is reviewed. It is lost three steps earlier, in a sentence that asked a reader to agree with something they had not yet been given a reason to believe, or in a link whose label promised one thing and whose destination delivered another. By the time the result is counted, the small failure has been folded into a large number and is no longer visible.
These pages are written from the opposite direction. They take the smallest unit of marketing work that still carries meaning on its own — one sentence, one link, one step of a sequence, one decision a reader is asked to make — and look at it closely enough to say what it is actually doing. A microcosm is a small thing that has the shape of a larger one, and the argument here is that a single badly ordered paragraph usually has the same shape as the strategy it belongs to.
That is not a claim that detail matters more than direction. It is a claim about where direction becomes legible. A positioning statement is an intention until it reaches the level of a sentence someone reads; a customer journey is a diagram until it reaches the level of a page someone leaves. The units are where the intention either survives contact or quietly does not, and reading them in order is the cheapest diagnostic work available.
The practice documents below take six ordinary subjects — branding and messaging, customer-journey mapping, funnel structure, web design and search, social content, paid media — and treat each of them at that scale. They are descriptions of how the work behaves, not offers, and they assume a reader who already does this work and wants a plainer account of it than the field usually supplies.
The working notes are shorter and less finished: recurring problems, written down when they recur, kept in one file rather than scattered through the documents. The glossary exists because most of the vocabulary in this subject is used in at least two incompatible ways, and it is easier to state which one is meant than to keep apologising for it.
Written and kept by
Microcosmic Marketing
What a name carries before a sentence does
Decisions in order, not screens in order
Sequences that persuade and sequences that collect
Being found, and being worth having found
Publishing to a question, not to a calendar
The one thing distribution can buy
Recurring problems, written down when they recur. The full file holds nine; three are shown here.
A sequence asks for a decision before it has given a reason. The step is not too long; it is in the wrong position. Moving the reason one step earlier usually costs nothing and changes the whole sequence.
A message reads well to everyone who already agrees with it, because it was drafted by people who do. The test is whether a sceptical reader can find the sentence that answers their objection, not whether an enthusiastic one enjoys the tone.
A measurement counts arrivals rather than intentions, so it rises when a headline overpromises and falls when it becomes accurate. The number is real; what it is a measurement of has quietly changed.
Written and kept by
Microcosmic Marketing
Practice papers on marketing, kept as a working file.