Hit Hard or Don’t Hit at All – One of My Top Tips for Digital Marketing

Sometimes it pays to be cautious. Sometimes, caution is the worst thing you can do. Unfortunately, it often takes experience to know when.

When forging or pattern welding steel – that is, when you combine two different types of steel in layers (like a samurai sword or a really expensive kitchen knife) – there’s no room for hesitation. When the steel reaches the right temperature, you have to move fast and you can’t afford mistakes; if you slip up, you have to start over. Harder, faster, straighter – those were the shouts echoing through the smithy the last time we stood there. If you strike too cautiously or miss, everything goes wrong.

This isn’t only true in the forge – it’s just as true in digital marketing. Sometimes you have to strike hard, straight, and fast. That means throwing all caution to the wind. A cautious hammer blow is, after all, no real hammer blow at all. A clear example of this is within the segments of SEO where the competition is brutally tough.

We conducted a study within the casino vertical in the U.S. over 12 months. At the start, we were in the top 20 along with 19 competitors. Twelve months later, it was just us, one of those competitors, and 18 entirely new players.

You might be wondering what this means. Why is there such high turnover among competitors? The answer is that they act in the way that market demands. Competition in the U.S. gaming sector has always been much tougher than almost anywhere else. That almost always means you have to take much greater risks to win.

In the same way that competitors crash in World Cup giant slalom – something you yourself might never do on a slope – it’s because they’re fighting to be the fastest in the world. If you want to go that fast, you have to push yourself to the very limit of your ability.