Insight Online

Anyone need a break but also scared of losing momentum? What's the right thing to do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Short History of Insight Online 2022 - Abysmal 2023 - Worse 2024 - Turnaround 2025 - Rebuilding strong Feels like it took us an age to get here. So, as the holidays come up, I'm bloody nervous about losing the momentum we've built. I don't want a start like last year where it took 6 months to get things moving again. My plan: Keep the marketing going through the break but not all on my shoulders. I’ve got great people like Marilene Gaerlan and Terri Morris stepping in to take some of the load, because I know “holiday Kim” won’t write 3 posts a week. Maybe that's the lesson: Tired? Get help. Let me know what you're up to! I think we'll head up to Paihia for a few days for some diving. ----- #Follow for stories about running Insight Online, strategy, marketing, and occasionally, my mum.

Looking back at 2025… what am I proud of? Hard to say just one thing. Just staying in the game deserves a bloody medal. If you’re running a business right now and you’re still standing, you're pretty rocking in my book. For me, the big one is finally getting a proper business strategy together. It took time. I only really got serious about business strategy a couple of years ago. But now, it’s become the guide I never knew I needed. It seems to me that if you're in a booming economy, you can get away with less strategic work. But if you're in a competitive, tough climate, then it becomes essential. Thoughts in the video below! ----- #Follow for stories about running Insight Online, strategy, marketing, and occasionally, my mum.

The ads are coming to AI results. ChatGPT started trialling eCommerce ads in their results a few weeks back and now reports have started to surface showing ads in AI mode at the top of Google Search. I don't think anyone is particularly surprised, we all knew it was coming. I'm really interested to see how they integrate this into the existing Ad infrastructure. For example: 1. Will it be another channel accessible through the Google Ad interface? 2. How will they handle targeting? There's so much more nuance in LLM queries. 3. How will they start in terms of pricing? My thoughts: They'll start it cheap to get people to start advertising on the platform while building case studies to promote it. 📌 Read the full article in the comments below! 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘺 𝘉𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘬

Our rebrand didn’t start as a branding problem. It started 12 months ago when I looked at everything that was going on and was thinking, "what the hell??!" Externally: AI coming in full force, NZ recession, US tariffs. Internally: Existential angst. Will agencies exist? Are we all going to be farmers? I really wondered for a while whether Insight had a future. But you know what? I'm stubborn. I wasn't ready to stop with Insight. I'd just worked for the last year to pull us out of debt. I had an amazing team. We had freaking awesome clients.... I'm not giving this up. Ok, Kim, but what to do. Well, we gathered intel. Big discussions with clients, team, business partners and coaches. And slowly, we formed a new strategy, a new plan. Out of that mash of activity, one project was the rebrand. Haha, as I write this, I realise the rebrand is the reflection of a lot of internal change that's been going on for the past two years. Would I do anything differently? Probably very little.... (mulling). I think the amount of energy we expended internally was the right place to focus. Maybe.... (and I can't believe I'm saying this) I'd give myself more of a break as we finish off the last piece of this mixed up puzzle I call my business. Ahhhh what a trip. Thanks for letting me blab. How's your year gone? I hope easy and full of success. ----- #follow for stories about running Insight Online, strategy, marketing, and occasionally, my mum.

The biggest shake-up in search since Google launched? It’s happening right now. Say hello to AIO: AI Optimisation. We set ourselves a challenge to explain it in plain English (no buzzword bingo). Here’s the deal - People aren’t just Googling anymore. They’re asking AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity… these tools are changing what people see, who they trust, and which brands show up in answers. If SEO helps you show up on Google, AIO helps you show up in AI answers. And when AI gives two results instead of ten, you’d better be one of them. So what can you do right now? ✓ Publish credible, expert-led content. ✓ Use structured data so AI understands you. ✓ Earn mentions from trusted sites. ✓ Stay consistent - authority compounds. Search is evolving fast. The brands adapting now will own the future. Check out the full breakdown in our recent blog. (Link in the comments below!) And if you’d rather skip the acronym soup and get straight to results with someone who knows their sh** stuff, you know where to find us. 😉 #AIOptimisation #SEO #AIO #DigitalMarketing #SearchStrategy #InsightOnline ----- #Follow for stories about running Insight Online, strategy, marketing, and occasionally, my mum.

Common reasons I see people changing agencies? Weirdly, the most common reasons have nothing to do with performance. Top three in no particular order: 1. Lack of communication 2. Poor attitude 3. No alignment to business goals Note: There will have been many clients that have left us for exactly these reasons. So these are things we work on too! But over the past couple years, these three reasons are probably the most common that I hear in sales calls. • Lack of communication is really big. In digital, the work we do can be super technical and so the people doing the work can often struggle to translate what they do in a way that makes sense to the client. It often results in long ass reports that aren't read. • Poor attitude. I've definitely had a few clients come to me recently because their previous agencies actually did great work, but they felt ignored and not really listened to. At the end of the day, we're all still people, right? • No alignment to business goals - Yea, this is kinda funny. Happens a lot with SEO work. Where maybe there's lots of demand for particular keywords so the SEO consultant will only focus on those keywords, even if there's only a slight association to the client's business. I call these out because they're probably the biggest things we need to work on as well. We're a service business, right? Key focus being service. What about you? What's the reason for the last time you changed a provider? —- #Follow for stories about running Insight Online, strategy, marketing, and occasionally, my mum.