2025 was a year of reminders. Not revelations – just the kind of gentle (and occasionally snooze-disturbing) nudges that make you tilt your head and think, hmm, that again…

A few themes kept resurfacing.

Email doesn’t work… until it does.

If you blast noise to an unwitting audience, it dies. If you send something genuinely useful, timely, and human, it still earns its place. Turns out the channel isn’t broken – the content and timing often is.

Conversion isn’t about cornering people.

Forms, gates, ‘book a demo’ buttons – they only work when the value is obvious. Buyers don’t want to be captured. They want to be helped. When your information is indispensable to them, they convert themselves.

Face‑to‑face still matters – but only if you’ve done the groundwork.

A good conversation is gold. A surprise conversation is expensive. If you haven’t laid the groundwork with content, clarity, and context, you’re wasting precious show time.

Everyone is on their own trajectory.

There is no universal journey. No neat funnel. No perfect timing. All we can do is show up consistently, in the right places for our targets, with something that’s actually useful to them. Being unavoidable, just bumping into them, again.

Plan… but not so tightly you miss the moment.

Marketing paralysis is real. The perfect plan can be the enemy of the timely post. Get it right enough and publish the thing. You can expand or refine later.

Repurpose long after you’re bored of it.

If you’ve said it three times, three ways, you’re just starting to warm up. Most people haven’t seen it yet – and the ones who have, probably needed the reminder.

Choose your battles.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Choose your battles, focus for the wins, learn to press their buttons and expand on the footprint. Then you can plan for the next one.

And finally: don’t be seduced by the stats.

Bots open and click. Dashboards flatter. Pipelines tell the truth. Talk to sales. Follow the deals. That’s where the real story and hints for success, live.

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These are the threads I’ll be chewing over more in the New Year – shouldn’t we aim to be unavoidable and indispensable, building content that actually works, bumping into our audiences in the moments that matter?

For now, a friendly ‘au revoir’ to a year that reminded me of the basics:

Be useful. Be present. Be human.
Oh and say ‘so what?’

HNY, see you in ’26 🙂