The Next Sensible Step
How to decide what deserves attention now when everything looks urgent.
Rob Curtis
Marketing is
messy.
Let's make sense of it.
I'm Rob Curtis. I run a marketing agency, co-founded marketing software, wrote a book, host a podcast and speak about what I've learnt along the way. Mostly, I help business owners work out what actually matters, what does not, and what to do next.
Founder, The Pursuit Agency
◆Co-founder, MyMarketr.io
◆Author, Managing Marketing's Messy Middle
◆Creator and host, Marketing Unzipped
◆Speaker
The short version
I bloody love
marketing.
I love the problem-solving bit. Working out what a business is really trying to achieve, what is getting in the way, and which bit of marketing can actually help.
What I do not love is the industry habit of making simple things sound complicated. Most businesses are not short of activity. They are short of a clear reason for doing it. SEO, ads, social, email, content. Fine. But if nobody can explain how it connects to the business, you are just collecting tactics and calling it best practice.
- 01Start with the business. Marketing comes second.
- 02A strategy is a hypothesis. Test it, learn, adapt.
- 03Clarity beats cleverness, especially when somebody is paying for it.
- 04People are not data points. Context changes everything.
My world
One idea,
five ways in.
An agency, a piece of software, a book, a podcast and a stage. Different formats, same obsession: making marketing easier to understand and easier to act on.
Doing the work
The Pursuit Agency
Joined-up marketing strategy and execution for ambitious businesses. It is where the thinking gets tested against real targets, real budgets and real people.
Visit Pursuit ↗MyMarketr.io
Software I co-founded to make useful marketing thinking, content and guidance more accessible to businesses that do not need, or cannot justify, a full agency relationship.
See what we are building ↗Managing Marketing's Messy Middle
One hundred practical ideas for the bit between getting attention and getting chosen.
Read about the book →
Exploring the ideas
Marketing Unzipped
A 2025 series of longer conversations about marketing, business, psychology and technology.
Browse the archive →
Bringing it to life
Speaking
Practical talks built around the same frameworks I use in real conversations with business owners.
See speaking topics →Ideas
Things I've been
thinking about.
Articles, frameworks and the occasional podcast episode. Some of it is finished thinking. Some of it I will probably change my mind about. That is rather the point.
Your marketing isn't broken. Your order of operations is.
Most businesses do not need another channel. They need to decide what the business needs, then choose the marketing that can help.
The marketing words that usually mean nobody has decided anything
A small collection of phrases that sound strategic, but often hide the fact that nobody has made a proper choice.
"We just need more leads" is usually the wrong diagnosis
More leads can make a broken system more expensive. Before buying traffic, work out where the people you already have are getting stuck.
Attention is not trust. That is where the Messy Middle begins.
Getting noticed is the easy bit to measure. The harder job is helping somebody feel confident enough to choose you.
Business. Strategy. Tactics. In that order.
A simple hierarchy that stops marketing conversations beginning with channels before anybody has agreed what the business is trying to change.
The data said no. The customer said yes.
Dashboards are useful. Humans are inconvenient. Good marketing gets better when you understand where the numbers stop explaining the decision.
The framework
The Next
Sensible Step.
Most marketing problems are not caused by a lack of ideas. They are caused by too many ideas arriving before anybody has agreed the problem.
The internet can give you four hundred things you could do by lunchtime. That is not useful. Start with the business. Get clear on what needs to change. Choose a strategy that could change it. Then pick the tactic. The Next Sensible Step is simply the best move you can justify now, not every move you could possibly make.
Business
Strategy
Tactics
Not the other way round.
Do everything at once
Copy a competitor
Wait for certainty
"So, what is the next sensible step?"
The question I use when a marketing conversation starts getting too clever.
Rob Curtis
Managing
Marketing's
Messy Middle
100 Pages to Clean Up the Mess
The book
Attention is not
the same as trust.
And trust is not
the same as a sale.
Managing Marketing's Messy Middle is 100 practical ideas for the bit between getting noticed and getting chosen, when customers are comparing, hesitating, researching and deciding whether to trust you.
- 01Why attention does not automatically create trust
- 02Where the invisible leaks appear between interest and action
- 03How proof, clarity and comparison reduce hesitation
- 04Why you should fix the funnel before fuelling it
The podcast
Marketing Unzipped
Longer conversations about marketing, business, psychology and technology. The 2025 archive is here, with a shorter route to the episodes I would actually tell somebody new to start with.
The 2025 archive
Seventeen conversations that did not stop being useful
Browse the archive →
Start here
01
Demystifying the basics of SEO: what, why and how
The clearest long-form version of how I explain SEO without turning it into a dark art.
Why We Buy: the psychological biases your marketing is missing
Why sensible customers behave irrationally, and why logic rarely gets the final vote.
The 3 Pillars of a Scalable Marketing System
For when marketing feels busy but not joined up. Structure before more activity.
Speaking
I'd rather be
useful than
inspiring.
Talks for people who have to go back to work on Monday and decide something. Practical, honest, a bit funny, and built around problems I have actually had to solve.
Marketing Without the Bullshit
What actually moves a business, what just sounds impressive, and the questions worth asking.
The Irrational Marketer
What to do when the dashboard says one thing and the customer does another.
Managing Marketing's Messy Middle
How buyers move from attention to action, and what helps them decide when the path is anything but linear.
Off the clock
More than
marketing.
Not every part of my life needs to become a business lesson. These are just three things that shape how I work and how I spend my time.
A lot of evenings and weekends on the touchline, usually thinking about the game long after everybody else has gone home.
A brain that moves quickly, changes lanes often, and works a lot better when I build the right scaffolding around it.
The part that makes the boundaries matter, and the reason I am much less impressed by being busy than I used to be.
Newsletter
One useful marketing
thought a week.
No funnel. No twelve-part sequence. One idea I think is worth your time, usually sparked by something I have seen, tested, questioned or disagreed with that week.
Unsubscribe whenever. I would rather you read it than be counted.