Marketing budgets are often one of the first budgets cut, time and time again, yet marketers continue to claim companies are making unwise decisions. To support the case, you point to research and cases showing companies who invest in marketing during a downturn come out stronger. Is the answer turning marketing into a profit center, as some have claimed? For a few companies, particularly those with a direct response marketing model, this might work. But it isn’t the solution in most cases. The truth is, most companies can temporarily reduce their marketing budget. Here’s why. MORE >>

Photo credit: Wikipedia. am old enough to remember the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. At the end of his life, there were endless reports of his courageous fight to remain alive. When, inevitably  he did pass away, Saturday Night Live aired a news story about Francisco Franco’s'”valiant fight to remain dead.” ” I am getting to the point where I think we need to do the story on SEO’s valiant fight to remain dead. I’ve been doing SEO for a long time, and I have grown weary of the “SEO is dead” stories. SEO is not dead. They are spam techniques. MORE >>

I like and admire Eric Qualman. I’ve met him a couple of times and he is a fellow author at McGraw Hill. He is a kind man, a legitimate intellect, and one of the top speakers in our field. His insanely popular series of fast-paced “ social media revolution ” videos have been viewed millions of times and are standard fare to kick off a social media class or workshop. In under four minutes, these catchy factoid machines impress upon the viewer the power and importance of our society’s digital transformation. Like Apple. Let’s not sell fear. What do you think? MORE >>

What marketing metrics do you use to run your business? Are they the same as the metrics you report to your CEO? Long-gone are the days when the only thing marketing discussed with the CEO was the color of the logo and the size of the advertising budget. It is not the creatives who will delivering reports to the C-Suite. It is the data scientists and the marketing nerds. While we all want a shiny real-time marketing dashboard  running on a wall of flat screens, let’s consider why the metrics themselves are important. Marketing Metrics Keep Marketing Accountable. Read that again!). MORE >>

I am not referring to the age-old question, “What will we write about?” Creating content that an industrial and technical audience will find relevant is not easy. An industrial marketer [.]. This is only a content summary. Please click on the headline to read the full article. Visit my website for more content on industrial marketing.]. Content Marketing Sales Strategies Engineering Inbound Marketing Industrial distributors Industrial Marketing Manuafcturing Manufacturers MORE >>