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There are some lessons you only learn when life hits you hard. This week’s master stared down the loss of his business —

A few years ago, I was in charge of presenting a big marketing strategy deck to a senior executive. My team and I prepared a script that went something like this:

My inbox is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get (with apologies to Forrest Gump).

Have you ever seen an online ad campaign that has absolutely nothing to do with you? I just saw one on Facebook — it was a brand I've never heard of promoting a product I’d never buy. I'm not the brand’s target audience, and that brand is missing out by not understanding who to market their product towards.

I never thought I needed a website redesign strategy until I lost search traffic and the revenue it brought. That was in 2022, when I had several websites generating earnings via affiliate commissions. Back then, you could have an “ugly” website and still rank well in search.

With 5.5 billion people online (and counting), the internet has never been busier — or had more opportunity. But, businesses keep asking if blogging benefits are still worth the effort.

When you‘re just getting started with making a website, I know that the process of learning how to use WordPress can feel overwhelming. We’ve all been there, so you're certainly not alone.

Read this line from one of my favorite authors: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

At my last job I was tasked with launching a newsletter, and was suddenly faced with a bunch of unfamiliar acronyms: DKIM, DMARC, SPF. (Apparently that last one is not related to sun protection?)

Given how logos are such an essential part of brand identity, I was skeptical of using AI logo generators.

Most companies calculate their customer acquisition cost (CAC) incorrectly. They focus on individual channel metrics, such as $50 from paid ads, $30 from content marketing, and $75 from partnership, without understanding their true CAC across all channels. This incomplete picture leads to misallocated budgets, unrealistic growth projections, and investor presentations that don't hold up under scrutiny.

With ChatGPT, anyone can create blog posts in seconds. But, just because you have copy doesn’t mean it's valuable. You need content research to make a post that’s actually valuable. That’s especially true with Google’s Helpful Content Update, a shift that placed even more emphasis on expertise, knowledge, and credibility.

For anyone struggling with using AI in Instagram marketing, now is definitely the time to learn. Nearly half of the marketers we surveyed for our 2025 State of AI Marketing report said they're already using AI for social media, with 49% using it for text-based social content and 47% for video/audio-based content.

As the founder of AI newsletter Mindstream, I'm constantly thinking about scale, especially when it comes to content. For me, video was the bottleneck. I wanted to show up consistently, but I didn’t want to spend hours filming, editing, or setting up gear. That’s what led me to explore AI avatars.

You want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO), but where do you start? We were all SEO beginners once, so take heart: There’s lots to learn, but I’ve got plenty of expert advice and a step-by-step guide to get you started.

As I was scrolling on Facebook today, I noticed two ads. One was offering me 20% off at a store that I've never heard of before. It felt completely random, in a “did you send this message to the right person?” kind of way.

Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are wired to want proof, not promises. While we marketers light up at impressions, and engagement — excuse the stars in my eyes — CFOs focus on revenue, risk, and return.

Marketing is a paradoxical undertaking: We create campaigns for the masses, but those messages are only ever experienced on the individual level. How does a good marketer straddle this? By writing directly to a single viewer, aka their buyer persona.

When things get chaotic, it’s easy to ignore marketing team structure, but fast-scaling companies can’t afford that oversight.

Let‘s be honest: if you’re running a business focused on AI tools and you‘re not using AI to grow that business, you’re missing the point entirely.

Email design is a mix of art and science. You can have the best email body copy ever written, but if your design and layout don’t support it, it can still flop. I know. I’ve been focused on email marketing for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in email design.

I am “just threw out my back while turning to adjust my seatbelt” years old, so I was especially excited to talk to Jayde Powell, who’s made a name for herself as a bit of a Gen Z whisperer.

Marketing teams today are drowning in software. The 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape revealed a staggering 14,106 martech products available, representing 27.8% growth year-over-year. But here's the uncomfortable truth: marketers estimate they waste an average of 26% of their budgets on ineffective channels and strategies, with about half of respondents saying they misspend at least 20% of their budgets.

As a digital marketing consultant, I spend a lot of time promoting website content on social media. But what about promoting your social presence via your website? Embedding enables you to do exactly that. I’ll often use this tactic for video content as a way to repurpose it and increase its reach.

The newsletter platform and social media site, Substack, has become one of the hottest spaces for online creators—and now brands and celebrities are joining the bandwagon. Boasting more than five million paid subscribers across the platform, Substack invites creators like myself to build an audience, make money, and connect with other readers and writers.

When I spoke to this week’s master in marketing, I was surprised at how seamlessly she had combined her two professional loves, digital marketing and life coaching. I’ll admit to having been skeptical about life coaching in the past, but this conversation changed my mind. As a life coach, she developed a framework she calls the Three See’s — more on that below — that can help any marketer up their game.

Managing relationships across healthcare professionals (HCPs), healthcare organizations (HCOs), and complex regulatory requirements makes choosing the right CRM critical for pharmaceutical companies. Whether you're tracking drug samples, coordinating clinical trials, or ensuring compliance, pharmaceutical companies benefit from CRM systems with features that support their specialized workflows.

There‘s more to healthcare than the visit itself. Whether you’re a doctor’s office, dental practice, or senior living facility, you know that consistent, personalized communication is key to meeting patients’ changing health needs. In fact, it’s what patients prefer. Research by global healthcare company Abbott found that 72% of patients want more personalized care.

Spreadsheets and manual processes can hold back your wholesale business from growing. As wholesalers face increasing pressures to deliver faster, maintain accurate inventory visibility, and provide exceptional customer service, the right CRM becomes essential for success.

With college enrollment trending downward and experts anticipating a “demographic cliff” in 2025 — having a higher education CRM is absolutely vital to ensuring a thriving institution. A CRM is key to attracting and retaining students, ensuring enrollee success, and fostering relationships with alumni and donors.

For the past ten years, I’ve lived and breathed marketing. I’ve run social campaigns, worked with influencers, created content, built affiliate programs, and everything in between. One factor unites everything: Every single winning strategy has always tied back to community.

If you’re creating content without an editorial calendar you’re setting yourself up for stress, inconsistency, and missed opportunities. Been there, done that, got the “I meant to do more” t-shirt.

If missed appointments, mismanaged invoices, and fragmented customer communication are draining your revenue, it’s time to consider implementing a CRM for plumbers. The right platform helps reduce no-shows, speeds up emergency dispatch, and provides the insights you need to improve profitability and customer loyalty.

With advances in technology and evolving media consumption habits over the years, publishers are no strangers to business model pivots — and it’s only getting more challenging with the rise of generative AI. To conquer obstacles to monetization and distribution, publishing companies need to be able to build stronger relationships with their readers, subscribers, and viewers as well as measure the ROI of different campaigns to ensure they spend resources on what works best. From managing subscriber relationships to automating workflows to crafting personalized marketing campaigns, a good CRM can help you tackle modern-day obstacles.

In the crowded digital marketplace, a single click is everything. It’s not just a metric, it’s the heartbeat of conversion. But what compels someone to click? Is it the headline? The button color? The layout?

I’ve helped build marketing plans at startups where the entire “team” was just me and a Google Doc. Other times, I worked side-by-side with CMOs and VPs of marketing to launch new products, shift positioning, or scale growth. No matter the stage, the goal was the same: make a plan that actually gets used, not one that collects dust.

Wondering how to start a blog that gets read, gets clicks, and actually leads to conversions?

Stacks of notes. A half-finished webinar script. Google Docs open in every tab. That’s the beginning of a lead magnet story I hear from peers, founders, and marketers on tight budgets.

If I were looking for the best way to divide a room full of marketers, I’d bring up the topic of guest blogging and link building.

Running a successful cleaning business in 2025 goes far beyond spotless floors and sparkling windows — it requires seamless communication, efficient scheduling, and reliable customer management. Yet, finding the right tools to keep everything organized is a challenge; here’s why: the CRM needs of cleaning businesses are uniquely demanding, blending field service logistics with customer service, recurring job tracking, and quick invoicing.

Managing client relationships in the accounting world involves much more than keeping contact info in one place. For small business accountants, it means staying on top of recurring deadlines, securely handling sensitive financial data, and ensuring no client communication falls through the cracks. These unique needs make it essential to have a CRM that’s not just flexible but tailored to the specific demands of accounting work.

Traditional marketing vs. digital marketing shouldn’t be a controversial decision.

I’ve worked on many websites that have pretty standard “Meet the Team” pages. But I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for your brand if you don’t try to get a little creative or, at the very least, make sure the page is engaging and up to date.

Standard business tools often fall short when it comes to the complex needs of the oil and gas industry. From managing complex, multi-year drilling projects to tracking equipment across remote locations, energy companies need specialized tools to stay competitive. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems designed for oil and gas operations help companies streamline vendor relationships, manage lengthy sales cycles, and coordinate between field operations and corporate headquarters.

Managing customer relationships in call centers presents challenges that standard business software simply can’t address. Unlike typical sales environments, call center teams handle hundreds of interactions daily, require instant access to customer history across multiple touchpoints, and need sophisticated routing and monitoring capabilities to maintain service quality. These high-volume, fast-paced environments demand specialized tools to keep up with rapid-fire customer inquiries while maintaining detailed records and enabling seamless handoffs between agents.

Investment banking operates in a fast-paced environment where relationship management, deal tracking, and regulatory compliance determine success. Investment banks face rapid market changes and growing client demands, increasing regulatory demands, and the need to manage intricate client relationships that traditional spreadsheets and generic tools simply cannot handle effectively.

Honestly, I used to be an AI critic. When ChatGPT first came out, I tried a bunch of ChatGPT prompts. The output I got was often surface-level and sometimes inaccurate. I concluded that it would take more time to edit the work than to do it from scratch myself.

One of the first real jobs I landed as a B2B content writer was summarizing a couple of campaign reports for a product adoption platform. I’ll be honest — I was terrified. Coming from a fiction-writing background, I was way more comfortable describing things in detail.

Running an HVAC business means juggling emergency calls, seasonal demand spikes, and multi-visit jobs that can span weeks. You're dealing with a technician shortage, meanwhile customers expect rapid response times when their AC fails or their furnace breaks.

A few years ago, I inherited a content calendar that was really just a Google Sheet — no dates, no owners, and half the cells completely empty. I spent two straight weeks trying to untangle what was going live, what was already published, and what somehow didn’t exist at all.

In today's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz SEO expert Tom Capper walks you through cannibalization: what it is, how to identify it, and how to fix it.

Let's take an in-depth look at Moz.com title tags that were re-written by Google, including three case studies where we managed to fix bad rewrites.

See how, through several little tweaks to their conversion strategy, the team at Chromatix attracted a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities.

Miriam helps you get started in Google My Business Products with this illustrated tutorial, walking you through how to add your most important products and services.

In SEO, there are three main “bosses” with different needs: your business, your searchers, and your search engines. How do you answer to all of them?

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race: making sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and that you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

These tips will help you optimize your responsive search ads in your Google Ads search campaigns, and increase clicks and conversions.

Measuring ROI for your SEO efforts involves two factors: KPIs and the cost of your current SEO campaigns. With GA, you can pinpoint where your audience is coming from, set goals to stay on track, and incorporate the most attractive keywords to rank better in search engines.

Today, Cyrus explains how powerful STAT can be when you’re trying to discover SEO opportunities on a massive scale.

Links drive rankings — that’s one thing that SEOs and marketers can agree on. But which rankings, and for which pages on your website? Use this guide to build links that impact rankings for specific pages on your website.