The first rule of technology marketing? Don’t make it sound like marketing.

This is something we’ve learned in our years of marketing software-as-a-service (SaaS) to highly technical audiences, but it’s honestly a good reminder of how marketing should be regardless of your industry. It shouldn’t feel or sound like marketing at all.

But when you’re trying to promote products or services to a specific niche within the tech industry, some of the tried-and-true marketing tactics that succeed with other audiences just won’t work.

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the final blog within the series.

Lead generation and nurturing are important for new leads, but if you’re not pursuing those strategies with existing buyers, you’re missing out on low-hanging fruit.

How do you generate and nurture leads once you’ve already made a sale? By turning your new buyers into brand evangelists. And how do you do that? You have to earn it.

Google recently announced it was postponing the rollout of its Google Page Experience Update. What was scheduled to be rolled out in May now won’t start until mid-June and won’t be fully rolled out until the end of August 2021.

The delay, according to Google, will allow it to “monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues” and “give site owners more tools to improve their pages for this update.”

The page experience doesn’t go live this upcoming month, but there are a couple of updates from Google that do.

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the fifth blog within the series.

Your buyer made the purchase and the sale closed, so the journey’s over, right? Like all good (and ongoing) relationships, the journey’s never really over.

When someone purchases your solution, it’s not a guarantee they’ll be a customer forever if the experience isn’t right. While there may be a contract in place for a specific amount of time, what happens during that contract will largely determine whether the relationship continues beyond that. 

Your new buyers have networks full of peers who are potential SQLs, which means you should consider this stage of the buying cycle to be another sort of entry point for new customers. When delivering support content to new buyers, you’re both working to retain them and market to their networks.

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the fourth blog within the series.

No one at a company wakes up one day and decides they are going to make a large purchase out of nowhere. When the time comes to decide what to buy and from where, there has been lots of careful consideration, many discussions and lots of information provided.

A buyer in the decision stage is looking for product information, and they want to know enough about your product to evaluate its relevance to their problem. It’s important to remember that although a potential buyer has gotten to this stage with your product or service, you can still lose them at this part of the process. This is a critical stage in the buyer’s journey.

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the third blog within the series.

We’ve determined that the awareness stage is about the problem. So what about the solution?

This is called the consideration stage.

Remember the trigger events we mentioned in our previous post? When those trigger events occur and the company signals that they are willing to shake up the status quo in order to find a solution, it means they are looking for a company to help make that solution possible.

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the second blog within the series.

There are two types of buyers in the awareness stage: those who know they have a problem but don’t yet know what the solution is, and those who don’t know they have a problem yet.

The buyer journey can't begin until there's been a disruption of the status quo and a problem is identified. That disruption is the first stage of the buyer's journey: awareness. It’s important to clarify that awareness isn’t about product awareness, branding or familiarity with your company. In this instance, awareness refers to the buyer’s recognition of an internal problem within his or her organization that has become noticeable enough to articulate.

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the first blog within the series.

Every buyer looking for your products and services is on their own journey, from knowing they need a product to actually purchasing it. As a marketer, it’s up to you to create the right messaging for each stage of their journey that will resonate with them and nurture them toward their decision.

Beyond thinking about the buyer’s journey, you must take into account that there are different types of people buying your products and services. These are known to marketers as buyer personas.

In this six-part series, I’m going to help you understand buyer personas and how to create content for each of the various stages of the buyer’s journey. To make the process more manageable, I’m going to walk you through it step-by-step, from awareness to consideration, decision, support and retention.

Do you sit staring at your analytics wondering why some email campaigns are successful while others have dishearteningly low open rates?

When designing your email marketing campaigns, avoid simply analyzing the parts. Instead, study several good email marketing examples from a variety of businesses through a more holistic, human lens.

Don’t get me wrong. Regularly reviewing analytics is key to figuring out what worked and what didn’t, enabling you to make more informed decisions in the future, but you’re not writing marketing emails for robots.

Humans are more than just a set of 0s and 1s behaving in predictable, formulaic ways. We get sick. We give birth. We explore. And unlike robots, no two humans are alike, even identical twins.

Our fears, desires, and goals are in a constant state of change, so when it comes to email engagement, one recipient may delete it without reading it, while another may read it all the way through and eventually become a customer.

To help you understand, I’ve pulled the past year’s best email marketing examples from my own inbox and outlined why these emails made the cut. I’ve also listed additional exercises you must do before...

When setting up a new Facebook ad campaign, there are a lot of moving parts. It’s good to have a checklist of things to cross off, so you aren’t missing what is necessary to run a successful Facebook campaign. From targeting the right audience to creating the right assets, we will cover everything that is needed to run a successful paid Facebook ad campaign.

A digital marketing ecosystem is somewhat similar to the ecosystems you learned about in 6th-grade science class. To save you the trouble of digging out your old science book, an ecosystem is a community or group of living organisms that live in and interact with each other in a specific environment. Examples of ecosystems include marine, desert and rainforest.

But this is a digital marketing blog, and as much as I would like to dissect a frog right now, we have to keep our eyes on the prize: the digital marketing ecosystem.

For any manufacturer, setting yourself apart from the rest is paramount to remaining viable in today’s market. With Google continuing to dominate search results, being easily found through the search platform and ranking highly goes hand-in-hand with success.

Feeling burned out? Looking for some inspiration? Want to improve a skill?

We could all use a boost sometimes. Whether you’re a marketing genius, new to the profession, somewhere in between, or just feeling burned out, resources like podcasts, books or blogs can give you that extra inspiration you’re looking for.

Keeping up with digital marketing resources can let you hone a specific skillset, stay ahead of trends and help keep your team sharp.

Here’s a look at some of our favorite digital marketing resources.

In an effort to create a more privacy-first web, Google has announced its plan to eliminate third-party cookie storage on the Chrome browser by 2022. 

SEO growth is critical for any company. But in order to achieve SEO growth, it requires a diverse and talented team of digital marketers with wide-ranging expertise and skillsets. This team must be strategic and experienced in using the CMS platform your website is built on.

At Kuno Creative, we are HubSpot SEO experts because of the talent, skills and proficiencies our entire team of digital marketers brings to each project. In January of 2021, this teamwork and execution fueled an average increase of 12% growth in organic sessions year-over-year for the HubSpot client websites we manage.

At first glance, you may think audience personas and buyer personas are the same thing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. However, when used together, they can help you get a better understanding of your customer base and they can amplify your marketing strategy.

Understanding email marketing best practices will help your brand stand out. By keeping best practices in mind when writing your emails, you’ll give your recipients that feeling you get when an email hits your inbox and you just can’t NOT click on it. We all get so many emails (many of which end up in trash or spam), so when we get one that speaks to our hearts, it’s a momentous occasion.

Creating an SEO-friendly website design can feel like walking a tightrope between two points on opposite ends of a canyon.

On one side, there are SEO best practices.

You want your most important web pages to rank well in search engines so more people will find them. All the latest SEO updates and trends you’ve read about seem to be telling you that the more words you have on a page, the higher you’ll rank.

On the other side, there’s the user experience.

If you weigh those pages down heavily with too many words, people can’t find what they need quickly once they’ve made it to your website. They’ll get confused and leave for another site that’s easier to navigate. And what good is all that website traffic from Google if it’s not leading to new customers?

Although these may seem like two conflicting priorities, they both accomplish the same goal in the end.

So how can you write website copy that’s optimized for search engines and the user experience?

After working through this challenge on dozens of different website redesigns over the years, here are some of our best recommendations.

Between blog posts, eBooks and social media posts, a long-time marketing stalwart seems to have fallen through the cracks in many of today’s digital marketing strategies: press releases. That’s a big oversight because press releases offer several advantages that no other form of content can bring a robust strategic digital marketing campaign.

A natural excitement comes with getting your digital marketing strategy off the ground. With the wheels in motion, businesses are eager to check and see the results of their marketing efforts in the days, weeks and months that follow. This begs the question: When is the right time to pivot?

When webinars work, they really work. Statistics show that these online-based seminars offer significantly higher conversion rates than other types of content, with an average of 20% of webinar viewers becoming paid customers. Paired with the shift to a more virtual environment, 67% of marketers are increasing their investment in webinars to help turn prospects into clients.

While some businesses are well-versed in how to host a webinar and get people to attend, other businesses are completely new to the game — and that can be an overwhelming place to be. If you’re in this boat, here’s a helpful resource on how to successfully host and promote a webinar. This will lay the groundwork for a model you can reuse over and over as you scale operations.

If you’ve ever been responsible for preparing a big holiday meal, you know the work often begins days in advance and includes countless hours of cooking, cleaning and shuffling around hot pans. You also know that after investing so much time, money and energy into creating your feast, there’s no way you’d let a single morsel go to waste. Luckily, sometimes dishes are even better as leftovers than they were the first go-around (Thanksgiving sandwiches, anyone?).

But, where do you start?

A value proposition is a statement that answers the ‘why’ someone should do business with you. It should convince a potential customer why your service or product will be of more value to them than similar offerings from your competition. You know why your company is great, but do your potential customers know what sets your brand apart?

A good value proposition can give you an advantage over your competitors and is often what your prospects use to evaluate you. And for many consumers, your value proposition is the first thing they encounter when exploring your brand. So, having a clear, concise value proposition is more important than ever. (Consider this: You’ve got less than a minute to capture a site visitor’s attention.)

When creating a value proposition, it’s important to identify all the benefits your product or services offer. Describing what makes these benefits valuable in a quickly digestible way for the reader will help your value proposition make an impression. It’s also critical to identify your customer’s main problem your value proposition helps solve. By connecting this value to your buyer’s challenges your value proposition will become more...

Your brand strategy is what makes you memorable, setting you apart from the competition. Ultimately, it’s why your most loyal customers will decide to invest in you. 

Companies with clear, consistent branding can expect to earn 23% more annual revenue than those without a well-communicated brand. 

Defining your brand strategy is a lot like answering life’s toughest questions. Who are you? What were you put on this earth to do? It can be a daunting discussion, but until you have a clear mission and vision for your company, you won’t have a clear path forward. 

If your company has introduced a new product line or you’ve made a major strategic shift, this conversation is crucial. 

At Kuno, we’ve had the privilege of leading brand development discussions for companies in a variety of industries, from highly technical software to one of the largest greenhouses in the country. 

Here are our recommendations for making the process successful.

What are the first things that come to mind when your customers think about your company?

Why do they trust you?

What truly sets you apart — and is it obvious to everyone who interacts with your brand?

These questions reveal a lot about your brand experience. If the answers aren’t obvious to you, you can’t expect your customers to know why they should choose you over your competitors.

At a time when buyers have more options than ever, defining your brand is your most fundamental mission as a company. It’s not something you can outsource, but it shouldn’t rest entirely on your team’s shoulders, either.

A brand experience agency can bring a valuable fresh perspective and the benefit of having gone through this exercise many times before. They know what goes into brand development and how to create a strategy that communicates your brand to the world.

Here’s a closer look at what the best branding agencies should accomplish.

When developing your brand strategy, there are a lot of elements to consider before you finally get it right. You’re eager to share your story with the world, but you have to do it in a way that pings your target audience just right. 

Before you launch, here are 20 questions that can help you identify your brand strategy. Use your answers as a roadmap to where you want to guide your business in the future.

Everyone loves a fresh start and, after a nightmarish 2020, we’re all ready to move full-steam ahead into a [hopefully] brighter, more successful year. But, as any great business leader knows, setting cohesive goals is only half the battle. To move the needle and make meaningful progress toward your goals this year, you’ve got to have the right people, with the right skills, in the right places.

Whether you’re looking to level-up your existing team, make new hires, outsource projects to an agency, or boost your own capabilities, it’s important to know exactly what it’ll take to outpace the competition in the year ahead.

To help you prepare, here are the five most in-demand marketing skills for 2021.

Have you adjusted your SEO since the advent of COVID-19? If not, now is the time. While some businesses have not been impacted from a search standpoint, others have seen a shift in terms of search intent. As a reminder, search intent (also called user intent or audience intent) describes the purpose of a person’s online search — in other words, what they are hoping to find by conducting the search.

In the past, search engines used direct word matching of keywords. But Google found that just because a user types “battery car dead,” for example, doesn’t mean they want everything that matches that search term, such as what it is, where to buy batteries, which batteries are rated higher or how to replace a battery.

Are you falling into today’s technology marketing trap? The way we’ve been marketing software for years may not be working as well as it used to, according to a new report. 

The 2021 Buying Disconnect exposes the gap between the way organizations are marketing technology and the way buyers want to engage now. This gap began to appear before the advent of COVID-19 but accelerated during the pandemic. The reasons for the rise include economic uncertainty and remote workplaces. These changes require buyers to not only search for products virtually, but also to be more confident in their purchase decisions than ever before.

The report’s findings provide insight on creating a new path for tech marketing so that organizations can meet consumers’ changing expectations in the new year and beyond.

Your brand identity is what makes you memorable, setting you apart from the competition. It’s why your most loyal customers will decide to invest in you.

Companies with clear, consistent branding can expect to earn 23% more annual revenue than those without a well-communicated brand.

Defining your brand identity is a lot like answering life’s toughest questions. Who are you? What were you put on this earth to do? It may seem like a lot to tackle, but until you have a clear mission and vision for your company, you won’t have a clear path forward.

There are many social channels out there, and many are rolling out new features on a weekly basis. It can be difficult to keep up with new social trends for businesses. With so many different platforms, it is hard to figure out which ones are worth your companies time and effort. It is also difficult to perfect your strategy on each channel.

The question is, how much time do you want to spend creating content, posting updates, and engaging with users, and on what platforms does this even make sense? You can’t perfect every platform, but you can find the right ones that mesh with your business. In this blog, we will break down which channels make sense for your business, and how to create the right strategy to do so.

Here are a few questions to consider.

You spend a lot of time working on high-quality content for your prospects and customers. It’s a great piece so, when it’s complete, it should be gated, right? Not so fast. There can be a lot to consider about whether to gate your content. Let’s take a look at how you can decide whether to put your content behind a form.

Video marketing campaigns are a must for any business. But your strategy should go beyond filming something on your phone and posting it to social media. And if you’re going to work with an agency to get your video produced, don’t make a move unless they offer video marketing services that will be critical to your success.

Adding video content to your strategy is a great way to get more people engaged with your brand. It means they’re more likely to take actions like joining your email list, or better yet, buying your product. But if your message misses the mark or no one can find your video, it’s going to be a frustrating experience that costs you time and money. 

So, if you’re working with a video marketing agency to help you create a successful campaign, here are some of the services you must ensure they offer. 

A vital aspect of successful marketing programs is staying up to date on the latest news, trends and best practices across the industry. Great resources for staying on the leading edge of what’s working and what’s not are the many blogs that report on the digital marketing industry — including topics ranging from search engine optimization to social media marketing to conversion intelligence.

Every year, Gartner makes predictions on what factors will become critical in the face of ever-changing technological advances — including how organizations must be prepared to adapt to the new trends. Several of its predictions are directly related to digital marketing.

Of special note is the fact that, more than any other recent year, 2021 will require organizations to find nontraditional ways to move forward due to the COVID-19 crisis. To rebound will require organizations to embrace innovation and efficiency in digital marketing.

The advent of the coronavirus pandemic has changed nearly everything, including how organizations are marketing. In particular, as marketing leaders create their digital content marketing strategies for 2021, their planning sessions will be very different than in past years. To prepare for 2021, they will be in uncharted territory — considering the impact of COVID-19 on their target audiences.

Several organizations have already successfully adapted their strategies to meet the new content marketing demands. Their lessons learned provide valuable insight for others, including in these areas:

1. Social media: Adopt a social media strategy that is customer-focused.
2. Events: Pivot from in-person to virtual content-sharing opportunities.
3. Search: Leverage new search patterns to plan content development.
4. Tone: Create content that is compassionate, authentic and empathetic.
5. Access: Find ways to share special content more freely with prospects.

These five marketing success stories during COVID-19 provide inspiring insight for planning your organization’s 2021 digital content marketing strategy.

Every year, new terminology enters the vernacular of digital marketing. As we move into 2021, there are several new terms that will impact the marketing plans of organizations in the New Year. We’ve rounded up the following 19 trending digital marketing terms for 2021. If you haven’t heard of “always-on lifecycle marketing,” “no-click searches” or “the internet of everything,” then scan our list to stay current before welcoming another new year.

Pandemic or no, medical device companies can have a lot of challenges when it comes to marketing their products. Your device or product can be a great innovation for patients and healthcare, but if it’s not marketed well and its benefits aren’t communicated, its potential impact will be lost.

Medical device companies face some unique challenges, namely getting in front of busy clinicians and hospital executives, overlooking the value of your device, and much more.

With any luck (and a vaccinated population), the pandemic may be mostly behind us by Q4 of next year. But there’s no denying this experience has reshaped us all indefinitely. And even after life returns to any semblance of our old normal, we'll likely hold fast to a few of our new habits — like remote work flexibility, an increased focus on employee wellness, and (hopefully) frequent hand-washing.

But how has B2B buyer behavior changed in the wake of COVID-19? And what do these evolving habits mean for B2B organizations looking to boost revenue in the year ahead?

To help you prepare for 2021 (and beyond), we’re delving into a few ways B2B buyer behavior is shifting and what it takes to meet buyers' needs both today and in a post-pandemic world.

Once a prospect becomes a customer, how are you continuing to delight them? In a world where everyone is a consumer, building trust and standing out is crucial — especially when more consumers are shopping online.

One way to stay top of mind with your customers is by identifying your customer touchpoints and making sure you’re leaving them satisfied during every step of their buyer journey. In this blog, we’ll discuss four customer touchpoints you may be missing and how you can add them to your marketing campaigns.

When watching award shows, we’re accustomed to the rhythm of recipients making a speech when they receive an honor. As we’ve seen, these speeches can veer in any which direction. There are the ones that last only a few seconds and fail to tell enough of a story to the audience, the ones that drag on for too long (cue the music) and cause the audience to lose interest, and the ones that hit the sweet spot of a compelling, to-the-point narrative.

While scenes like these may play out on the actual stage, businesses can undergo a similar experience when it comes to the digital marketing stage — specifically, writing website content. Saying too little on your business website can leave visitors with more questions than answers while saying too much can leave visitors feeling overwhelmed by what they see. In the middle of all this is effective website content writing, where a meaningful yet concise story is told.

Whether you already have plans for a website redesign or are considering one in the future, we encourage you to keep this roadmap for effective website content writing in your back pocket.

If you write a great blog post but no one can find it, does it really exist?

Blogging for SEO is both an art and a science. There’s a formula to ensure you have the best chance of ranking in Google’s search results.

Using highly searched keywords is still essential, but SEO has evolved far beyond that—and it continues to evolve with every Google algorithm update.

To rank at the top of search engines, your content also has to provide value, be authoritative and stand out from the current top search results.

This checklist offers helpful guidelines you and your team should follow every time you write a blog post.

The world’s most powerful search engine began rolling out its 2020 Core Algorithm update earlier this month. A core algorithm update means that Google has changed or recalculated its algorithm in some meaningful way. It had been seven months since Google had released the new core update that was announced on Twitter on Dec. 3. While we are still waiting to understand the full breadth of this update, we are starting to identify some industries and domains that have so far been affected.

The SEO strategies that will be most effective going forward will be those that best help you meet Google’s simple mandate of comprehensively answering a search query as effectively as possible with your website content. According to Google, the world’s most powerful search engine will continue to follow three basic steps to generate results from web pages: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

The search engine optimization strategies that you need to continue to employ in the future should be designed in a way that will help Google crawl your site more efficiently, index your content properly, and rank your website pages as high as possible for all relevant search queries.

Who doesn't love watching a great looking drone shot? Unless you want to rent a helicopter or go up on the roof of a skyscraper, there is no other way to get wide, sweeping views from high in the sky. From capturing a sunny lakefront or a city skyline, a drone is the easiest way to get hundreds of feet in the air with the press of a few buttons. And as long as they are used properly and effectively, drones instantly increase your video’s production value.

With all that said, it’s discouraged to edit in drone footage just for the sake of it looking cool. You should think about WHY you want a drone shot to be included and be able to articulate why it can impact the outcome of your video. Can it be used to improve the overall story and emotion that you are trying to convey? Can it emphasize a certain line of dialog that is written in the script? Here are some reasons why using a drone can be so effective.

Think about all of the logos you encounter on a daily basis. What do they all have in common? If you saw golden arches, you would immediately recognize it as McDonald’s. If you saw a red circle with a dot in the middle, you would know it’s Target. A blue, fluttering bird? Twitter.

All of these logos are memorable and they convey a message to consumers. Your B2B logo should do the same. As you embark on a business rebrand, there are six design elements your B2B logo should include. It’s easy to fall into the rut of doing what everyone else is doing, but to stand out, you need to leave a lasting impression on your potential customers.

In this blog, we’ll share the six design elements and examples of B2B brands whose logos adhere to these standards.

The power of video marketing continues to grow. But we expect shoppable videos to take on a life of their own in 2021. It may just become the biggest marketing trend of the year.

Why? Video continues to drive sales on multiple platforms. In fact, Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey found that more than 80% of video marketers say that video not only increases traffic to their website, but it directly increases sales. And more and more companies are buying in.

That same Wyzowl survey discovered that 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. And a recent HubSpot survey determined that online videos are supposed to gain more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022 which would be 15 times higher than it was in 2017.

But in the short-term, it’s shoppable videos that are expected to get a stronghold in the video marketing world. So, let’s take a look at this trend, find out what it is, and where it’s going.

The question of what to focus on first — website design or website content — can feel like the debate between the chicken and the egg. But perhaps another analogy more accurate for how you should approach your website is how to organize your bedroom closet.

Your closet will have the basic categories, such as coats, shirts and suits. You likely have additional categories and subcategories, such as dress shoes and tennis shoes. But most importantly, you need a place for everything. If like me, you have already binged The Home Edit’s organization show on Netflix, you’ll know hosts Clea and Joanna advise building a system for the life you already live. You need to create zones to organize and contain everything, working backward from what you have to get to what you need.

The same concept applies to your business website. That means taking stock of what content you have, how people are coming to your site and what needs work. Focus on how to align your website with your business objectives. That, in turn, will give you a sense of how your website can evolve and continue to support your growing business.

It’s a tall order for a website; in many instances, it’s best to...

Does your B2B website reflect how you feel about your company and the widespread usage of your product or service? And does it do so in a way that makes people want to visit your site again and again? B2B marketing and websites don’t have to include boring, conservative design elements — industry professionals are people, too, and wouldn’t you rather navigate through a website that was visually appealing and catered to your user experience?

Websites are often a potential buyer’s first impression of you, and according to HubSpot, traditional B2B websites tell potential customers three things: “who we are, what we do, and how we help.”

Customers in search of a solution don’t want to scroll through websites that don’t get to the point quickly. After helping several B2B clients create websites that have achieved their desired results, we believe successful B2B sites should do the following:

• Provide a pleasing visual/user experience
• Answer questions
• Function across multiple platforms (mobile, desktop, tablet)
• Have quick load times
• Captivate attention/combat short attention spans