When was the last time you stopped mid-scroll to click on an ad?

For me, it was a few days ago, when I saw The Peach Truck was making its rounds again for the summer. I bought a box last year and couldn’t resist clicking on the image of perfectly ripe, juicy peaches to pre-order again.

And I was immediately jealous of their marketing team. Why can’t selling software and cloud security solutions be more like selling peaches?

While it’s hard to compare a $40 box of fresh Georgia peaches with buying a $100,000 solution for your organization, there’s a lot B2B companies can learn from consumer digital ads.

Here’s what the best digital ads have in common, regardless of their industry.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, creating great video content is important. One way to help keep your viewers engaged while they are watching your video is to use b-roll — the moving images you’ll need to match the words.

If you’re producing marketing videos, it’s important to understand b-roll’s importance. It’s one thing to tell your potential or existing customers about your company, but showing them will provide an entirely new perspective. You can drive home your point or help your target audience understand your message more clearly.  

You never want to get to the editing process and not have the b-roll you need. So, let’s talk a little bit about what it is and how you can shoot the best b-roll for all of your video marketing projects.

While Google tweaks and updates its search algorithm on a regular basis without ever saying as much, there are other times the search engine giant publicly confirms a larger-scale algorithm update has or will occur.

Over the last 90+ days, Google has offered several public confirmations of these larger-scale algorithm updates. This makes it an even more important time to be monitoring your keyword rankings and SEO reports to understand if your website has been impacted either positively or negatively by these recent algorithm changes.

If you wait to review monthly or quarterly organic revenue numbers to determine whether your website has been impacted adversely, it might be too late. The goal right now should be to know where you stand in terms of search queries or keyword rankings on a regular basis. This will put your team in a position to optimize your site in response to these algorithm updates if needed.

Let’s take a look at the most recent updates from Google.

Social media is a big part of everyone’s lives. Today, nearly every business engages in some form of social media marketing — including learning management system (LMS) companies. Like the increasing sophistication of the software they sell, LMS companies are becoming savvier about social media marketing.

Many leading providers have an active presence on one or more platforms. We’ve gathered some of the best LMS social media sites as examples of how to leverage the marketing opportunities of today’s five leading social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

If you or your video marketing agency are producing a video about your business, you’re going to have many options when it comes to posting it. You can put it on your website, social media pages, and YouTube for sure. But don’t forget about video email marketing.

Video email marketing is very effective. Why? There are 3.9 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.3 billion by 2023.

And how about this? Adding the word “video” to your email subject line can increase open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65%.

Studies show that when you watch a video, you’re likely to retain more information compared to reading. That’s because our brains process visual information differently. And if your video appeals to your recipient’s emotions, they’re more likely to forward it or share it with their friends and peer groups on social media.

Let’s take a look at three video email marketing strategies that you can try.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Of all the ways to communicate with your customers, email campaigns still reign supreme. Email generates $38 for every $1 spent, equalling a 3,800% ROI, according to HubSpot. That’s not nothing!

While content is one of the most important aspects of your email newsletter, don’t forget to think about the format as you lay everything out. A compelling design and flow will guide your readers through the email in a way that will entice them to open future correspondence.

One of the fastest-growing industries today is learning management technology — and it’s not just due to changes in remote working and learning created by COVID-19. For the past several years, the sales of learning management systems (LMS) have exploded. This accelerating growth has heated up the competition among the industry’s ever-expanding number of players.

The global LMS market was valued at $8.76 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow to $38.1 billion by 2027. The percentage of U.S. companies using online learning applications reached 77% in 2017 — and has continued to grow ever since.

According to varying estimates, there are anywhere from 800 to 1,000 LMS companies vying for a piece of the growing learning platform marketplace. Which LMS companies will make the biggest impact and have the greatest success?

It’s likely that among the winners will be the companies that launch successful digital marketing strategies. After all, digital marketing is becoming the dominant form of marketing in today’s marketplace. Gartner says that 80% of B2B sales interactions between companies and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025. 

As your company utilizes...

Why do you blog?

Most organizations publish blog content to educate prospects, attract new visitors through SEO, or demonstrate company expertise. Ultimately though, blogging is part of the means to a clear end: increasing sales.

Traditionally, blogging has been considered a top-funnel activity, helping pique audience interest and illuminating the first steps of the buyer’s journey. We don’t often think of blogging as something with a direct link to revenue — and that’s a mistake. According to a recent HubSpot consumer study, 56% of consumers made a purchase after reading a company's blog posts.

While top-to-mid funnel content is more appropriate for a blog, great blog content can also convert visitors into customers.

Let’s examine exactly how you can write blog posts that lead to purchases.

Color has a profound effect on many things in our daily lives — the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the walls that surround us, the items we purchase. If you don’t like the color of a shirt, it goes back on the rack. If a nail polish doesn’t complement your complexion, you’re putting it back. If a couch doesn’t match your color scheme, it’s not coming home.

So it makes sense that if your use of color in email marketing is too bright, too dull, or too just too much, you may not get the click-throughs you were hoping for. This is where incorporating color psychology into your email marketing campaigns comes in handy.

While Facebook, Instagram and Twitter grab all the headlines, one hard-working platform sometimes gets lost in the social media landscape: LinkedIn. But overlooking the power of LinkedIn to reach your targeted audience would be a mistake.

LinkedIn is not just for job seekers. If you use this social networking platform the right way, it becomes an active marketing channel to grow your network and business.

As your potential subscribers hover over your form deciding whether to allow you to add them to your email marketing list, concerns pop up in their heads like dandelions after a spring rain.

Are you going to send them irrelevant emails? Email them too frequently? Or worse, are you going to sell their contact information to a list service, resulting in endless spam?

With virtual “weeds” filling their inboxes daily, the prospects visiting your website need a compelling reason to give up their contact information, which is why so many companies lure new subscribers with free ebooks, video tutorials and other content.

Yet even these offerings may not be enough unless you work hard to build trust, a necessary ingredient for inbound marketing to work.

Here’s how to do it.

We get a lot of questions from prospective clients about digital marketing, SEO and lead capture. But what is a digital marketing agency, really? The truth is, the answer will be tied to your goals.

A digital marketing agency can be many things to many companies. The agency can be highly involved and practically take over all of your marketing efforts, or take on a more team-oriented approach. It all depends on your needs, and again, your goal.

So, let’s answer the question “What is a digital marketing agency?” by answering the questions we get the most about digital marketing.

In the entire history of human existence, we’ve never been as inundated with content as we are today. From morning email scrolling to evening Netflix-binging, we’re taking in more material in 24-hours than previous generations saw in an entire month. Ads, social posts, videos, news articles — there’s so much stuff filtering into our brains that, in some cases, we don’t even realize it’s happening (or remember it later).

As marketers, we’re always looking for new tricks to cut through this noise and hook our audiences. But it turns out that the best strategy is also one of the oldest: be more conversational.

Of course, creating more conversational content is easier said than done. To help you get started, here are five ways you can produce more enticing material and keep your audience hooked.

When an employer receives a job application from a qualified candidate, the wheels start to move quickly behind the scenes. There are (often) multiple rounds of interviews, the reference checks, the pre-employment paperwork that needs to be signed — and the list goes on. This can create a hefty workload for HR coordinators who manage and facilitate these processes, especially when a more manual approach is in place.

If you are a HubSpot user and are looking to automate your HR processes, the good news is you already have access to a platform that can help. Using automated email workflows and the Deals section of HubSpot as a pipeline management tool, you can digitize your HR processes to be more efficient, sustainable and compliant. One of our clients, Green Impressions, is already experiencing these benefits.

Technology companies are built on innovation and a mission to disrupt the status quo with products or solutions that can, quite literally, change lives. But you know it takes more than a brilliant idea and pure grit to achieve limitless success. It also takes a steady flow of high-quality leads, customer loyalty and a positive reputation.

But how do you know you need to hire an agency in the first place? Today, we’re delving into the three telltale signs it’s time to hire a digital marketing agency, plus a few tips on choosing the right one.

When someone subscribes to your blog, they’re essentially saying “I’m invested.” With a visible interest in your content and automated emails conveniently sent to their inbox, subscribers are apt to revisit your blog on a regular basis as new content is rolled out, as well as share articles with their colleagues or on their own social media platforms. This all goes to say that as your blog subscriber base grows (and these subscribers become your promoters), your blog traffic will naturally follow suit.

As an ongoing goal for businesses, getting more blog subscribers is a shared effort across the spectrum. While companies in the early stages of blogging are working from the ground up to get blog subscribers, well-established business blogs may encounter a plateau in numbers and be on the lookout for ways to move the needle in the right direction. Whatever the case may be, these ideas can prove to be beneficial in getting more blog subscribers and boosting blog traffic.

The learning management software (LSM) industry is in a high-growth phase — which has accelerated due to several factors, including today’s changing workforce demographics, technological innovations in the workplace and a shift to a work-from-home culture.

Today, more organizations than ever are looking for a next-generation learning platform, so they can transform their employee learning programs to meet the new demands.  

With more companies looking to buy, the growth is a boon for LMS companies. However, they are also facing a significant challenge: their competition. Just as the number of LMS customers is growing, so is the number of LMS providers. By early 2021, there were an estimated 700 to 900 learning platform providers competing in the same space.

This means that today’s LMS companies need a significant advantage to win out over their competitors. One powerful way to gain the lead is to deploy a sophisticated inbound marketing and sales platform.

Your data is one of the most important assets your company has. It’s how you track revenue, decide who you are (and are not) going to market to, get ahead of problems before they happen, and stay in touch with your prospects and customers alike. A clean, well-thought-out database is essential to the success of any business. Choosing the right or wrong tools to model your data within your database can either position you for success or set your company back significantly.

2020 flipped traditional consumer habits upside-down. Buyers are now conducting more research before purchasing, they’re into shopping almost exclusively online, and with the advent of the coronavirus, they’re even more cost-conscious.  

One thing that remained relatively the same was email marketing — in fact, 2020 did email campaigns a favor. Despite having to pivot messaging and delivery, a new report by SparkPost shows email “remains a stable channel in terms of overall volume globally and when it comes to investment — even during the recession.”

Here are five trends shaping email content and campaigns in 2021.

Whether you’re new to the game or just looking to enhance your video marketing for business models, your strategy must ensure that your video marketing campaigns hit your goals and drive your social media forward.

But how do you do it? What’s a good place to start? Do you need high-end video production?  Should you do an explainer video? Or a demo video?

The beauty is that you don’t need to answer all of these questions individually because if you apply certain tactics, it can help you to create compelling, inspiring, on-brand videos every time.

So, let’s take a look at some of the things you can do to build a successful video marketing strategy.

Is your ideal customer reading your marketing emails? If your email open rates aren’t where you’d hoped, relax. I’m on more email lists than I can count, and there are three main reasons I don’t open most emails, but these can be fixed.

But first, a confession: In spite of the fact that I hate reading emails, I subscribe to new email lists every month. “Why,” you ask.

A proud Ravenclaw, I’m an eternal student, which means I’m a sucker for free downloads. You know, those free how-to videos and ebooks that you get in exchange for your email address?

The folders on my desktop contain tons of these little treasures. In return, I get regular emails from these companies, which often end up in the trash, unopened, until I eventually decide to unsubscribe.

So yeah, I’m an email marketer’s worst nightmare. But before you judge me too harshly, I don’t subscribe just for the free stuff. I genuinely want to hear what the sender has to say, but the subsequent emails are often a letdown after the ebook high.

That’s why I’m the perfect sherpa to help you trudge up the seemingly insurmountable mountain of creating successful marketing emails.

Keep reading to learn the three...

As any marketer knows, if you can’t get your product or service in front of the right audience, the chances for your brand’s success dwindle. But there’s more to a successful marketing strategy than brochures, ads and a slick website.

Medical device companies can range from those that produce tongue depressors to face masks to implantable ventricular devices and much more, and due to the increase in infectious and chronic diseases, the medical device market is expected to grow to over $600 billion by 2023.

It’s critical that medical device companies market their products effectively, but how can a medical device company do digital marketing right? Let’s take a look.

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.