Our Perspectives

Are you optimizing for comfort—or reallocating for impact?

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Stop Budgeting Like It’s 2019

If you’re asking the question, you’re probably closer to needing outside help than you realize.

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When Do Tech Start-Ups Need a Marketing Agency?

You shape the market, not just the message.

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Dear Marketer: You’re the Reason Revenue Even Has a Chance

Five things to learn from award-winning brands

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The 2025 Webby Awards and the Future of B2B Marketing

See five smart moves B2B marketers should be making right now.

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Google Breakup Coming? Here’s How Marketers Can Hedge Their Bets

Use the right combo of FOMO (fear of missing out) and FOMU (fear of messing up) to propel your business.

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Fix the Tug of War That Slows Down Your Deals

Treating content syndication leads like they’ve raised their hand for a sales conversation is a fast way to kill the momentum.

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Fixing the B2B Lead-Quality Gap

How to remain agile, adapt strategies, and navigate economic shifts effectively.

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Marketers Beware: The Tariff Tsunami That Could Drown Your Brand

If we only think of customers in the aggregate, we risk optimizing for the wrong outcomes.

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There Is No Average Customer, So Rethink Your Approach

Tap into an easy-to-use competitive intelligence powerhouse and get results fast.

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The Secret Weapon for Demand and Brand Markets: Social Listening

AI is transforming how brands create content, engage customers, and automate workflows. But can it work for you?

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New Gen AI Approaches for B2B Marketing

The best marketing strategies are built to adapt while keeping you pointed toward true north.

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Marketing Strategy Is a Compass, Not a Map

Rethink what’s possible for your B2B content strategy, and boost results without breaking the bank.

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Rewrite Your B2B Content Strategy Playbook

If your marketing budget is tight and you need to drive real revenue impact, bottom of funnel should be your top priority.

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Bofu or tofu? That’s the B2B question.

See how to maximize your B2B marketing budget, drive higher returns, and beat the competition.

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Reduce Marketing Waste and Boost ROI

What’s audience intent got to do with it? Find out.

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Good B2B Content Might Not Get Amplified without This

The best way to earn trust might not be a detailed white paper or an hour-long webinar. It could be a 30-second video.

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Short-Form Video Helps B2B Brands Build Trust

The high-stakes buyer journey for complex, high-ticket solutions is highly nuanced. B2B marketers, here’s how to stay ahead.

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Rethinking the B2B Funnel Myth

Partner marketing has the potential to be the linchpin of success—if you do it right.

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Five Fast Ways to Raise Your Partner Marketing Game

Give the people what they want: measurable results and a whole lot of ROI, deeply rooted in data and strategy.

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Three proven steps to help executives trust marketing more

Optimizing how your internal teams and agency partners work with SMEs is critical. Find out how to get ahead.

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Unlock Your Company’s Expertise: SME Interview Tips

Counting mentions and clipping articles worked OK in the past. Today, it’s all about narrative leadership, quality over quantity, and the ripple effects of your story.

B2B Marketers: Could Your PR Make More Impact?

Today’s digital platforms are designed to keep users within their ecosystems, making it harder to funnel audiences back to your site. Here’s what B2B brands can do to solve the problem.

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Getting Results in a Zero-Click Content World

Bluesky is a compelling contender among social platforms. Find out what it’s all about and whether it makes sense for your brand.

Bluesky: Can Your Brand Use it, and Should You?

To deliver seamless, customer-focused experiences and make a measurable impact on your business, you need to advance beyond basic online presence.

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Make Your Website Work Smarter With Crm + Custom Design

See why it’s better to obsess about relevance than to obsess about terminology, phases, and formats.

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The Buyer Journey Is Due For A Refresh

Add native content to your B2B marketing program to capture your audiences’ attention on the platforms they use.

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Boost Engagement with Native Content: Tips for B2B Marketers

Give your sales teams what they need to engage prospects effectively and move them confidently through the pipeline.

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How can marketing help you sell more?

For brands with complex products, achieving the right fit may feel like an uphill battle, but it’s entirely possible.

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3 Proven B2b Product-Content Fit Strategies

For B2B companies, content decay is a silent threat that can slowly erode organic traffic. Explore simple ways to avoid the risk.

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What is content decay and how can you avoid it?

If you want to connect with niche audiences, boost SEO, and drive engagement, don’t sleep on Reddit.

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How To Leverage Reddit For Seo And Lead Generation

Get insights on maximizing ROI and growth with the right balance of agency and in-house expertise.

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Why and When B2B Marketers Should Hire an Agency

As privacy regulations tighten globally, cookie compliance is no longer optional. But when users opt out, you could lose data that helps you measure success. See what action you can take to stay ahead.

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Unlocking Cookie Compliance without Disrupting Your Marketing Plan

Want to make your next product launch a roaring success? We’ve got the stats, the insights, and the tips you need to crush it.

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CRACKING THE CODE FOR PRODUCT LAUNCHES: 2025 B2B PLAYBOOK

Discover how AI is transforming SEO, and learn four strategies to grow your website's traffic in the age of AI-powered search engines and changing algorithms.

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FOUR WAYS TO GET YOUR CONTENT SEEN IN THE AI SEO ERA

Budgets are tighter, investments are scrutinized, and leadership wants one thing: proof that marketing drives revenue. The stakes are higher than ever, and the fear is real. Let’s unpack that fear, understand its roots, and explore how B2B marketers can plan for 2025 with confidence.

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TURNING FEAR INTO FOCUS: A 2025 PLANNING GUIDE FOR B2B MARKETERS 

Ever struggle with long-term planning? We all do, especially in marketing. Many of us face short timelines, multiple priorities, quarterly reports, and other challenges that can distract us from building substantive, sustainable growth. 

GROWTH MARKETING FOR B2B: 3 EXPERT TIPS TO DRIVE REVENUE FASTER 

Live events and trade shows are potentially powerful avenues for B2B-focused organizations to connect with clients, generate leads, and build brand awareness. Here’s how to get the most bang for your buck. 

Five Trade Show Hacks to Boost Your B2B Event ROI

Long sales cycles can be a significant hurdle to growth and profitability for B2B companies. Explore 10 truly effective strategies to shorten your sales cycle and boost your bottom line.

10 WAYS TO SHORTEN YOUR B2B SALES CYCLE 

When you’re speaking to decision-makers, emotional impact can be the difference between landing a contract or losing to the competition. By identifying which creative assets evoke the right responses, you can optimize your campaigns to connect with key buyers on a more human level.  

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HOW CAN AI TESTING TOOLS BOOST B2B BRAND PERFORMANCE?

How do you know if a rebrand is the right move for your company? And if it is, which questions should you ask before diving in? 

FIVE WAYS TO KNOW IF YOUR B2B COMPANY NEEDS TO REBRAND 

In the competitive world of B2B marketing, standing out is crucial to any company that wants to get ahead. Many brands think that being different is the ultimate goal. However, the real game changer is not just being different, but <i>doing</i> different. 

Team meeting discussing B2B differentiation

B2B Differentiation: Why Visual Styles Aren’t Enough to Set Your Brand Apart 

Good design isn’t just about making things look great; it’s about making your brand shine, connecting with your audience, and driving real results. So getting it right matters.  

Five Things Your B2B Brand Should Do to Evaluate Design

Account-based marketing (ABM) could be your ticket to boosting sales without blowing your budget.  

Account Based Marketing, more value less effort and spend

ABM FTW: GET MORE VALUE FOR LESS EFFORT AND SPEND

Should your brand invest in a robust TikTok strategy and presence or avoid it because of the growing uncertainty about its future in the US? 

TIKTOK UNPACKED: NAVIGATING ITS ROLE IN YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Video is the superstar of content formats, and for B2B marketers it’s the magic ingredient that turns casual browsers into committed buyers. Discover why it works and how to make it work for you. 

Why Video is the MVP of B2B Marketing: Lights, Camera, Conversion!

At CMD, generative AI has allowed our experienced creative team to spend less time pushing pixels in production and visualizing concepts and more time crafting original campaigns that stand out. 

AI Image Generation and Manipulation

Wondering why your carefully crafted B2B campaigns aren’t grabbing attention like they used to? Discover what's going on—and what you can do about it. 

Brands vs. Creators: The Battle for Audience Attention

This year, the temperature on social is already hitting triple digits. To succeed in this heated arena, brands cannot operate with a status quo strategy. Explore great new ways to achieve your goals and avoid the pitfalls.

Keeping Your Cool on Social Media in a Boiling Hot Year

Trust is the foundation upon which lasting B2B relationships are built. When potential clients trust your brand, they’re more likely to engage with your content, consider your solutions, and ultimately convert into customers. 

The Trust-Content-Revenue Love Triangle

Discover 10 strategies for brands to navigate the competitive 2024 election media landscape. Learn how to optimize your advertising approach and stand out amid political noise.

10 ways to win the media strategy game in an election year

You’re a B2B marketer, so you know better than anybody that understanding buyer behavior isn’t just helpful—it’s essential for your success. Fortunately, thanks to modern data analytics and AI-enabled tools, there’s a whole new playbook for getting into the minds of business customers.

How to decode B2B buyer behavior better and faster

Marketing and sales teams cannot operate in isolation. Learn what you need to know to create alignment and get more from your efforts. 

Get marketing and sales aligned for more visibility (and profits!) 

Standing out in a sea of content is the charge—and challenge—for B2B writers in today’s digital business environment. Writing well isn’t enough, nor is an outcome of purchase transactions. Instead, measuring great writing means delivering value to readers who, ultimately, act to extend their relationship with your brand.

5 Key Strategies to Making Good Content Great

Most companies know there are tasks they could do to improve their site’s user experience, but it is easy to get stuck on how to best prioritize updates. A handy tool that we often use with clients is a “usability audit” — a formal evaluation to examine your site for user friendliness, content efficacy and ability to drive traffic to conversion goals. 

Improving User Experience with UX Audit

At CMD, we learn a lot when we listen to the various target audiences of our clients, so we decided to use that philosophy to better understand our clients’ mindsets. We partnered with Riley Research to hear from Portland-area marketers about their challenges, and how they are utilizing agencies, to ensure we can be the best agency partner — one that can help marketers rest a bit easier.



New Research: What Clients Expect from Agencies

I was recently called upon to attend a client’s executive meeting. Since I spend most of my time deep in project work, the rarity of this invitation was stressful enough to conjure an image of a 1950s movie, with a company president yelling down to the manager who in turn yells down to the line worker: “Smithers! Report to the top floor at once!”

The Action Cam View of Your User Experince

Did you know that the average CMO is spending 29 percent of their budget on marketing technology? That’s as much as 3 percent of overall company revenue. Whether or not your overall marketing budget is on par with industry leaders, marketing technology is a line item with a constant upward trend, and you need to understand the best ways to spend that money for your organization.

Designing Your Marketing Stack

When was the last time you bought a product because you agreed with that company’s stance on a political or social issue? If this is normal purchasing behavior for you, you’re in the majority. In fact, a new study says that 88% of surveyed consumers are more likely to be loyal to companies that support social or environmental issues aligned with their own beliefs, and 66% said they’d pay more for a product from a socially responsible company.

No Risk, No Reward: Brands That Take a Stand

There’s a great story about the Irish writer James Joyce and how after a day’s writing his brother Stanislaus found him prostrate on his desk and utterly despondent.

Wrangling the Words for the Biggest Impact

In a culture where ROFL does not bring to mind the piano-playing dog from The Muppets, where entire sentences are not only abbreviated to initialisms, but we have actually learned to interpret such shorthand and extract meaning from it, what role do accuracy and correctness play in written communication?

Do We Need Proofreading in the World of Digital Advertising? 

Every few years there is a new study claiming that putting a dog on a wine label or beer label results in new customer sales anywhere from 4% to 11% over the dogless competition. But do we really need more dogs on labels?  Are there other ways to use data and keep a designer’s integrity intact?

Don't Let Data Driven Design Go to the Dogs 

Whether for good or bad, technology is one of the most powerful forces shaping our world. We all experience it daily, and if industry analysts are on track — and they agree 100% on this — the pervasiveness of digital is set to dramatically increase in our homes, cars, offices, medical clinics, groceries, and pretty much everywhere else we work and play. Artificial intelligence has the potential to be as radical a disruption as the rise of personal computing and the internet combined.

The Tech Thing

Tap into CMD’s original thinking, provocative findings, and measurable outcomes: from AI to DIY, campaigns to content, B2B, B2C, B2B2C, and much more.