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.  

User in front of a computer studying a heat map

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

Americans will be consuming media at record levels as we head toward the November elections. With political campaigns vying for attention and ad space, brands face more competition and higher advertising costs across multiple platforms. Here are 10 ways to win.

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

Data access and privacy issues are throwing a shadow over the technology sector, as the data explosion threatens to become an ethics implosion. 

The Big Brother Bias: Balancing Consequences and Benefits in AI

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

From time to time, hot, quick-turn projects come in. A client needs us to create something for them right away — preferably sooner. Many times, I’ve seen CMD deliver exceptional work under time frames and conditions I didn’t think possible. This was often feasible only because of the heroic efforts of key individuals to get it to the finish line.

Red-Hot Project? Take a Breath and Review the Basics

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

Think You Don't Need a Mentor?

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 

There are days and projects where I wonder which character type a good project manager should emulate. In video games and gaming culture there are specific roles for each character on a team; a well-balanced team can be pretty successful because responsibilities are split to leverage each member’s specific skills.

Project Manager: Tank or Healer? 

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

As a creative agency that produces a plethora of assets—including video and audio files, PDFs, photos and graphics, print pieces, and many others—CMD needs to stay organized. We’ve been using digital asset management, or DAM, tools at CMD for about 15 years. A few years ago, we started investigating enterprise-level DAM platforms.

Get on the Dam Bandwagon and Get Organized! 

Our Perspectives

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 

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