Marketing

Marketing

If you're an entrepreneur or freelancer, building a personal brand and credible reputation is no longer optional if you want to grow your business. A personal brand helps you stand out in a saturated market and establish yourself as a trusted authority, and in turn, helps to drive more revenue. Social media is a key way to build your personal brand and reputation.

In times gone by, growing your follower count was the ultimate goal. More followers meant more reach, more impact, and hopefully more fans tuning in to your music. But now, that's all changed. According to creator economy executives speaking to TechCrunch, social media follower counts have never mattered less. Not because they don't matter at all, but because algorithms have taken over. Now, your feed is shaped far more by what platforms think you want to see than by who you actually follow.

After a three-year hiatus, Cheez-It has officially brought its mascot Prince Cheddward out of retirement in time for this year's Citrus Bowl. As sports marketing gets more crowded, Cheez-Ithopes its revived brand mascot will drum up enough fan nostalgia to drive more sales. "He's a fan-favorite asset who helps us stand out without needing to 'out-spend' or 'out-shout' anyone," said Cara Tragseiler, senior brand director for Cheez-It. It's increasingly necessary for brands to find new ways to break through the noise.

The session began by asking attendees why they made content, and we were pleased to see answers corresponding to every stage of the marketing funnel. Engagement and storytelling ranked the highest, while other popular answers included education, selling products/generating sales, brand awareness, creating a dialogue, enhancing brand messaging, boosting SEO, making people feel like they belong, entertaining and creating a buzz.

Usually, they'll do that using some bold "AI insights" from tech CEOs - because who knows every industry, from sales coaching to knitting, better than a tech leader? But there's a problem with this kind of blog post. There's no doubt agentic AI will have an effect on a plethora of repetitive tasks in sales and revenue enablement. However, the abstract knowledge that "things will never be the same" isn't nuanced enough to help decision makers future-proof their AI adoption strategies.

A few years ago, the art of the brand collab most often involved bringing together two brands that already had overlapping design styles, fanbases, or product categories. Recall partnerships like Nike and Apple's successful 2016 Series 2 Watch launch, for example; or Dolce & Gabbana's elevated designs for Smeg in 2019; or even Lego's 2020 collection with Ikea. All of these pairings make some measure of intuitive sense. But over the past couple of years, something has clearly changed.

Content plays a central role in how we acquire and educate customers. It needs to perform across the full funnel and work for both classical search and modern, LLM-based discovery. This requires a combination of technical SEO, strong content strategy, and hands-on content creation. As Senior Content Strategist (m/f/d), you own our content system end-to-end. You are responsible for defining the strategy and technical foundations, while also contributing directly to the creation of high-impact content such as articles, guides, case studies, and video-based formats.

Keyword research is only a small part of SEO, but it's an important one. No SEO strategy is complete without this vital portion of research, and devil is in the detail. This phase can often result in mammoth amounts of data that can leave SEOs feeling lost - unless, of course, you use my go-to methodology which keeps things simple, logical and, most importantly for your brand, highly relevant to your audience.

Welcome to the era where advertising grew a soul and started talking back. In the early 1960s, the industry underwent a massive transformation that moved away from dry product specifications toward something much more psychological and artistic. We transitioned from a world where ads looked like instruction manuals to a vibrant landscape where they felt like a conversation with a clever, funny friend.

For more than a century, Red Wing Shoe Company has designed and manufactured work boots in the United States with leather sourced from its own tannery. The family-owned, privately held business, which was founded in 1905 in Red Wing, Minnesota, wanted to remind its customers of that commitment to craftsmanship, so the shoemaker decided to add some distinctive texture to its advertising.

The biggest brands pour creativity into being instantly recognizable. A logo you can spot at 20 paces. A color palette that becomes cultural shorthand (think Oreo blue or Coca-Cola red). That visual obsession runs through every corner of marketing. TV, social, out-of-home, retail, and packaging. Millions go into crafting imagery, with every frame revised until it perfectly reinforces the brand.

I'm looking for advice on free, long-term methods to improve Domain Authority for a content-focused website, without paid backlinks or link schemes. The site I'm working on is here for reference: http://whats-your-iq.com/ It's an informational platform around IQ testing, cognitive skills, and related educational content. The site already has: Original long-form articles Structured internal linking Clean technical setup (Core Web Vitals, mobile-first, indexing)

HOPWTR is kicking off its Drink Whatever You Want campaign, just as global curiosity peaks around the mysterious interstellar object 3i/ATLAS, which is currently making its way toward Earth. As headlines swirl about unidentified objects beneath U.S. waters and scientists debate whether 3i/ATLAS signals extraterrestrial life or just another space rock, HOPWTR is leaning directly into the moment with a simple message for consumers: drink whatever you want, because the aliens are coming anyway.

Google Search Console's "Insights" section no longer shows click trends for individual keywords. It now displays trends for keyword groups, once available only to high-traffic sites. Selecting any group of keywords takes you to the Performance section with the regex filter activated to show details. Many marketers believe the future of organic search monitoring is keyword groups. Consumers' queries are becoming longer and more diverse as they interact with genAI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. Hence tracking individual words is becoming ineffective.

As independent studios move toward more flexible, collaborative, tech-enabled structures, TOML's model offers one example of how an open, adaptive, talent-first approach can take shape in practice. As big networks merge and chase scale, independent studios are taking a different path, moving faster, staying closer to culture, and producing work that feels more intentional. Many are founded by senior talent leaving holding companies in search of autonomy and healthier ways of working.

My biggest gripe with Super Bowl campaigns is that most brands are just advertising during the Big Game, instead of creating content designed to coexist within the Super Bowl. Those that do-like Rocket Mortgage and Uber Eats in 2025-can reap enviable rewards. Brands must keep in mind: this game is the pinnacle for two teams as well as their fans.

"Definitely within the last year, we've all from a marketing perspective have had to look at things a little bit differently and focus on being the best answer and not just the loudest bidder," said Sarah DeCiantis, chief marketing officer at United Wholesale Mortgage. "It's challenging all of us to think about things a little bit differently and from more of a consumer-first, consumer-why or consumer-intent perspective, than just focusing on the paid side of things."

Enterprise accounts have become the ultimate accelerators of growth, as they bring massive annual contract values (ACVs), multi-year predictability, and the unique opportunity to expand across global teams. However, along with the advantages come some challenges in the B2B enterprise sales. That is because selling to large companies is not just a longer version of SMB sales. It is fundamentally different since it includes risk management, internal politics, cross-functional committees, and challenging procurement standards.

It's funny to think of people getting up in arms about any capitalist appropriation of "Santa Claus," a 100-percent made-up corporate advertising mascot bearing the same relationship to the Christian historical figure of Saint Nicholas that Hannibal Lecter has to the murdered prison guard whose sliced-off face he wore as a disguise to escape confinement. This is a figure that exists pretty much explicitly to obfuscate the religious meaning of Christmas in favor of a Satanic monthlong veneration of shopping and consumerism.

In brief, AEO optimizes content for answer boxes and voice search results, while GEO targets AI chatbot citations and generated summaries. It might be challenging to get everyone in agreement on what's what, but let's try. AEO and GEO are not going away, and the faster the industry can align on what these acronyms mean, the better. From a strategic perspective, it doesn't matter that much since all SEO specialists should already be laying the foundations for AEO, GEO, and, of course, SEO.

The first real sign of holiday momentum begins after Thanksgiving; Americans have spent more than $220 billion on Small Business Saturday alone since 2010. Retailers are already seeing the lift that defines the busiest shopping period of the year. This is the point in the season when founders can decide whether a strong winter quarter becomes a temporary spike or the start of a sustainable growth plan.

A digital marketing agency run by a former AFL star has reopened, despite owing more than four million dollars to staff, suppliers and the tax office.

"Giving away apples is like giving away white bread," they told TheStreet. "It's fine, I guess, but not very interesting. It's certainly not going to get me to do anything different."

Never before has the CMO position been more complex-or more essential to driving business results. The mark of success for any chief marketing officer is their impact on the long-term trajectory of a beloved brand. So, what does that look like in a year as chaotic as 2025, where there's been on-again, off-again tariffs, massive holding company mergers, and the continued rise of AI across the board?

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