Author: Vlad Kazankov

Hi! As a Digital CMO specializing in the IT sector, I am currently advancing my theoretical knowledge in digital marketing strategies to enhance my professional impact. Let's connect on LinkedIn!

AI Content Humanization Techniques

Few-Shot Prompting with Claude Sonnet 4 There’s only one thing that drives me crazy about content creation today. AI detection tools:) I’ve tried all the popular humanizers. There are tons...

Linkedin Ads Pricing

LinkedIn uses objective-based pricing. That means you pay for a specific action tied to your campaign goal – a click (CPC), an impression (CPM), a message delivery (CPS), or a...

Linkedin Ads Cost

LinkedIn Ad Cost Metrics & Performance Benchmarks (2025 Focus) Cost and performance benchmarks help set expectations, but don’t predict outcomes. Why results vary – and what actually drives performance  is...

Storytelling in Marketing

Storytelling captures attention and builds emotional connections. The story may hook viewers, and deepens their feeling for the brand. In marketing there’s usually a second act: you turn that emotional...

B2B Content Marketing Strategy Checklist

1. GOALS. Content Marketing Goals 2. AUDIENCE. Characteristics of the Key Target Audience Segment the audience based on insights: Messaging are relevant and drives engagement and action if: 3. MESSAGE....

Hero, Hub and Hygiene Content

Originally built for big YouTube strategies. By integrating these elements, campaigns extend their lifecycle. Hero Content (Big Idea) Example Hub Content (Build Relationship) Examples Hygiene/Help Content (Addressing needs) Examples Example...

Customer journeys

Reach, Act, Convert and Engage There are many different customer journey models. The simplest is Smart Insight’s RACE Planning Framework. 4 stages (both B2C and B2B): Reach, Act, Convert and Engage. Reach Search engines, social networks,...

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

A mix of traditional advertising (outbound marketing) and inbound marketing (content marketing is a cornerstone) is recommended. What is Inbound marketing Common tactics of Inbound marketing #1 SEO What is the goal?...

List of Marketing Strategies

Growth Strategies (Ansoff’s Matrix) These strategies focus on product and market expansion options​ More Market Share = >Market Penetration

Content Marketing Workflow

Here is the note about how the content marketing workflow should be, from strategy to publishing. Universal content-creating marketing workflow: If it’s set up well, it’s a real chance to...

Content Marketing KPIs

When hiring a copywriter, it is important to set clear KPI expectations and then monitor their performance. You can even include the KPIs in the offer. It may be helpful...

Business Case

RISKS BENEFITS RESOURCES RESOURCE PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT #1 Resource audit #2 Resource allocation #3 Financial analysis #4 Critical success factors #5 Project planning #6 Accountability and responsibility

SEO for ChatGPT For Lead Generation

Further reading https://www.semrush.com/blog/chatgpt-search-insights/https://www.semrush.com/blog/chatgpt-search/https://searchengineland.com/seo-for-chatgpt-search-4-key-observations-449001https://hbr.org/2024/05/how-marketers-can-adapt-to-llm-powered-searchhttps://ahrefs.com/blog/llm-optimization/https://firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/searchgpt-optimization-2025-guide/

Contribution Margin

Example Marketing budget allocation Product and campaign profitability Pricing and discount strategies Assessing break-even point Improve ROMI Target high-margin products

Revenue

What is Revenue What type of Metric it is Revenue vs Profit Sales performance Market demand Pricing strategy Business growth Investment appeal Operating revenue Non-operating revenue Revenue growth strategies Examples...

Profit

Gross Profit Operating Profit (Income) Net Profit (Bottom Line) Profit Margin Gross Profit Margin Operating Profit Margin (EBIT margin) Net Profit Margin

Break-Even Point: No Profit, No Loss

Formula to calculate the break-even point (in units)  Break-even point (units) = Fixed costs/(Price per unit − Variable cost per unit) Setting realistic marketing budgets

Share of voice (SOV)

Share of voice = (your brand metrics / total market metrics) x100. If you were measuring your social media interactions, say there were 200 for your brand vs the total...

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

A key performance metric that measures the total cost incurred to acquire a new customer. This cost includes all marketing expenses (advertising, promotional campaigns, digital marketing efforts), sales costs (commissions,...

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

A key metric. The total revenue a business expects to earn from a a single customer account over the duration of their relationship with the company. CLV helps businesses understand...

Commercial Intelligence

Commercial intelligence = how you use the data to make smarter decisions, ensuring decisions are rooted in evidence rather than speculation. Components of commercial intelligence Commercial intelligence is a systematic...

Product Life Cycle (PLC)

Each product or service of every company is currently in one of the PLC stages The use of the “PLC” concept in developing a marketing plan means that the marketer...

Key Issues for Marketing Plan

Key Strategic Challenges or Internal Resource Issues Key Issues are issues identified from the Strategic Audit audit that shape the content of your Marketing Plan. In plain English, the issues...

Strategic Marketing Initiatives

Strategic Initiatives When developing strategy, the two key questions are (Hooley et al, 2020, p161): how can we exploit our strong resources more fully; what new strong resources will we...

Competitive Advantage Strategies

Competitive Advantage can be created in two main (though not exclusive) ways: through Cost Leadership Strategy and Differentiation Strategy (Porter, 1980. Cited in Hooley et al, 2020, p45). “The two...

Best WordPress Plugins

Best SEO plugins for WordPress Permalink Manager Lite Check your WordPress administration’s “Permalinks” settings page  2. Choose a custom structure for the URLs of your posts. I use “category/post-title” structure...

SWOT/TOWS Matrix

SWOT Matrix Strengths1. a strong brand reputation,2. a loyal customer base,3. unique technology,4. skilled workforce,5. strong financial resources,6. efficient processes Weaknesses1. inadequate research and development facilities2. outdated technology3. insufficient marketing...

Marketing Plan Objectives Examples

The RACE framework (Smart Insights) provides a structured approach to formulate marketing objectives. REACH MARKETING ACTIVITIES Objective: drive visits to your main site. Tactics: build awareness of a brand, its...

Google Sheets Functions List

1. Raw SEO Data Cleaning and Preparation This type of task is often referred to as data cleaning, data wrangling, or data filtering, since it involves selecting relevant information from...

Product Portfolio Analysis

Sales by product Profit contribution Sales mix Competitors Product Portfolio Analysis Refining marketing strategies Identifying market opportunities Guiding strategic decisions Opportunities for differentiation Positioning and benchmarking How to maintain market...

Best Blog URL structure for SEO

It’s usually better to have as clean of a URL as possible. And for that reason, in most cases, I would not add /blog/ to your URLs. If you are...

Blog on Subdomain vs Subdirectory

If you are an IT company with the blog on a subdomain I recommend you move the blog from the subdomain to the main domain. Especially when you get leads...

Digital Marketing KPIs

KPIs indicate if things are going well. A sudden change in the KPI should create an alert and call for further analysis like segmentation. A spike or decline must indicate...

Email Marketing KPIs

What is the goal of your email marketing? You can have more than one goal. To grow a subscriber database. If your focus is on growing the top of your funnel —...

Chief Content Officer

Chief Content Officer reports To Chief Executive Officer/Chief Operating Officer in smaller enterprises or Chief Marketing Officer/VP of Marketing in larger enterprises. Position Summary The Chief Content Officer (CCO) oversees...

Lead Management

The first place to begin building this new fact-based culture is in the lead management process. If marketers are ever to shed the perception that their value is solely in...

New CMO: What are the First Steps?

Don’t just think about the answer to the question or completing the project, think about what comes next. Showing that you’ve thought about what could come next gives leaders confidence in...

How To Choose a CMO

Researcher Frank German and colleagues have proven firms with a CMO achieved on average a 15% better financial performance compared to firms without. CEO satisfaction with the marketing more than...

Lead Generation Goals for IT Companies

A lead generation goal is the total number of potential customers your marketing team should achieve in a given period since they got the necessary resources.  To establish a lead...

Lead Scoring for IT Companies

It’s quite clear that not every lead will become a client, and that every lead can be scored. Lead scoring is the process of assigning points (from negative to positive...

Lead vs Prospect vs Customer

What is a Lead in Sales Cold: Leads who are unfamiliar with your brand, have no opinion on it, or don’t intend to buy anything. You may know their contact information,...

CRO and UX

Users shouldn’t struggle to find what they needed. Be ensure resources are easy to find and that the user journey is clear. A report from McKinsey, the business consulting firm, found that “those...

Product Marketing vs Service Marketing

An “IT company” is the umbrella term for a software services company or a software product company. What is a Software Development Company Googling for this topic, I discovered that many authors...

Keywords With Low Search Volume

Should I target low volume keywords?How do I find low volume keywords? “Low volume” is the name for keywords that can have below 250 searches per month.   https://moz.com/blog/low-search-volume-keywordshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsLhrmdCn3M

Annual Marketing Budget

A marketing budget is the amount of money a business plans to spend on marketing-related activities over the year. It includes not only expenses such as paid advertising, sponsored web...

How to Market a Software Development Company

If I were asked to develop a marketing strategy for software development companies from scratch right now, where would I start? With the so-called commercial intelligence. Commercial intelligence is the...

Software Development Companies in Poland

These companies are members of SoDA (Software Development Association) from Poland. 10Clouds 11Sigma Aberit Interactive Agency & Software House Acaisoft Angry Nerds Antologic Applandeo Appliscale Avra Software AWSM Systems B-MIND...

Content Publishing Velocity

https://howthefxck.substack.com/p/publishing-velocity-the-1-seo-strategy The #1 Lever To Get The Fastest SEO Results https://blog.coremedia.com/blog/what-is-high-velocity-marketing https://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-velocity-what-it-is-how-to-calculate-it-why-you-should-care/382710/ Content ‘Velocity’ Is More Important Than Quality Modernizing Government Digital Strategies: Let’s Get “Phygital” https://flyingcatmarketing.com/case-study/b2c-seo-case-study/ https://medium.com/the-book-mechanic/how-i-published-28-articles-in-april-and-got-500-bonus-from-medium-216e69710420 Sharing the...

Focus on Core Business

Almost inevitably, the right priority is to build on strengths instead of fixing weaknesses. Imagine two $100 Million markets. You have a 50% market share and do $50 Million in...

Small Business Marketing Mistakes

Companies have a minimum budget of less than $30,000 per year. CEOs expect miracles and dramatic results quickly or from a very limited budget. Companies sell everything to everyone, and...

List of Software Companies

The Best Software Companies To Work For In 2020 According To Glassdoor Company Software Business Sector SmartBear  IT Management DataDog Monitoring service for cloud-scale applications A10 Networks Inc.  App. Development/Testing/Lifecycle...

List of Technology Companies

Technology companies represented in the CMO Council 3Com, A.T. Kearney, Adaptec, Adobe, Akamai, Alcatel, Ameritrade,AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, ARM, Arrow Electronics, AT&T, BearingPoint, Borland, Broadcom,BroadVision, Business Objects, Check Point, Cirrus...

Unit Economics

Figure out Marketing’s role in the company’s unit economics. The CAC (customer acquisition cost) is shared between you and the sales team. Your company’s LTV (Lifetime Value) will determine how...

How to Scale Content Marketing

To scale your content marketing, do what restaurant chefs do: Create systems and processes that let you deliver delicious content no matter who is involved in creating and distributing it....

Value Proposition vs Positioning Statement

Unlike the value proposition, positioning is targeted to a highly specific segment or persona. It helps them understand why your product is best suited for their needs over other options....

Linkedin Advertising for B2B

If your average deal size is less than $12-15K, LinkedIn may not be the ideal vehicle for lead generation; Next, ditch LinkedIn’s first two suggestions regarding ads. Instead, remove the...

Sales vs Marketing

Marketing is the art of creating genuine customer value (Philip Kotler). Hence, marketing analysis, marketing thinking, and marketing decisions cannot rest upon the shoulders of just one department. Plus marketing theories that...

B2B Video Marketing

Seventy-two percent of B2B buyers say they watch a video while deciding whether to buy. 82% of businesses are investing more in the video. By 2022, it will account for...

Value Based Marketing

Your content should focus on providing value that an employee can bring to their manager or a manager to their executive.The content is so value-driven that it isn’t engaging anymore....

VP of Marketing Job Description

Vice President of Marketing at a SaaS B2B product company (Content Management Software for colleges and universities “Softdocs”) Company description Launched in 1998, 110+ employees (2021). Requirements Define, shape and...

Voice of Customer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_the_customer Do you want to be a company that risks bringing products or services to market without fully understanding what customers need, and why they need it? Are you still...
Content mapping

Content Mapping

What Is Customer Journey Mapping? Content is consumed throughout the customer journey, and an understanding of how and where customers need personalized content is vital to making meaningful improvements to...
Copywriter VS Content Writer

Copywriter vs Content writer

Copywriting is sales-driven; content writing is engagement-driven. While both are written for marketing purposes, copywriting has a clearer sales objective, whereas content writing is for branding. Is all writing essentially...

How to Create Pillar and Cluster Content

Pillar content is a single page that broadly covers a particular topic, all aspects of it, and has links to the cluster content. Cluster content is a set of more detailed blog...
FAQ schema example for keyword "b2b portal development services" https://www.pixelcrayons.com/b2b-b2c-portal-development

How to Implement FAQ Schema

IT companies actively use FAQ Schema to increase the number of clicks from the Google search engine. The key behind the improvement in clicks is a more visible listing in...
Difference Between White Paper and Ebook

Difference Between White Paper and Ebook

“White Paper” or “Ebook” is a booklet that usually can be downloaded from a lead-magnet (so-called gated content ). It’s a landing page where you write down a few bullet points about...
IT Marketing Companies

IT Marketing Companies

Are you looking for a company that understands digital marketing for technology providers inside out? IT marketing companies help information technology companies generate leads in the B2B technology space using content...
Keywords For Software Development Company

Keywords for a Software Development Company

Are you trying to find a ready-to-use list of keywords relating to the services of your software development company to launch a successful PPC or organic search campaign? I’ll help you to...