Dear  <<First Name>>:

Re-forecast. 

That’s what a company I once worked for used to call budget cuts. 

They’d adjust their revenue forecast based on current sales trends every quarter and then modify budgets accordingly.  The marketing budget  -- and by extension PR budget -- always got whacked.

Yet budget cuts always cost more than the cut. By the time a cut came in July, marketing had already invested six month’s worth of budget into programs that would now be forced to stop. 

While the company clawed back a percentage of the budget, it also sunk another percentage in efforts that were still cooking. There was still a bigger problem in the lost momentum. 

Marketing requires a larger investment to overcome inertia -- and less budget once the flywheel is running smoothly. When you stop and start constantly, which is the effect of cuts, you wind up having to spend to overcome that inertia again, and again, and again. 

There are a lot of professionals in our community having this battle right now amid the economic slowdown. You can’t just turn this function off and on. Or can...but it’s going to cost more in the long run. 

And that leads us to the top story in this edition of the Monthly Scripts.    

Yours in marketing and communications,
Frank Strong

PS: Looking for an agency partner with the content chops to build a sound strategy and execute? Give our services a try.

The Must-Read Articles

Every month I peruse hundreds of articles about marketing and public relations. Near the month’s end, I analyze those metrics with technology and human judgment to find the most important stories. 

Featured

1. SEO Is Not an On/Off Switch (Moz - Whiteboard Friday) “But the problem with SEO is when you turn it back on and when the money comes back, you're going to have to go through this ramp-up again. The curve may be different shapes, and it may not go all the way down and it may not go back to where it was.” 

Leadership and the CMO

2. It's Time To Put In-Housing In Balance (Media Post) …in their haste for efficiency, many CMOs are making a mistake –removing outside advertising agency partners vital for nimble performance and new ideas.

3. Why You Should Hire Agencies & Consultants [for everything you can] (Sparktoro) A breakdown of the benefits and drawbacks, including costs, of consultants vs. FTEs. 

4. Four Signs a Marketing Reorganization is Coming and How to Prepare (Business2Community) The unspoken truth is that there will always be a change in model, market, management or metrics.

5. Marketing Salary Survey Shows the Pandemic is Changing Hiring Trends (Sword and the Script) Annual marketing salary survey shows remote interviews and shorter hiring processes have become the norm as a consequence of the pandemic.

Marketing

6. Here’s Why Psychological Games Make or Break Marketing Campaigns (Thrive Global) “All marketing campaigns should have their grounding in psychology. When you craft a marketing campaign, you need to have a clear understanding of who your consumer aspires to be.”

7. What Do Marketers See As the Long-Term Impacts of COVID-19 on Media and Ad Investment? (Marketing Charts) More innovative and willing to try something new (53%). 

8. Your Messaging Framework: What It Is, Why You Need One, and How to Build It (Marketing Profs) “A messaging framework is a structured representation of what your company and products stand for. The framework exercise is a systematic way of defining the value you bring to your customers.”

B2B Marketing

9. Buying Signals: B2B Marketing Budgets without a Line Item for Trade Shows (Sword and the Script) The decline of B2B trade shows frees B2B marketing to experiment with more efficient channels; virtual events surface buying signals.

Public Relations

10. 4 trends in journalism and what they mean for the PR industry (Arik Hanson) “Big-time news is increasingly reported from one of three cities.”

11. PwC moves marketing under Chief Comms Officer (Campaign Live) "PwC has restructured its communications function to include marketing, as well as internal and external comms."

12. The News May Be Recycling Much of its Content; Implications for PR and Content Marketing (Sword and the Script) Amid layoffs and closures stemming from the pandemic, news organizations are republishing political content leaving less time and space for business news

Content Marketing

13. Why Content Marketing is Indispensable to Sales Enablement (Televerde) “Sales enablement is gaining momentum. The number of companies adopting this philosophy has risen by 40% in just the past few years.”

14. Blogging isn’t Sexy but Done Well It Drives B2B Marketing Results [Study] (Sword and the Script) The most effective blogs in B2B marketing tend to publish longer posts, more frequently, with visuals, paid distribution and analytical measurement

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Email Marketing 

15. Email Is Most Used Channel As Marketing Spend Goes Up (Media Post) “Email is rated as a top source of sales and marketing leads by 38%, a distant second to referrals, at 65%.” 

Experience: UX & CX

16. Facebook & Instagram Drop Support For WordPress Embeds (Search Engine Journal) "The change is retroactive, so all Facebook and Instagram embeds on the sites of unauthenticated publishers will soon become broken. This has the potential to affect millions of sites." 

Creativity

17. When and How Advertising Creativity Works (Marketing News) A new Journal of Marketing study...finds robust empirical evidence that advertising creativity has significant positive effects on consumer responses.

18. Google’s new logos are bad (TechCrunch) "To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float by."

Digital

19. 15 No B.S. CRO Tips to Create Blog Posts That Convert (Search Engine Journal) “Throw in a story or case study in the introduction...have one clear & compelling call to action.”

SEO & SEM

20. What is Technical SEO? 11 Best Practices (AHREFS) Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google find, understand, and index your pages. 

21. Google Ads turns 20: The most important trends and changes of the past 5 years (Search Engine Land) "the ads business generated more than $135 billion last year...Yahoo surrendered search ads to Microsoft," 

Social Media

22. WordPress can now turn blog posts into tweetstorms automatically (TechCrunch) "The new feature will allow you to tweet out every word of your post, as well as the accompanying images and videos." 

23. Instagram Announces New Crackdown on Influencers Who Fail to Disclose Commercial Partnerships (Social Media Today) “Instagram itself face legal action - and in order to avoid such, Instagram has vowed to increase its action on sponsored posts.”

Marketing & PR Technology

24. The 12Ps of marketing technology (ClickZ) “Marketing technology, in and of itself, is not a strategy. The technology offers no value unless it enables a solid marketing strategy.”

25. Tech Talk with Muck Rack cofounder and CEO Gregory Galant (PR Week) “A lot of people in marketing think of communications tech as a fringe, unimportant part of the marcomms world, but recently people have realized that comms is a lot more important than they realized.” 

26. SEO Software Company SEMrush Moves into PR with Prowly Acquisition [PR Tech Sum] (Sword and the Script) SEMrush acquires Prowly; PublicRelay announces predictive alerts; de-Cision: buy Meltwater and spinoff TrendKite?

Measurement  & Analytics

27. Seven important metrics to measure content marketing ROI (Search Engine Watch) “For most B2B marketers, this strategy helps them achieve top-of-funnel marketing goals.”

ICYMI from the Blog

28. 28 Plus Public Relations Resources to Brush up and Stay Sharp in Comms (Sword and the Script) A carefully curated list of public relations resources like newsletters, blogs, podcasts, trades and books for staying up to speed in comms.

29. The Enduring Characteristics of Winning B2B Content Marketing Programs (Sword and the Script)  Effective B2B content marketing programs have a documented strategy, build a subscription audience and use metrics to inform decisions.

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Sword and the Script Media, LLC is a verified veteran-owned public relations agency immersed in the B2B tech marketplace. We focus on building sustainable and process-driven programs for PR, content marketing and social media. A defining difference comes down to our approach – that marketing ought to have utility. This is because marketing that helps, sells better than marketing that hypes.  

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---------------------------------------------
Frank Strong, MA, MBA
Founder & President
Sword and the Script Media, LLC
www.swordandthescript.com
PR | Content Marketing | Social Media
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