Marketing Insights Blog
Strategic and tactical marketing insights from the Foundations First team and guest experts.
Make Confident Marketing Decisions without Being a Marketing Expert
Join the Foundations First team and Keystone Group International to learn the two questions to ask to make confident marketing...
The Reality of Modern Marketing Funnels
Marketing funnels can end in a bunch of junk leads and no sales. Clean up your sales by going backwards...
How to Use Marketing KPIs to Measure Success
KPIs and KPI targets should be quantifiable, particular, dynamic, and worth tracking. Tracking them efficiently is key to visualizing your...
Be Unapologetic About Your Vision and V/TO™
I recently had a conversation with a friend who told me about his IKEA nightmare. After assembling, and reassembling, a...
The Investment of Calculating ROAS
Advertising can be tough. Truth be told, it can seem a lot like gambling. In my interview with Stas Balanevsky,...
2022 Local Excellence Award Winner by UpCity!
For more than a decade, UpCity’s mission has been—and continues to be—to help businesses find B2B service providers they can...
Using Strategy to Dispel Marketing Myths
Digital marketing strategies change quickly. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the strategies seem to change at light speed....
Brutal Opinion on Marketing KPIs
If you can’t hire and fire off your KPI, it's not a real KPI. It's just an interesting core metric.
5 Mistakes to Avoid if You Outsource Marketing
Here are the top mistakes I've seen businesses make over the years when outsourcing their marketing to agencies, freelancers, fractional...
Setting Marketing Expectations with the Visionary
Leverage the mindset of the visionary to keep marketing tactics focused.
The Myth of Marketing Attribution
Everyone has their opinion on B2B marketing attribution. When it comes to B2B attribution, it seems like everyone has their...
Marketing Rocks for your Quarterly Meetings
How to Use EOS Marketing Rocks If you’re running on EOS® (Entrepreneurial Operating System) you know how to use Rocks...
Execution Rock: Set up marketing tracking
Tracking is often overlooked, but it should be a priority across the organization. Make sure everyone is clear on the...
Management Rock: Create brand cheat sheet and teach staff how to use it
Your brand messaging, tone, values, colors, logo usage, fonts, etc. are not helpful if they only exist on a remote...
Management Rock: Create strategic partner nurture process
Strategic partners are incredibly valuable. They provide qualified leads with shorter sales cycles because the lead came from a trusted...
Management Rock: Create product descriptions
Product descriptions are critical to all marketing and sales efforts but rarely developed properly.
Management Rock: Create SLA for sales & marketing alignment
Marketing should support sales. But this can only happen if there are clear communication expectations between the two department leaders.
Management Rock: Competitor analysis process
Documenting a process to analyze the competitive landscape will keep you tuned in to the marketplace before you get left...
Management Rock: Prioritize your target markets
If there is a clear target market hierarchy then content, events, and ads for the primary target market will take...
Management Rock: Create staff & vendor onboarding process
This Rock ensures everyone understands how you do things, what’s important, what the non-negotiables are, what quality looks like, etc.
Leadership Rock: Build your marketing budget
We're talking beyond having your chart of accounts...we're talking about forecasting your marketing spend for the next year.
Leadership Rock: Define core marketing metrics
We're talking about creating core metrics so you can be more efficient in what is reported and measured and tracked...
Leadership Rock: Define your marketing KPIs and marketing Score Card
KPIs are how you track your progress to your vision. What are the 1-3 marketing metrics your CEO can look...
Marketing Department Check-Up Guide
How to use your marketing department check up: Below are the basic marketing items every company should have in place....
Leadership Rock: Craft Your Vision Statement
Your vision statement guides absolutely all marketing decisions (and beyond). What does your future look like? Define that in your...
Our Proven Approach to B2B Marketing Strategy & Tactics
The marketing challenge As a fractional CMO, the most common roadblock I see is a lack of direction. A lot of...
Marketing Strategy Decision Map
Map your decisions to yourmarketing strategy. For any marketing decision, run through your strategy map to make decisions faster, stay...
Do You Know Why You’re Spending Money on Marketing Tactics?
Getting to the Why of Marketing I’m in my element when I get to talk about how to help business...
The Future of Marketing is More Successful and Less Wasteful
Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, businesses were either thriving or struggling to survive. In the marketing world,...
Strengthen Trust in Your Marketing Team
Do you trust your marketing staff and vendors? I mean, really trust them. Think about it. When you ask about...