Consumers, investors, employees, policymakers, and business partners are becoming more interested in learning the benefits of ESG, driving its importance and complexity for companies and institutional investors. While it’s predominantly linked in its most formal executions with publicly traded corporations, there is value to smaller private companies and brands to enhance or grow a halo effect if done properly, with purpose and authenticity from all involved. In this edition of Plain Talk, we’re not giving advice on developing an ESG initiative. Instead, we’re focusing on 11 ideas to boost your ESG branding by leveraging your practices.

During the two years of the pandemic, we were forced to stay home and not travel. Business was anything but “business as usual.” Overnight, The B2B world had to grow new synapses to reach, educate, and sell to new and existing clients remotely. While phone and Zoom calls picked up much of the slack for B2B marketers, digital marketing was also forced to evolve significantly. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll outline the three biggest industry changes that will “stick,” how they affect your B2B digital marketing strategy, and what you need to do about them.

For many years brands, and not surprisingly, the advertising industry shared the opinion that it was between difficult and impossible to bring the services that a traditional marketing agency provides “in-house” to the client company. There was pretty good evidence that this was the third rail of advertising. Many large companies tried to build in-house agencies only to shut them down or struggle as the quality of their marketing mysteriously slumped. However, today there are some pretty compelling success stories for in-house agencies (IHAs). So, we thought rather than ignore this truth, we would have a closer look. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll help you examine what conditions might be necessary to succeed in in-house marketing. We’ll explore what you gain and lose and whether in-housing might be for you.

As marketers, we continue to seek an understanding of how our brands can consistently produce awesome search engine result page (SERP) rankings on Google. That’s a heavy lift without having some understanding of the engine that’s under the massive hood of the search hotrod that is Google. This edition of Plain Talk will share what you need to know about Google algorithm update history. Use this information to gain a meaningful understanding of Google search algorithms and how they impact your brand.