SEO has changed a lot since I began optimizing web sites more than two decades ago in the pre-Google era of Hotbot, Lycos, Magellan and Ask Jeeves. It’s clear that the entire digital marketing ecosystem in 2022 bears little resemblance to that of 1996 and even 2006.

But there are core marketing principles underlying SEO — among them being the essential role played by authoritative, useful content meant to guide the consumer to an informed decision regarding any particular product or service — that haven’t changed and likely never will.

To get a better sense of what’s changed in SEO, and what remains the same, I wanted to catch up with Nick Stamoulis, President of Brick Marketing. Nick, like myself, has been involved in SEO since the late 1990s, and, like myself, now runs an organization that’s morphed from a specialty shop into a full-service digital marketing agency.

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Dan Englander is CEO of Sales Schema, a specialist firm that helps agencies and SAAS firms find new business opportunities. He’s also an author of a new book entitled “Relationship Sales at Scale: How to Find Your Virtual Tribe and Reliably Grow Your Professional Service Business.”

I wanted to catch up with Dan to talk about contemporary challenges of business development, especially when it comes to selling a complex service. As anyone who’s done business development for an agency or marketing service provider knows, the actual decision-makers are often hard to reach. Worse, important procurement decisions are increasingly made not by individuals, but by committees whose composition may be unknown (and may often be unknowable).

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Bant Breen is Founder and Chairman at Qnary, an executive reputation management and talent branding solutions company he founded in 2012. Since that time Qnary has grown quickly, adding features and tools along the way that make it easy for clients to monitor — and interact with — social media channels.

I wanted to catch up with Bant to trade notes on how social media — and reputation management — has changed in the past decade and how Qnary is adapting these changes. As he notes, online reputation management was primarily search-centric 10 years ago, but today has broadened to include many disparate social media channels. And while LinkedIn remains the most important platform for executives to establish and maintain a presence, other platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and even TikTok, are gaining influence, all of which means that executives need to think much more holistically about their personal and brand reputations.

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Cory Treffiletti is SVP Marketing at FIS, a large fintech company that supplies a lot of the technology used by banks and broader financial institutions; it's also the largest payment processing platform in the world. Cory is a serial entrepreneur, author, columnist, and genuine ad-tech pioneer I’ve known for many years.

Cory is a major advocate of data-driven storytelling, and I wanted to explore with him the difference that storytelling can make, especially in a B2B context, where the technique is often under-used. We discuss how marketers should go about ideating and hypothesizing stories and testing them in the marketplace, the foundational importance of talking to customers and prospects before embarking on the storytelling exercise, and the fact that the B2B customer journey — like the B2C journey — is non-linear and thus requires careful thinking about which message is most appropriate at which stage of this journey.

We explore how B2B companies, which generally place a high value on customer testimonials, should go about getting them, and how the post-pandemic re-emergence of face-to-face meetings will likely affect the B2B sales channel. As Cory observes, “the handshake is back, with a vengeance.”

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Kevin Lee interviews Jeanette Braun, Esq., founder of Braun IP Law, LLC, an Illinois-based law firm specializing in intellectual property. Kevin and Jeanette discuss the unprecedented intellectual property issues raised by generative AI systems. Their conversation then turns to a more general discussion of IP protections and the mistakes that business owners often make with respect to them. They then explore various aspects of IP law, including wordmark and logo protection and provisional patents, and conclude with a discussion of tips for business owners who either think their IP rights have been infringed or seek to protect their own original works from infringement by others.

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From superior strategy though tireless execution in the marketing trenches, Kevin’s insightful conversations allow you to leapfrog over the competition learning from the best guests. Guests include senior management from Hint Water, PepsiCo, Danone, FTD, Global Industrial and FIS through startups including Grunt Style, BeardBrand, Senrev and SparkToro. Catch the pearls of wisdom shared with Kevin by some of the most brilliant minds in marketing and business.

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