Marketing communications, like all good contact sports, offers a time to play defense and a time to play offense.  Since the pandemic hit in March, many companies (B2B and B2C) shifted to play defense, cutting back their ad spending, which resulted in local TV and radio losing nearly $20 Billion in ad revenue, and Google and Facebook losing a combined $44 …

Make Hay While the Sun Shines: 9 Things Marketers Can Do Now with Newfound Time The slowed pace of business activities due to the coronavirus presents a great opportunity for marketers to tackle the B- and C-list tasks that have been on their to-do list. Most marketers have more time for these tasks, and for many companies there’s easier access …

Virtual is Now Reality The social distancing and shelter-in-place mandates necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic mean that most of the U.S. workforce must now work remotely.  While this presents challenges to keeping businesses open and moving forward – particularly sales and marketing teams whose work typically requires face-to-face interactions – technology solutions exist to bridge the necessary physical distances between us. …

The World Health Organization just declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and domestic manufacturers are scrambling to formulate and communicate their response to this situation.   We encourage our clients to approach this situation in a two-step fashion – build a response plan, then work with your public relations team to disseminate it. Proactive businesses can play an important role in information …

In this piece we examine how marketing research can pay big dividends to your sales efforts.  Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about your industry, company, brand, products/services and pricing provides you with an informed definition of who you are, a specific sense of where you are, and a roadmap to guide you where you want to be.  At the very least, …

How Manufacturers Should Use Social Media While most B2C marketing and sales pros realize the benefits of social media platforms, many of their B2B peers in manufacturing either dismiss social media’s value or fail to take a strategic approach to creating and placing content properly optimized to the respective channels. Here, Studio/D focuses on the benefits of social media for …

At Studio/D, we love diving into the uniqueness of B2B sales and marketing; the things that challenge, confound and reward our manufacturer clients in ways you don’t see in the consumer world. Case in point: DMUs, or Decision-Making Units. Philip Kotler, marketing author, consultant, and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, defines DMUs as a collection …

The pace of change throughout the communications industry has only intensified over the past several years. To help you  ramp up for 2020, Studio/D  identified six key communication trends, together with a game plan for how to leverage each to your advantage. Just being heard will be difficult.  In 2020, we will experience  a national fall election, plus other unique events such as the Summer Olympics, …

Studio/D’s “Shop Talk” column examines how communication strategies should bridge across sales and marketing functions, providing tangible benefits to each while providing maximum impact to your organization.

Most manufacturing-based companies emphasize sales efforts over marketing communications, and in doing so, they unknowingly cap their sales growth opportunity. This emphasis probably results from being more familiar with sales processes than communication strategy, and while deemphasizing marketing communications is unintended, its minimized role hinders revenue growth over what is typically a long sales process. See if this captures your …