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What’s Google Search Console, and why is it particularly important for B2B?

An Overview Of Google Search Console for B2B Digital Marketers

Google Search Console (“GSC”) is Google’s way of communicating information about Google’s view of a website back to that website’s owner.

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Some key facts about GSC:

  • It’s free and open access. Anyone with a website can use it.
  • It’s an essential tool if you are remotely serious about SEO and content marketing.
  • You can use GSC to ask Google to remove certain content from search results.
  • GSC provides some important hygiene functions that might mitigate or avoid several harmful scenarios where something has gone technically wrong with your website.
  • It provides an important safety net when you are making major changes to your website or domain, like a restructure or switching to a new CMS.
  • You can only use GSC on a website that you own, and you have to authenticate your domain with Google before you can use it. Until you do this, you’ll miss out on the benefits of GSC.

GSC isn’t the most glamorous tool in a technical marketer’s armoury, but it’s foundational for SEO. And if you have a PR or legal crisis around some website content, or if something goes badly wrong with Google’s view of your website (for example, if your site is hacked), GSC can be an absolute lifesaver. So even if you don’t care much about SEO, it’s worth making sure you have GSC in place and that your team has some familiarity with it, just in case of a future technical or content-related emergency.

Why GSC is particularly important for B2B digital marketers

GSC is important to all digital marketers and there’s nothing B2B specific about GSC: its functionality is defined in technical terms, and it doesn’t know or care whether your website’s target audience members are consumers, businesses or something else. But GSC is particularly useful in B2B marketing for a couple of reasons:

  • B2B companies are often dealing with niche audiences, so B2B websites often have low levels of traffic. Whereas a B2C site might have thousands or even millions of visitors each day, and hundreds of transactions per hour, a specialist B2B site might just see a handful of daily visitors. If something goes wrong with a high volume B2C site, someone is likely to notice pretty much straight away – the transactions stop coming, or someone will call the contact centre with an error report. But with a niche B2B site it’s quite possible that a problem won’t be noticed for days or even weeks. That’s where the proactive monitoring and alerting features of GSC really help. It’s another pair of eyes, constantly on the alert for website problems.
  • B2B websites often cover very specialist areas of content. It’s easy for there to be misalignment between the intended purpose of your content and Google’s understanding of it. If that happens, you won’t reach your intended audience via Google Search. The diagnostics that GSC provides help to detect and fix this sort of misalignment. Even if you’re not particularly focused on SEO, it’s still worth understanding the basics of how Google views your website content.

That second point leads us nicely to the first feature of GSC that I want to highlight.

Search Performance reports

A key SEO-related function of GSC is the Search Performance report. Here’s an example from the Sharp Ahead domain:

This example shows how many clicks my website received for particular searches on Google, and also how many impressions. For example our content was shown 730 times on Google for the search “alternatives to webinars”, and received 5 clicks.

I can find out about these clicks from other sources, like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity. But this data about Google search impressions is unique to GSC. Search impressions have marketing value, even when the viewer doesn’t click. So this impressions data is very valuable for assessing and improving SEO and content marketing.

I won’t go into all of the detail here, but you’ll note that this report has a lot of options: for example, you can break down performance geographically, or by device type (mobile vs tablet vs computer).

Note also that these reports can cover up to 16 months of historical data – great to build up enough impressions to make sense of niche search queries where daily volumes are small, and useful to look at seasonal trends too. But the historical data isn’t retrospective, it is only present from the moment you first verify your site with GSC.

So if you don’t have GSC yet, verify your site today so you can start building up this valuable history!

Inspecting a URL with GSC

Another core SEO-related function of GSC is “URL inspection”. This allows you to check Google’s view of a particular page from your site. Here’s an example report from the Sharp Ahead website:

An important highlight is at the top of the report “URL is on Google – it can appear in Google Search results”. This confirms that Google knows about the page and is, in principle, willing to show it in Google search results. This feature allows you to tell the difference between a page that can’t get any search traffic – because it isn’t known to Google, or because Google has excluded it from search results for some reason – and a page that just isn’t getting any search traffic – because it doesn’t rank highly enough against SEO competitors.

There’s a lot of more detailed information in that URL inspection report which is important for SEO.

Some of the other things that GSC can do for you

There are dozens of functions in GSC and I can’t cover them all here. But here are some highlights that are likely to be of particular interest to B2B marketers: 

  • You can ask Google to “urgently remove” content from Google Search. You might need to do this if, for example, there’s a breaking legal issue around some of your web content. 
  • You can ask Google to immediately reindex a page from your website. Typically you don’t need to do this – Google checks your site regularly and will automatically find your new content quickly enough – but if a change is time sensitive (for example, a key team member has left the company to work for a competitor, and you want the outdated information purged from search results), or if you are testing something new for SEO purposes, this can speed things up. 
  • You can tell Google if you’ve moved your site to a new domain. This can speed up migration of Google’s search content to that new domain, and help to preserve the SEO value of the old domain. 
  • Google will use GSC to inform you if it finds invalid content metadata on your site. For example, if you run real-world events, you might use structured markup https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/event to inform Google about them so that they can appear nicely in search results, like this:

If there’s something wrong with that markup, your event won’t appear and you’ll miss out on that additional search placement opportunity. Google will tell you about the problem in GSC.

Google will inform you – in the “Security Issues” section of GSC – if it detects a serious issue with your website such as the apparent presence of malware.

This last feature is especially important. If Google thinks your site has been hacked it will display a notice to that effect in search results:

(See https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/190597) 

That’s a bad look for any brand. 

Hopefully your site will never be hacked or otherwise compromised by malicious content. But if that ever happens, you’ll want to know and to do something about it right away. GSC is one way to monitor for that. 

Authenticating your website for GSC

It makes sense that Google won’t share all of that powerful functionality in GSC with just anyone. You have to prove to Google that you are a legitimate owner of the website in order to set up and access GSC for that site. 

It may be that GSC has already been set up by your company, or by a web agency acting on your behalf, but you personally don’t have access. If so, there are methods to add extra users to an existing GSC account. Contact the person who owns your GSC setup. 

If you don’t have GSC in place at all, you’ll need to authenticate by verifying your site ownership with Google. There are multiple methods for this which Google details here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080?hl=en 

I strongly recommend you choose the Domain Property method if you possibly can. This is because it covers all variants of your domain and subdomain via a single verification step. Especially in B2B marketing, it’s likely that you’ll use a number of subdomains (for instance for landing pages, with a system like Unbounce, and for marketing automation with systems like Hubspot and Constant Contact). Even if you are attempting to exclude those subdomains from Google’s index, they might creep in and cause SEO problems. The Domain Property method makes sure you get data on all of them via GSC.  

Note that Google doesn’t collect search performance data for your property until you first verify it with GSC. The data isn’t retrospective. So even if you don’t plan to put any effort into SEO for a while, it’s worth getting GSC in place so that a timeline of past data can build up. 

Other search engines are available

I’ve focused on GSC which is a Google-specific tool. While Google is often the most important search engine, it’s not the only one. 

There is also a Microsoft equivalent of GSC called Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT). It offers similar functionality to GSC with some nuanced differences. Once you have GSC in place, it’s a good idea to set up BWT as well. BWT may become proportionately more important as Microsoft’s new AI developments make inroads into generative search. 

Other search engines have their own equivalent tools and it may be worth setting these up if other search engines are important to your business. For example, Baidu Webmaster Tools may be very useful to you if you do business in China. 

But that said, Google Search Console will be the most valuable single tool for most B2B marketers. So if you are pressed for time and resource, start by getting GSC in place and making use of it. The other tools can wait if need be. 

GSC habits and processes

As you’ll see from this overview, GSC is a complex tool with a lot of important functionality. To get the best of it you need to build some habits and put some processes in place. I’ll cover that in a future article. Sign up for our newsletter to be one of the first to read it, and for other B2B digital marketing news and best practice tips. 

If you need help with Google Search Console or any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch. We offer a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation.

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    The Impact of Stricter DMARC Policies on B2B Email Marketing

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    As technology evolves, so do the tactics employed by cybercriminals.

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    In an effort to protect their customers from spam and email attacks that spoof sender domains, both Google and Yahoo have announced stricter sender authentication requirements, which will come into effect later this week. These changes will have a significant impact on B2B email marketing practices, so it’s important for marketers to understand and adapt to these new policies.

    Does this affect me?

    Starting February 2024, both Google and Yahoo will impose increasingly stringent email authentication requirements. Sender domains that deliver more than 5,000 emails per day will be required to carry a DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) policy, which outlines how to handle unauthorised emails sent via your domain.

    But even those who send fewer emails will face tougher measures. Failure to meet these requirements may result in the rejection of legitimate inbound mail due to the inability to validate the sender’s authenticity, potentially impacting the effectiveness of your B2B marketing campaigns.

    What do I need to do?

    The new requirements are categorised into two sets. All senders will need to follow the first set, while high-volume senders delivering more than 5,000 messages per day will need to adhere to additional rules.

    Applicable to all senders:

    • Email Authentication: Implementing email authentication measures is necessary to prevent threat actors from sending emails under the pretence of being from your organisation. Domain spoofing is a common technique used in phishing attacks and email spam, and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) protocols play a vital role in combating these threats.
    • SPF: SPF is an email authentication protocol that prevents email spoofing by checking if incoming email comes from an IP address authorised by the domain’s administrator.
    • DKIM: DKIM allows an organisation to take responsibility for transmitting a message by signing it in a way that mailbox providers can verify. DKIM record verification is made possible through cryptographic authentication.
    • Low Spam Rates: To maintain a good sender reputation, it’s important to keep spam rates low. If recipients report your messages as spam at a rate that exceeds the new requirement of 0.3%, your messages could be blocked or sent directly to a spam folder.

    Requirements for senders of more than 5,000 messages per day:

    • SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: Companies sending to Gmail or Yahoo must have SPF and DKIM authentication methods implemented. Additionally, they must have a DMARC policy in place. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is an email authentication standard that provides domain-level protection and detects email spoofing techniques used in phishing and other email-based attacks.
    • DMARC Alignment: Messages must pass DMARC alignment, which means that the sending Envelope From domain is the same as the Header From domain, or that the DKIM domain is the same as the Header From domain.
    • One-Click Unsubscribe: For subscribed messages, it is vital to include a one-click unsubscribe option. Messages must contain List-Unsubscribe message headers and a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. Unsubscribe actions must be taken for a requesting user within two days.

    Keep in mind: These rules and best practices don’t just apply to marketing emails but also to regular business emails sent from the same domains. This includes your internal communications and any exchanges with clients, suppliers, stakeholders – literally anyone you email – so it’s important to be mindful of the main business email setup. If you neglect DMARC and that reduces deliverability of your marketing emails then that is undesirable, but not immediately business critical. However, if you make an erroneous change to your DMARC settings and that prevents delivery of normal business emails, that might have a catastrophic impact on your operations. With this in mind, it’s important to coordinate any DMARC changes with your company’s IT team or the people who look after your business email setup.

    How do I put this into practice?

    Most email marketing sending platforms – including Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and HubSpot – set their own requirements that represent their views of DMARC best practice, which they will enforce to protect the deliverability of their shared email servers. As a B2B marketer you might be tempted to take the view “I don’t send to personal email addresses / many emails so who cares if Yahoo and Gmail will bounce me”, but if you’re using someone else’s server you must comply with their policies – even if you only send 1 email a year – or risk getting your email tech account suspended.

    You can check the status of your email domains and verify the status of your DMARC compliance. dmarcian’s domain checker is a useful tool, and their library of DMARC resources is a great place to signpost your IT team.

    Why should this be a priority?

    These stricter DMARC policies aim to enhance email security and protect users from malicious attacks. As a B2B marketer, it’s necessary to ensure compliance with these policies to maintain email deliverability, build trust with your audience, and keep this element of your digital marketing mix and daily email communications in motion. Adhering to email authentication protocols, monitoring spam rates, and implementing the necessary unsubscribe options will help you navigate these changes successfully. By following these guidelines, B2B marketers can continue to leverage email marketing effectively while safeguarding their reputation and maintaining strong communications with customers.

    Remember, email authentication is an ongoing process, and continued efforts to ensure the security and authenticity of your email communications will contribute to the success of your B2B email marketing campaigns.

    Stay up to date with the latest email marketing best practices, adapt your strategy to comply with the stricter DMARC policies and stay ahead of your competitors with our B2B digital marketing newsletter

    If you’d like help implementing these changes or with any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch!

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      Why B2B Marketers Need More Than Just Cookie Warnings

      Elevating Compliance

      Cookie regulation is on the move

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      The regulatory environment for cookie consent reminds me of A23a, the world’s largest iceberg – dangerous, poorly-understood and takes a while to move, but when it finally starts to change it’s important to pay attention.

      Like A23a, the regulators – at least, the UK’s Information Commissioner – have been making moves in November 2023. Major sites have been given 30 days to adjust the way they gather users’ consent for cookies – see the BBC’s write up for more details.

      Although to date there has been relatively little enforcement action, everyone in the digital marketing world needs to be mindful that the regulatory environment around cookies is both strict and complex. And the laws have teeth – companies can be fined up to 4% of global turnover, and we’ve seen fines of more than £100 million already imposed on large tech companies.

      So we think it’s timely to remind B2B marketers to take a look at their consent management setup.

      Last orders at the “cookie bar”

      A “cookie bar” or other drop-in user interface component is the most visible part of consent management, but on its own is just not enough to ensure compliance with the regulatory environment.

      If you want to comply with the law, and to verify that you continue to comply as things change over time, then you are going to need a proper Consent Management Platform (or CMP). This is a technology that you integrate with your website (and any other web-based digital content, like specialist landing pages) and which makes the technical aspects of compliance much easier to achieve and assure.

      What does a CMP do?

      A good CMP does 4 main things:

      1. Generates the “cookie bar” user interface component that allows a user to grant or withhold consent for cookies of different types, and records that consent – ironically, most likely in a cookie! – so that a user doesn’t have to be asked again on a return visit.
      2. Provides technical control mechanisms allowing for tracking scripts and other cookie-using components to modify their behaviour based on a user’s consent choices – for example, not firing an analytics tag if a user hasn’t consented. These control mechanisms need to be able to play nicely with the rest of your tech stack. In particular, they need to work with a tag manager if you use one.
      3. Automatically documents the cookies that your site uses, with the purposes of each, to avoid a lot of error-prone manual work in maintaining a compliant cookie policy document.
      4. Automatically audits the use of cookies on your site so that you can tell whether you are compliant, and identify any steps you need to take to remedy non-compliance.
        Here’s an example of the technical architecture of a website with a CMP in place:

       

      And here’s how that picture changes if a tag management system (like Google Tag Manager) is in use:

      There’s a LOT of complexity here! And only a tiny part of that is the visible “cookie bar”.

      With all this complexity, there is a lot that can go wrong. Even the best CMP does not guarantee compliance. So it is crucial to use the auditing features of your CMP to check for compliance. And even once you have a compliant site, you should still plan to repeat this audit process regularly – it’s easy for non-compliant technologies to creep in via apparently harmless site updates.

      Choosing a CMP

      If you don’t have a CMP in place yet, it’s really time to choose one and get it in place. The regulatory iceberg is on the move and the level of legal jeopardy associated with non-compliance is rising.

      There are many good CMPs on the market. At Sharp Ahead we have good experiences with Cookiebot, which is a strong entry-level CMP that covers the basics well for relatively simple organisations. If you’re a more complex business (for instance with multiple business units) you may need to instead look for a system with more enterprise-level features. You’ll also want to look at compatibility with your current and future tech stack, in particular for support for any CMS and tag management platforms that you use.

      If you’d like help choosing, implementing or updating your CMP setup, or any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch with us!

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        Why Microsoft Clarity belongs in your B2B digital marketing tech stack

        The power of session recording for optimising B2B campaigns

        We love Microsoft Clarity. Chances are, it belongs in your B2B digital marketing tech stack. It delivers useful insights that can drive meaningful performance improvements. And it’s free to use, and easy to set up. So it’s a quick win for B2B digital marketing teams.

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        Microsoft what-ity?

        Not heard of Microsoft Clarity before? It’s a web analytics tool that uses session recording techniques. That is, it records the details of what actually happens within the user’s browser – scrolling, typing, clicks and so on. And then reports those back in aggregate form so that one can understand how a web page is being used by your actual web visitors.

        There are many similar tools in the market: Hotjar, Inspectlet and Crazy Egg are some of the better-known ones. Those are all good tools and are worth considering if you have advanced requirements. But Clarity is a great entry-level session recording tool for these reasons:

        • It’s free forever, so there’s no subscription cost to worry about;
        • It is built and supported by Microsoft, which provides comfort around the compliance and privacy aspects;
        • It is very easy to set up and use, so you can get value very quickly without a huge amount of technical knowledge.

        Why we love Clarity and session recording

        “Conventional” web analytics tools like Google Analytics can tell you things like the “engagement rate” and “average time on page” for a web page. But those measures don’t really tell you whether the page is doing its job or WHY a badly-performing page might be failing. And they don’t tell you how to improve the page. (I went into some detail about the limitations of Google Analytics for niche B2B campaigns in my recent GA4ward webinar .)

        Session recording gives a much more direct, actionable view of page performance and can point you towards specific improvements.

        Here’s an example of a Clarity report for the mobile version of one of our own landing pages:

        The colours and numbers on this “scroll heat map” show the percentage of visitors reaching each vertical position on the page. So for example only 25% of our visitors scrolled down far enough to see the “Marketing Automation” heading.

        Take a moment to look at the image. Can you see any issues?

        For me, this Clarity report has highlighted a design problem with this page. Only 41% of mobile visitors are seeing the text (in the yellow/green area of the colour coding) which says “We’re a full service digital marketing agency…”. That’s important text! Without it, the offer of a free B2B digital marketing consultation makes a lot less sense. A person might view the page without scrolling and decide not to bother taking any action, whereas if they’d seen that extra copy, they might have been persuaded to go ahead and book a consultation.

        Frustratingly this important text is only JUST below the fold. You can see from the heatmap that if it were only a line or two higher up, 75% of visitors would see it – almost twice as many!

        This Clarity report not only diagnoses the problem, but it allows us to come up with some potential solutions. In this case, we’re going to trim down the opening section so that it uses a bit less vertical space, allowing the “We’re a full service…” text to show above the fold for all users. That’s an easy change that will only take us a few minutes to implement. We’ll test that change and expect to see an improvement in conversion rates as a result.

        Imagine instead all I’d told you was that this page had a high bounce rate or a low engagement rate. You would know there was an issue, but you’d have no idea what aspect of the page’s design was to blame, and so nowhere to start for choosing potential solutions. Most likely, the page would have stayed unchanged.

        Not just scroll heat maps

        We find these scroll heat maps incredibly useful for B2B landing pages, where the user journey is often just a single page and where we have difficult tradeoffs to consider in information architecture – which content to prioritize above the fold, in particular.

        There are many other useful features in Clarity, including:

        • Recording and replay of a whole user session (across multiple pages) to look at navigation issues
        • Reports on where clicks and taps occur on the page
        • Automatic detection of “rage clicks” that suggest when a person has become frustrated with a page
        • Filters to segment traffic to look at specific pages and visits from specific campaigns

        These features are all enabled as standard, so you access to them all as soon as you have put the basic Clarity setup in place – there are no complicated setup decisions to make.

        Getting started with Clarity

        If I’ve convinced you that Clarity has a place in your tech stack, please give it a go! The setup could hardly be easier:

        1. Sign up for a free account at https://clarity.microsoft.com/
        2. Step through a tiny number of simple set-up questions
        3. Install a single JavaScript tag on your site, ideally via Google Tag Manager
        4. Wait a while for some useful data to turn up – this might need a few days or even weeks if you are running niche, low volume campaigns
        5. Check out the heatmaps and session recordings in the Clarity interface and start looking for insights!

        Microsoft have given careful thought to the GDPR / privacy / compliance aspects of the system, so while you shouldn’t take these for granted, the use of Clarity shouldn’t cause too many concerns for your company lawyers. And the technology has negligible impact on page speed for the end user. So it’s hard to think of any material downside to the use of Clarity. And the upsides can be huge – if you discover and fix a page design issue that improves conversion rates by even a few percent, that’s extra ROI on every digital campaign.

        We’ll return to some other ways to use Clarity for B2B campaign optimisation in the future. For now, if you’d like any help with Clarity or any other aspect of B2B marketing, we’d love to hear from you

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          Generative Search and the Future of B2B Search Marketing

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          Some thoughts on the direction of travel…

          It’s obviously risky to make predictions about something as radically innovative and fast-moving as Generative AI. But I’m willing to take a chance and make some observations about the likely impact on B2B search marketing, at least in general terms. And if I’m right, there are some obvious things that B2B marketers can be doing right now to help future proof themselves and their work.

          I took a look in detail at Microsoft and Google’s Generative Search tools (Bing Chat and Bard) earlier this year. I updated that research for my recent presentation at Leeds Digital Festival. Even with that short gap of a few months, there was a lot of change and improvement in both tools. Here are my observations and predictions:

          1. Generative Search is already useful for some types of B2B research, and it is getting better at a rapid pace. So generative search will at least partially replace the conventional search engine experience for B2B research in the future.


            I’m not saying that conventional search engines will disappear overnight, or that they will ever disappear completely, but we’re going to see at least some non-trivial fraction of B2B search activity switch away from conventional search engines in favour of generative search. This creates both an opportunity and a threat for search marketers.

          2. Microsoft is making a really big bet on generative search for B2B. For instance, “Bing Chat Enterprise” gets a prominent position in MS 365.



            I think it’s likely this strategy will see some success, so expect to see Bing gain some market share from Google in B2B search.

          3. B2B SEO strategies will need to change as generative search gains popularity. In particular, there will be no prizes for P4 in the new world where the generative AI is building a shortlist of the top three.

          4. Google has a problem because generative search has fewer opportunities to monetize than conventional search engines. Google will fight hard to maintain its revenues, so B2B PPC advertisers will need to pay more money for fewer impressions and fewer clicks – but in return, may get higher quality traffic from better-engaged and better-qualified search. Expect B2B PPC CPCs to rise, perhaps dramatically.

          If I’m right about these trends, here are some things that B2B search marketers can do right away to be ready for the future:

          • Try out Bing Chat and Bard with some realistic B2B research tasks, to get some first-hand experience of these new tools. And keep trying them from time to time, to track the emerging user experience.
          • Stop ignoring Bing. If Microsoft’s generative search strategy works, we can expect Bing to become a lot more important in B2B search marketing in future. At a minimum: set up Bing Webmaster Tools, so you can track use of Bing for your existing web content. And consider testing out Microsoft Search Ads for your B2B PPC.

          And two more strategic areas to think about over the next few months:

          • Re-evaluate your SEO strategy in the light of the generative search user experience. The long tail of positions 4,5, 10, 100… are going to be much less valuable when the generative AI is building a shortlist. Where can you be position 1, 2 or 3?
          • Build confidence in the ROI from your B2B PPC. And focus relentlessly on the user experience of your PPC landing pages. Because CPCs are going to rise, and only companies who are confident in their PPC investments, and who do the most to extract the most value from PPC clicks, will be able to compete.

          For more details on these ideas, check out the recording of my Leeds Digital Festival presentation:

          Have questions about generative search or any other aspect of B2B marketing? We’d love to hear from you—and we offer a free 30-minute consultation. Get in touch!

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