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Happy 25th Anniversary to Markitects

Let’s start at the beginning…

You could say that marketing for technology products officially started in 1984 (when I was just starting my career in marketing) with the mind-blowing Apple Computer Super Bowl ad—clearly a watershed moment for Apple, if not the entire industry. The meteoric rise of Apple, Microsoft, IBM and other technology leaders of the day incited a revolution—and the eventual birth of an entire industry—one comprised of hardware, software, distribution, service, and R&D companies of all types, started by individuals and financed by the venture capital community. Who wouldn’t want to be part of these exciting times?

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Thursday Thoughts: Relationship Marketing

What is Relationship Marketing?

Relationship marketing is a strategy designed to build and foster long-term relationships with customers. The goal is to establish customer loyalty for repeat sales; however, these customers also tend to act as good referral sources.

Think of brands you use and purchase from repeatedly. You have a relationship with these companies as they continue reaching out and selling to you. In comparison, there are companies you may buy from only once and never hear from again; you may not even remember their names.

In B2B marketing, we use traditional marketing in certain instances, but relationship marketing in others. We work with many companies that utilize us for the strategy and execution of their traditional marketing, but also have us oversee and aid in relationship marketing, alongside their sales team.

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Effectively Predict Maintenance with Proconex Valve Diagnostic Services

The Pros at Proconex can provide a bridge from corrective or time-based preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance on your critical valves—before a problem occurs. With Proconex diagnostic services, you can:

  • Perform control valve diagnostics on ANY air-operated valve—regardless of manufacturer or model.
  • Coordinate field testing, data interpretation, and corrective action planning with our team of experts.
  • Maximize uptime and schedule downtime more effectively, while right sizing your maintenance costs by focusing on critical repairs.
  • Diagnose control valve issues while in-service with optional Performance Diagnostics tiered equipment.
  • Present diagnostic results in an easy-to-read report with Green/Yellow/Red indicators.

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NCCPAP Releases Its February IRS NPL Update

NCCPAP Immediate Past President, Steve Mankowski, CPA, recently attended the February 2019 IRS NPL meeting. Highlights of the meeting include: updates for this filing season, PTIN, TRIO, and more.

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Fairman Group’s Next Nest: Volume 3

The Next Nest series features a fictitious family—the Carlsons. In the last issue, James, age 60, an executive with a publicly-held company headquartered in the Philadelphia suburbs and Jeanne, age 58, owner of a small public relations firm, received news that their first grandchild was on the way and sought ways to financially help their children and future grandchild. Now they find themselves in the dead of winter, wondering when they will be financially secure enough to spend their winters someplace warm. Have they saved enough money for James to consider stepping down from his high-paying, high-stress position?

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Thursday Thoughts: Backlinking

To wrap up the month of February (and hopefully winter) here is our recap of our favorite Wednesday activity, SEMrushChat! This week’s discussion focused on the importance of trustworthy links in your SEO strategy.

First, let’s define what this means. Search engines’ ranking algorithms focus on a variety of different metrics to determine authoritativeness, relevancy, and trustworthiness of a website. One of these metrics is backlinking.

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Thursday Thoughts: PPC Audience Targeting

Every Wednesday, Markitects participates in SEMrush’s Twitter Chat. This week’s discussion focused on how to take advantage of PPC audience targeting.

Here are our top takeaways:

1) Some key audiences to include for general campaigns are:

  • Audiences consisting of previous visitors to your website, especially those from high buyer intent pages like a RFQ page
  • Audiences based on demographic reports (i.e. from Google Ads & Analytics)
  • Audiences consisting of individuals searching for specific terms that align with your campaigns’ keywords and ads

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Fairman Group Explains What Each Financial Title Actually Means

It might make sense to seek advice from a financial professional, so you start your research. Unfortunately, this results in a myriad of confusing titles: Financial Consultant, Financial Advisor, Advanced Retirement Specialist, Wealth Manager, Retirement Counselor, Financial Planner and other variations on the theme. It all seems like a name game.

Since investments are an integral part to your overall plan, a good approach may be to sort prospective advisors by the legal standard of care to which they are held. Those who are acting as a broker or sales agent are held to a “product suitability” standard. This group typically consists of stock brokers and life insurance agents, whose primary function is that of a salesperson; investment advice is merely incidental to their role.

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HCC Partner’s 11 Steps to Help You Hire Top Talent in 2019

Today the job market belongs to the ‘candidate’. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or the type of job you are recruiting for; finding, attracting and retaining top talent is a real issue for everyone. At HCC Partners, they believe that with the strength of the economy, low unemployment rate, and number of available job openings, the challenge of recruiting top talent will continue to be top of mind through the remainder of 2019.

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