I have spent over a decade in marketing. In that time I have built countless workflows, managed over a thousand inbound campaigns, and run SEO campaigns for large organizations. Before becoming a fractional CMO I had the privilege of working with top CMOs in the industry, and my journey spans all marketing channels — I learned each of them from the ground up rather than from a slide deck.
I am not a big-time writer. I do not want to sell you a product, and I am not interested in using my technical marketing knowledge to build websites I am not excited about. I wanted to do what I am very best at. My goal is not to share opinions about topics that have been discussed and written about millions of times before. Every article on this blog is written for executives who need a functional understanding of the marketing and sales departments they manage. The value of gulaydin.com is that it tells you how I actually accomplished something and what it delivered — not what the playbooks say should work.
Where the experience comes from
I have a quantitative background and extensive experience in transformative marketing strategies across competitive B2B sectors: cybersecurity, managed IT services, home automation, and cloud security. Since 2012 I have driven growth, led demand generation, and built data-driven marketing strategies for a portfolio that includes Xcitium, Comodo, and Ezlo.
Today I am Vice President of Marketing at Corporate Technologies, a managed IT services provider serving small businesses from 21 locations across 18 states. I work with the engineering and service delivery teams on how the company explains its work to the businesses it supports — which is a harder problem than it sounds, and a good deal of what I have learned about technical marketing in the last few years came out of it. My writing there is collected on my author page.
I have built and trained teams in China, India, Ukraine, and the United States, and I visited every one of those offices in person. That matters more than it sounds. Managing a marketing function across four time zones teaches you very quickly which processes survive contact with reality and which ones only work when you are standing in the room.
What I actually do
Conversion rate optimization
I have tested, improvised, and developed hypotheses in CRO for over a decade, focused on cybersecurity, IT management, and home automation. My team and I have run more than 2,000 unique tests. The most important lesson from all of them is the least surprising one: always rely on data. I wrote up the method, the failures included, in Mastering CRO: Insights from a Decade of Experience.
SEO
I led comprehensive SEO strategies in sectors where the competition has real budgets, and established an SEO Lab to keep testing rather than guessing. The specifics live in how I approach keyword research, what internal linking actually does for a site, and how I optimize prompts for AI-assisted content. On the content side, using AI for website content covers where it helps and where it quietly damages you.
Performance marketing and measurement
I use quantitative methods and AI to make marketing decisions more precise. The two pieces that matter most to an executive are how to measure marketing ROI and how to determine a test budget for paid marketing — the second is the question I get asked most and the one most departments answer badly.
Email, database, and outbound
I have managed teams running rigorous A/B testing and data-driven workflows on email, and built marketing databases from scratch for outbound lead and appointment generation. Building your own lead generation machine is the long version.
Go-to-market and organizational design
I structure marketing departments to make data-driven decisions and to survive complexity rather than be paralysed by it. If you are building a GTM motion, start with how to develop a go-to-market strategy, then read Engineer Your GTM Like a CFO, which is the argument I make most often to boards. Value proposition is the piece that comes before both.
Cybersecurity marketing specifically
Most of my career has been spent selling security to people who are professionally sceptical. How to build a cybersecurity content strategy that actually generates pipeline is the closest thing I have to a complete method, and CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne is the kind of comparison work that content has to be good enough to survive.
Community and owned media
I grew a LinkedIn group to over 220,000 followers by combining quantitative growth strategy with actual community interaction — not automation. The generalized version is in how to build an owned media channel.
AI in the marketing function
I champion integrating AI where it removes real work and resist it where it just produces more content nobody reads. The first AI project most companies skip is the one I would start with, followed by adapting your marketing department to AI and how AI empowers innovators in marketing.
Work outside the core sectors
Not everything I have done is B2B security. I have applied the same measurement-first approach to promoting a real estate business, starting an ecommerce business, and redesigning a website without losing what already worked. The channels change; the discipline does not.
Who this blog is for
I started this blog to bridge the gap between CMOs and their marketing departments — to help executives understand and optimize the functions they are accountable for. If you run a marketing organization, or you report to someone who does, the articles here are meant to save you the two years it took me to learn each thing the expensive way.
If you are weighing whether you need one, what a fractional CMO is and why you would hire one is the honest answer, including when you should not.
Elsewhere
I write and post regularly on LinkedIn, which is the best place to reach me, and more briefly on X. My work for Corporate Technologies is on my author page there. You can also contact me directly.