B2B Marketing Blog

B2B Marketers on the Move: Celebrating May B2B Industry Movers & New Opportunities

Lane Ellis on May 25th, 2022
B2B Marketing

Today’s B2B marketing landscape consists of swift changes, often accompanied by growth that happens so fast that it can be difficult to fully appreciate.

For over two decades, TopRank Marketing has been honored to help a wide array of the world’s top B2B marketers and major brands elevate and go beyond merely being competitive, to standing out from the crowd with a variety of creative, award-winning successes. In this spirit, we like to regularly take time to congratulate and honor business marketers, thought leaders, industry influencers as well as our own talented team members who have recently seen career advancement.

B2B Marketers on the Move: Celebrating May B2B Industry Movers & New Opportunities

Episodic Expansion: How to Optimize B2B Experiences by Expanding Your Podcast to Full-On Video

Joshua Nite on May 23rd, 2022
B2B Marketing

Podcasts have been having their 15 minutes of fame for nearly a decade now. For marketers, we’ve seen podcasts go from off the radar, to a wide open new channel, to an established, even crowded, medium.

It’s true that it’s harder to build a subscriber base now than it was at the beginning of the B2B podcast boom. That doesn’t mean podcasts aren’t a valuable channel, however — just that it takes strategy and time to realize their full potential.

No, the proliferation of podcasts means that you should be repurposing your podcast content for other channels. This content can help drive traffic to the podcast, raise awareness of your brand’s thought leadership, and even become superstar content in its own right.

Episodic Expansion: How to Optimize B2B Experiences by Expanding Your Podcast to Full-On Video

B2B Marketing News: B2B Data Onboarding Insight, Google’s New Ad Formats, Marketing Campaign Performance Study, & LinkedIn’s Employer Branding Guide

Lane Ellis on May 20th, 2022
Online Marketing News

Google Shares Sneak Peek At New Advertising Features
Google has offered a look inside several of its new forthcoming Google Ads features, including responsive display and mobile ads that animate static imagery and better white space formatting, highlighted in a showcase of examples from firms that have tested the new tools, Google recently announed. Search Engine Journal

Twitter is testing a new ‘Liked by Author’ label for tweets
Twitter has tested the ability for tweet replies on the platform that have been liked by the post’s author to show a red heart liked-by-author badge and similar text designation, with the aim of making it easier to spot top tweet replies in lengthy reply chains, Twitter recently announced. TechCrunch

B2B Marketing News: B2B Data Onboarding Insight, Google’s New Ad Formats, Marketing Campaign Performance Study, & LinkedIn’s Employer Branding Guide

5 Timely Ways B2B Brands Can Conquer Metaverse Marketing

Lane Ellis on May 18th, 2022
B2B Marketing

The metaverse — a term coined in a 1992 novel — isn’t done cooking yet, but with a world that needs to eat right now and chefs that need to cook, what do B2B brands need to know to get ready?

Just 18 percent of brand marketing and analytics executives said that they understood the metaverse and how it will affect their brand, according to recently-released survey data.

Despite limited general understanding of just what the metaverse is and may become, the areas that it will encompass are vast, running the gamut from digital currency and assets and natural language processing to device independence and marketplace commerce, as Gartner recently outlined.

5 Timely Ways B2B Brands Can Conquer Metaverse Marketing

Mental Health in Marketing: Top Wellness Tips for B2B Marketers

Sam Kirchoff on May 16th, 2022
B2B Marketing

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. At TopRank Marketing, we care about mental health.

We care about it because we care about people: their words, their stories, their experiences. Those things matter, and in order to protect them, we have to protect the well-being of the individuals they come from.

Did you know that in the United States alone, there are over 50 million people currently experiencing some form of mental illness? You might even be one of them. If that’s the case, thank you. Thank you for getting up this morning. Thank you for reading our words. Thank you for being here.

Mental Health in Marketing: Top Wellness Tips for B2B Marketers

B2B Marketing News: Always-On Surges In B2B, Employee Influencers Build Trust, LinkedIn’s New Captions, & Video Distribution Study

Lane Ellis on May 13th, 2022
Online Marketing News

B2B Marketing and Sales Leaders Focus on Pipeline Growth
48.8 percent of B2B sales and marketing professionals have said that an expanded pipeline was their top priority in 2022, followed by building and staffing teams at 22.4 percent, and expanding addressable market with 8.3 percent, according to newly-released survey data. MarketingCharts

B2B Brands Deploy ‘Always-on’ Marketing Strategy to Keep Up with Buyers [Dow Jones / WSJ Report]
When it comes to the B2B content types that senior executives prefer when choosing new technology product or service providers, 31 percent chose case studies, the same percentage chose videos, while 28 percent said they preferred thought leadership and research — one of numerous findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in recently-released B2B trust survey data. WSJ Intelligence/B2B International

B2B Marketing News: Always-On Surges In B2B, Employee Influencers Build Trust, LinkedIn’s New Captions, & Video Distribution Study

Triple Word Score: 10 Spellbinding B2B Marketing Takeaways from Scrabble

Lane Ellis on May 11th, 2022
B2B Marketing

What strategic lessons can today’s B2B marketers gain from taking a new look at the original classic word game Scrabble?

With word games more popular than ever thanks to the runaway success of Wordle and its offshoots, it’s the perfect time to reach into the bag of letters and uncover some of the important marketing insights we can learn from the venerable game of Scrabble.

Let’s hop right in and start exploring 10 marketing takeaways that we can learn from Scrabble and begin applying to our own efforts.

1 — Prioritize Your Marketing Bonus Squares

The top B2B marketers and Scrabble aficionados are both keenly aware of the sweet spots — those force multipliers that can take a standard effort and double or triple its cumulative effectiveness.

Triple Word Score: 10 Spellbinding B2B Marketing Takeaways from Scrabble

The Business Case for Awesome B2B Content

Joshua Nite on May 9th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Have you seen Everything Everywhere All at Once? It’s a must-watch for everyone, but especially B2B marketers.

The movie tells a simple story about healing generational trauma. But it does so using multiverse travel, kung fu fighting, a truckload of googly eyes, and much more.

Simply put, it’s awesome. You have to admire the bravery of both the filmmakers and the financiers, who read this script and went, “Yup, that seems reasonable.”

Marketers could use a healthy dose of that kind of courage. Awesome content doesn’t overwhelm the story you’re telling the audience — in fact, it makes your message more likely to stick.

The Business Case for Awesome B2B Content

B2B Marketing News: Shifting B2B Buying Behavior, Rising Hybrid B2B Sales, MarTech Landscape Report, & LinkedIn’s Record Engagement

Lane Ellis on May 6th, 2022
Online Marketing News

B2B marketers adjust to shifts in buyer behavior
83 percent of B2B marketing leaders have said that brand purpose was important to new buyers, while meeting the challenges of changing buying behaviors was seen as the top priority in the next year — two of several findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in newly-released Forrester survey data. SmartBrief

The Video Content B2B Buyers Find Most Helpful
58 percent of B2B purchase decision makers pointed to learning about a product or service as the most helpful benefit of viewing video content, with 40 percent using videos to solve existing problems, and 36 percent using video to better understand a problem, according to recently-released B2B buyer video content study data. MarketingProfs

B2B Marketing News: Shifting B2B Buying Behavior, Rising Hybrid B2B Sales, MarTech Landscape Report, & LinkedIn’s Record Engagement

Go All-In On Opportunity: What The Great Reshuffle Means For B2B Marketers

Lane Ellis on May 4th, 2022
B2B Marketing

What does the great reshuffle — the world’s pandemic-driven workforce shift — mean for B2B marketers, and how can you go all-in on its opportunities while meeting its challenges head on?

Nature more often than not seems to have an innate ability to accompany undeniable calamity with something positive, and indeed with the pandemic we’ve also gotten the great reshuffle — which may at first not seem like something entirely good, until we take a closer look.

Just as the creation of the web forced upheaval on the pre-web Internet, with each challenge came nearly boundless opportunity, and in some ways the great reshuffle is yet another offshoot of the changes the web itself has given to the world.

Go All-In On Opportunity: What The Great Reshuffle Means For B2B Marketers

How the Most Successful B2B Marketers Work with Influencer Marketing Agencies

Lee Odden on May 2nd, 2022
B2B Marketing, Influencer Marketing

As B2B companies look to create more authentic and meaningful experiences for digital first customers, content marketing co-created with industry and internal influencers has enabled many organizations to deliver information that is more empathetic, useful and inspiring.

Growth B2B brands are seeing the influence piece of the puzzle as an opportunity to better attract and engage increasingly distracted and distrustful customers. Many of those ambitious B2B marketers are looking for ways to accelerate their use of influence both internally and externally.

Since our first paid B2B influencer engagement in 2012 with a Fortune 500 brand that is still our client today, we’ve seen an acceleration in B2B marketers seeking expertise, technology and best practices for engaging influencers. In 2022 those solutions come in many forms ranging from independent B2B influencer marketing consultants, to software platforms that also sell services to specialist agencies with teams dedicated to the strategy, tactics, technology, measurement and scale of B2B influencer marketing programs.

How the Most Successful B2B Marketers Work with Influencer Marketing Agencies

B2B Marketing News: Social Becoming Top B2B Media, B2B Content & Lead Tactics Studies, & Marketers Concerned Over Twitter Takeover

Lane Ellis on Apr 29th, 2022
Online Marketing News

B2B Mixology: Paid Search Is Top Channel And TV Use Is Growing, Email Near Bottom
56 percent of B2B executives have said that paid search is key among their marketing mix, with 44 percent singling out video and display advertisements as a top component, while just 16 percent chose email — three of several findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in newly-released survey data . MediaPost

B2B Buyers Say Research & Data Are Key Factors in Content Shareability, Memorability
Just over half of B2B buyers consider content that uses research data to be a key factor in making it memorable and more apt to lead to contacting a brand for further information, while storytelling that resonates with B2B buyers was also a top component of effective content, according to recently-released survey data. MarketingCharts

B2B Marketing News: Social Becoming Top B2B Media, B2B Content & Lead Tactics Studies, & Marketers Concerned Over Twitter Takeover