B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Lee Odden

5 Key Traits of the Best B2B Influencers

Traits B2B Influencers

Marketers are still asking, what is B2B influencer marketing? Here’s a definition I’ve been using over the past 5 years or so:

B2B influencer marketing is activating internal and external subject matter experts with engaged networks to advocate and co-create content of mutual value that drives measurable business goals.

As the groundswell around influencer marketing rises and becomes a normal part of the B2B marketing mix, the volume of information and misinformation on the topic also increases.

One of the most popular questions people also ask about B2B influencer marketing focuses on what makes a good business influencer? By now we all know that popularity alone does not make someone influential. It’s certainly important, it’s just not the only thing.


5 Key Traits of the Best B2B Influencers

How Influence and SEO Can Drive Customer Experience

Influence and Customer Experience

We talk a lot here on Online Marketing Blog about influencer marketing and one of the benefits of incorporating the voices of influencers in brand content is not often covered: customer experience.

What’s the connection between CX and influence? A big part of customer experience is trust and many customers simply do not trust brands or advertising.

That’s where adding credible 3rd party voices to brand content comes into play. Brands that want to deliver the most relevant, engaging and actionable experience for their customers will often incorporate external experts that already have the attention of the audience that brands want to reach.

Partnering with relevant influencers to co-create content can open doors for brands trying to engage hard to reach and increasingly skeptical audiences. Those content collaborations can also help deliver an experience that is more credible and trusted than brand content alone.


How Influence and SEO Can Drive Customer Experience

25 B2B Influencer Marketing Campaign & Engagement Ideas

B2B Influencer Marketing Campaign Ideas

In the business world, you don’t have to look far to see that the number of B2B companies engaged with influencer marketing is growing. As more companies are moving beyond experimentation to conducting pilots, sequential campaigns and always on programs, there is an increasing desire to expand how brands engage with business influencers.

To help B2B marketers solve that problem, I’m going to share a swipe file of sorts of different business influencer campaigns and engagement opportunities. Implementing just a few of these could help a company with a substantial amount of influencer program activity.

Of course just because you can, doesn’t mean you should! As with all effective marketing, it’s important to match up the campaign approach with the criteria for your customers and how they want to engage with influencer/brand content.  Check out the list below and hopefully some good ideas will spark and ignite your 2020 B2B influencer marketing to new levels.


25 B2B Influencer Marketing Campaign & Engagement Ideas

Top 10 B2B Digital Marketing Trends in 2020

B2B marketing trends 2020

As a kid I was a big fan of Science Fiction with a rich imagination about the world in 2020 with flying cars, floating cities and the possibility of aliens among us that sparked numerous ideas about what’s possible.

Of course that’s not exactly how things turned out (not so sure about those aliens) but B2B marketing is definitely entering an age of possibility.

Without question, the future is bright for digital with Forrester predicting that digital marketing spending will reach $146 billion by 2023. In B2B, there are important shifts from more B2C inspired tactics to a more focused effort to engage Millennial age buyers: 45% of B2B technology buyers are now Millennials and more than 70% of millennials are included in B2B buying decisions.


Top 10 B2B Digital Marketing Trends in 2020

SEO is Not Enough: Why B2B Marketers Need to Optimize for Trust with Influence

SEO Influencer Marketing

Studies over the years have shown that the vast majority of B2B buyers start their journey with a Google search. But what good is being found if the content doesn’t create immediate feelings of trust for the searcher?

According to the 2019 Content Preferences Survey Report, 95% of B2B buyers prefer credible content from industry influencers. At the same time, few B2B influencer marketing programs integrate SEO. Most business influencer marketing programs rely almost exclusively on the social media reach of the brand and influencers for content promotion and buyer discovery.

This findability and credibility disconnect is an opportunity for marketers to optimize for a much better customer experience. By integrating SEO and Influencer Marketing marketers can attract and engage buyers more effectively.


SEO is Not Enough: Why B2B Marketers Need to Optimize for Trust with Influence

10 Years of Women Who Rock in Marketing – CMO Edition 2019

Lee Odden
Lee Odden on Dec 30th, 2019
Digital Marketing

50 Women CMOs

In recent years headlines like ‘Men twice as likely to be CMOs than women’ were pretty common.

If you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time, you know that the role of CMO is already associated with high demands and turnover.

Some might argue that women in CMO roles face an even greater challenge given their underrepresentation in marketing leadership despite the marketing industry being overwhelmingly female.

While women are underrepresented as CMOs, there’s research that shows women in CMO roles are paid better (on average) than their male peers. Even more promising is that “Nearly half the marketing leadership hires in the first six months of 2019 were women“.


10 Years of Women Who Rock in Marketing – CMO Edition 2019

50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers, Experts and Speakers in 2019

Lee Odden
Lee Odden on Oct 15th, 2019
B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing Influencers 2019

In a world saturated with marketing strategies, tactics and technology, much of what makes B2B marketing successful is understanding the realm of what’s possible. Lucky for us, MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Washington D.C. October 16-18, 2019 offers an infotaining mix of possibilities from some of the top experts in the B2B marketing industry.

But who are these experts? To help B2B marketing professionals connect with experts and influential speakers at this year’s #MPB2B event, we’ve sorted through the master list of presenters to identify 50 of the top B2B marketing social influencers.

List Methodology: Our starting point is to identify and validate credentials of all speakers from the MarketingProfs B2B Forum website. Then we imported the scrubbed info into the influencer marketing platform Traackr. Using Traackr’s algorithm for ranking, we sorted the speakers according to their respective B2B marketing social influence using reach, relevance, resonance, and audience metrics.


50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers, Experts and Speakers in 2019

B2B Marketing Fitness: 16 B2B Experts Share Top Tips for Optimized Performance #mpb2b

B2B Marketing Fitness

In a world where shiny object marketing and weight loss fads equally distract from reaching our potential, there are many parallels between improving physical health and optimizing B2B marketing effectiveness.

Just like world class athletes, top B2B marketers focus on key areas for improvement starting with goals and including the right mix of data insights, tactical best practices and ongoing performance optimization.

To help B2B marketers achieve record breaking levels of marketing fitness, we’ve tapped some of the top B2B experts from brands like MarketingProfs, LinkedIn, Content Marketing Institute, SAP Ariba, Dell Technologies, Facebook, Skyword, Arm Treasure Data, & Engagio.

B2B Marketing Experts

We also collaborated with B2B marketing influencers like Ann Handley, Pam Didner, Michele Linn, Christopher Penn, Ashley Zeckman, Keith Reynold Jennings, and Kathleen Booth for their best advice to help marketers on their fitness journey.


B2B Marketing Fitness: 16 B2B Experts Share Top Tips for Optimized Performance #mpb2b

B2B Marketing Spotlight: Neen James on How to Make Attention Pay #mpb2b

Neen James Interview

Neen James is the author of Folding Time™ and her most recent book, Attention Pays™. She is frequently named one of the top 30 Leadership Speakers by Global Guru because of her work with companies like Viacom, Comcast, Cisco, Virgin, Pfizer, BMW, and the FBI, among others.

Neen is a leadership expert who delivers high-energy keynotes that challenge audiences to leverage their focus and pay attention to what matters most at work and in life.

She’s also originally from Australia but now lives in Florida. Neen and I are both members of a secret or not so secret society of speakers and although we have never met until today, the energy she shares through her digital communications makes me feel like we’ve known each other for years.


B2B Marketing Spotlight: Neen James on How to Make Attention Pay #mpb2b

B2B Marketing Spotlight: Ty Heath on Optimizing ABM & Social Sales with LinkedIn #mpb2b

Ty Heath Interview B2B Marketing

Ty Heath is one of those people whose reputation precedes them. I had heard of Ty as a marketing industry speaker and force for change working at LinkedIn before finally meeting her in person. The IRL Ty experience did not disappoint. Each time I meet with Ty, ideas pop like popcorn – who needs coffee with such inspiration around what’s possible?

Currently Ty is Global Lead of The B2B Institute at LinkedIn where she is responsible for scaling education on LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions product globally. She has previously worked for major brands including IBM, Nestle and over 7 years at Google – plus she’s had her own consultancy.


B2B Marketing Spotlight: Ty Heath on Optimizing ABM & Social Sales with LinkedIn #mpb2b

B2B Marketing Spotlight: Jay Baer on Employee Generated Content #mpb2b

Jay Baer Interview B2B Marketing

It was back in 2010 at SXSWi that I was in the blogger lounge networking with other social media savvy content creators and thought leaders like Brian Solis, Chris Heuer, Amber Naslund, Chris Brogan and Rohit Bhargava, when I met a fellow marketer who shared a metal bottle opener as his business card.

What a brilliant idea! Package your identity around something useful to trigger conversations.

Fast forward to 2019 and Jay Baer has continued to carry that message of utility, talk triggers and clever marketing savvy to his online media empire of Convince & Convert that includes an award winning blog, a network of podcasts, professional speaking, training and consulting.


B2B Marketing Spotlight: Jay Baer on Employee Generated Content #mpb2b

B2B Marketing Spotlight: Ann Handley on Being a “Badaxe” Marketer #mpb2b

Interview Ann Handley
Twelve years ago I had the good fortune to connect with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs and she’s been a positive influence to me on what’s possible in content and B2B marketing ever since.

I’m not alone.

During that time, we’ve both grown as marketers. Well, maybe I’ve grown, but Ann has exploded. She regularly fills keynote rooms at conferences, draws long, long lines of people to get one of her best selling books signed and her company MarketingProfs has attracted over 600,000 subscribers.

Ann Handley is a marketing influencers’s influencer or more creatively, she’s an Annfluencer.

Since Ann is the very first Chief Content Officer ever, a multi-book best selling author, international keynote speaker and who I like to call, The Khaleesi of Content, we’re pretty fortunate to share the following interview. And after recent events in Toronto, you call also call her a “badaxe” marketer.


B2B Marketing Spotlight: Ann Handley on Being a “Badaxe” Marketer #mpb2b

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