Elizabeth Williams

Marketing Lessons from Lockdown: What My 3-year-old Has Taught Me

Elizabeth Williams on Aug 25th, 2020
B2B Marketing

“Our children can be our greatest teachers if we are humble enough to receive their lessons.” Wise words from author Bryant McGill.

These last few months of lockdown, while challenging, have brought forth some very inspiring lessons from my almost 3 year old that I hope can inspire you: His fearless attitude, his openness to learning, his inquisitive nature and his no-yielding passion for everything he does.

Be Fearless

Unless we’re talking about cooked carrots, my little guy is about as fearless as they come. Whether he’s full-speed sprint-vaulting (without success) over two storage bins, or sticking his entire face into the pool water, only to come up coughing, nothing deters him from the next obstacle.

Marketing Lessons from Lockdown: What My 3-year-old Has Taught Me

Pantheon’s Roland Smart Details the Secret to Agile Marketing Transformation #DSMPLS

Elizabeth Williams on Aug 16th, 2019
Digital Marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, MIMA Summit

Run a Google search for “agile marketing” today and you’ll see 144 million results. It’s an insanely hot topic, which has steadily grown more applicable and desired from it’s “Scrum” beginnings.

Why are marketers today so obsessed with agility? Roland Smart, podcaster, author of “The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage” and Vice President of Marketing for Pantheon*, shared his insight on the subject at Digital Summit Minneapolis this week.

For starters, the average marketer’s tenure is just 18 months. After all, we need to get results—and we need them fast. Second, while our strategies and tactics have been artfully crafted with insight and data, once we put everything into the wild, we need to be able to act fast to monitor, measure, and optimize performance—while also navigating budget and “waterfall” resourcing limitations and challenges. And finally, today’s marketers are often managing a growing tech stack, making an agile approach a match made in heaven.

Pantheon’s Roland Smart Details the Secret to Agile Marketing Transformation #DSMPLS

Joseph Lindberg of Land O’Lakes Outlines How to Build a Marketing Dashboarding Discipline #DSMPLS

Elizabeth Williams on Aug 15th, 2019
Digital Marketing, Digital Summit, Marketing PR Conferences

Marketing measurement. It’s absolutely essential, but perhaps one of the hardest marketing disciplines to master. Why? As Joseph Lindberg, Digital Communications Editor for Land O’Lakes, Inc., told a room of marketers at Digital Summit Minneapolis this week:

“Measurement is a loaded term. It means many things to many people.”

It’s true. Measurement can be thought of in terms of KPIs. Measurement can be raw data or data insights. Measurement can be your stack of tools.

And during his session, titled Building a Marketing Dashboarding Discipline: It’s Not About the Tool (Until It Is), Joseph challenged marketers to flip our thinking on how we measure.

Below we outline his recommended process and advice for how you can level up your measurement game, and map tactics to business objectives so you can prove value up the ladder.

Joseph Lindberg of Land O’Lakes Outlines How to Build a Marketing Dashboarding Discipline #DSMPLS

What Can Marketers Learn From the Children In Our Lives? Plenty

Elizabeth Williams on Jul 25th, 2019
B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing

In my experience, most marketers fancy themselves as lifelong learners, taking pride in innovating their work and skill set to maximize their impact. We keep tabs on emerging trends, tactics, and tools. We follow industry leaders for their insight. We consult our internal teams and external partners for advice.

But there may be one specialty group we don’t look to for inspiration enough: The kids in our lives.

As a parent of two adorable monsters who are growing up way to fast, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how far they’ve come. Of course, I’ve realized that I’ve come far too, as both a parent and a marketer. And I’d wager that most of us have kids in our lives who have the potential to teach and remind us of some important things that can make us better humans and better at what we do.

What Can Marketers Learn From the Children In Our Lives? Plenty

Setting Your Sights on 2020: How to Brew a Forward-Thinking Marketing Strategy

Elizabeth Williams on Jul 18th, 2019
B2B Marketing

The high-pressure marketing budget and strategy planning season seems to kick-off earlier each year. It’s as if your boss is asking you to magically construct the perfect strategic and tactical mix at the right budget for 2020, without having enough of 2019 under your belt to predict the best approach. After all, you don’t know what the future holds, right?

As they say, hindsight is 20/20. So, why not leverage that to get some 20/20 foresight?

Like you, we at TopRank Marketing don’t have any magical crystal balls or employees with psychic powers. We don’t use witchcraft to brew mystical marketing love potions. And we certainly don’t engage in any sorcery with enchanted mirrors, but we’ve honed our craft over nearly 20 years and we do find plenty of value in reflecting.

Setting Your Sights on 2020: How to Brew a Forward-Thinking Marketing Strategy

4 Tips for an Out-Of-This-World B2B Marketing Agency Partnership

Elizabeth Williams
B2B Marketing, Integrated Marketing

Who was the first person to set foot on the moon? Of course the answer is Neil Armstrong — who else?

But, actually, the question really is “who else?” In order for Armstrong to walk the moon, there were innumerable individuals who contributed something large or small to get him there. His mom and dad, Mission Control, fellow astronaut and crew member Buzz Aldrin, a nation of taxpayers — and the list goes on.

What’s the point? Simply put, there’s no doubt that Armstrong was an amazing pioneer, but he didn’t get to the moon — or back home — alone. It took a team.

Being a marketing pioneer in the B2B technology space is no different. You need to have skills and ambition of your own, but you also need an amazing team by your side.

4 Tips for an Out-Of-This-World B2B Marketing Agency Partnership

3 Mouth-Watering Content Marketing Case Studies That Bring Home the Bacon

Elizabeth Williams
Online Marketing

If you’ve ever been pregnant, lived with a woman who’s pregnant or even just been around a pregnant woman, you can guess it is not smart to lie to a woman who’s pregnant about food.

Well that’s how I felt today. 6 months along and in arrives a marketing email with the subject line: “[Infographic] Good Marketing starts with good snacks.” Yes, I understand, I’m not literally going to get any food out of this, but I expect to see some mouth-watering graphics upon opening the email. Nope.

Instead I found food references in the copy like “Are you giving your prospects nourishing snacks or asking them to bite off more than they can chew?” and “Make your content highly snackable”. Still, this email teased me enough to click on the CTA to the infographic: Surely within it food will reside!

3 Mouth-Watering Content Marketing Case Studies That Bring Home the Bacon

Lee Odden Shares How to Supercharge Your Content with Influencer Marketing

Elizabeth Williams
Digital Summit, Influencer Marketing

Sitting across the aisle from a renowned digital marketing strategist and speaker on a daily basis has tendency to allow you to take for granted the knowledge stockpile that is just a few feet away. Tuesday was a good reminder of that.

When Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, promised the crowd at the 2017 Digital Summit Minneapolis 45 minutes of content in his 25-minute closing keynote, he was not joking.

Eloquently arranged into this 25-minute time frame, Odden opened eyes of marketers to the still-in-it’s-infancy-field of influencer marketing, and how influence can literally supercharge marketing programs. But, don’t take the summary from just me, his desk neighbor. Audience members let me wrangle them on the way into post-conference happy hour to share their favorite parts of the presentation too.

Lee Odden Shares How to Supercharge Your Content with Influencer Marketing

Elevate your Marketing Career with One Simple Word: Strategy

Elizabeth Williams
Digital Marketing, Digital Summit

Not everyone can say that within 4 years, they went from being an individual contributor to the VP of a billion dollar company. McLean Donnelly can.

How did he do it? As someone with a design background, you might expect the answer was jaw-dropping designs. But that is only part of the magic. It is the well-paired designs with outstanding business cases that propelled Donnelly’s career forward. And, his ability to grow the talent he manages, the product he sells and the bottomline.

So, how did he get there? In his Digital Marketing Summit presentation on Tuesday, Donnelly shared what he learned through his MBA, adding “business IQ” to his repertoire of design skills. Here are the three areas he suggested you can grow in – with or without an MBA.

Elevate your Marketing Career with One Simple Word: Strategy

Cows to Content: 6 Marketing Agency Culture Lessons I Learned on the Farm

Elizabeth Williams
Digital Marketing

[Editor’s Note: Please join me in welcoming another new author to TopRankBlog.com, Elizabeth Williams. Elizabeth is an Account Manager that has been with the TopRank Marketing team for almost a year and spends her time managing the needs of our awesome clients! Welcome Elizabeth!]

From my first day of preschool, everything I’ve encountered in life, I’ve compared to my experiences growing up on a dairy farm. So, when I had the opportunity to create a post for the TopRank Marketing blog, I immediately knew the theme: dairy farming.

What does dairy farming have to do with marketing agency culture? You’re about to find out.

Cows to Content: 6 Marketing Agency Culture Lessons I Learned on the Farm