Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

Joshua Nite

20 Jokes Only a B2B Marketer Will Get

Joshua Nite
Joshua Nite
Online Marketing

Lately, there’s been a big push for adding humor and personality into B2B marketing. I’m all for it—not only does it play into my natural strengths, it means that B2B marketers can bring more creativity and fun into their day-to-day.

It may be hard to cast off the idea that we on the B2B side have to be buttoned-down, professional, and above all, inoffensively bland. But if our content is going to stand out in the crowd, we’ve got to get in touch with our funny bones.

With that in mind, here are 20 brand-new jokes that only a B2B marketer could love. As I said in my last funny post, there’s nothing like a good joke: And these are, believe me, nothing like a good joke.


20 Jokes Only a B2B Marketer Will Get

Does Snark = Sales? What Consumers REALLY Want from Brands on Social Media

Social media marketers, do you feel a brief pang of envy when a brand gets sassy on Twitter or Facebook? Do you wish you had the brand identity and/or corporate backing to smack down a troll, a la Wendy’s?

Me too. It’s only natural. Even in a profession as inherently creative as marketing, some of us can fly our freak flags higher than others. If you’re working in financial services, or healthcare, or any number of staid verticals, odds are you have to keep your sarcasm in check.

We may never get the sweet satisfaction of seeing a tweet full of biting wit go viral. But we have to keep perspective. Are we here to get featured on Buzzfeed, or to generate revenue? Does the snark really translate to sales?


Does Snark = Sales? What Consumers REALLY Want from Brands on Social Media

11 Content Marketing Tips to Build Your B2B Business

As the father of an 8-year-old boy, most of my disposable income is tied up in little plastic bricks. In my house, you’ll find thousands of them in bins, several elaborate sets on display, and a distressing number of the (razor-sharp) things underfoot.

I’m not complaining, really. I have as much fun building with them as he does. And as a marketer, having Lego around is a good reminder of the value of content marketing. Great content can drive marketing goals while providing something of real value to its target audience: The Lego Movie was a 90-minute commercial for Lego, but it was also entertaining and heartfelt. I laughed, I cried, I bought $100 worth of tie-in toys… everybody won.


11 Content Marketing Tips to Build Your B2B Business

Why Content Curation Is an Essential Part of Your Marketing Mix

Joshua Nite
Joshua Nite
Content Marketing

Imagine if an art museum contained every single painting created over a hundred-year period. It wouldn’t be much fun to visit, right? Hundreds of thousands of images, of wildly varying quality, without organization or context? It would be like a Google image search crossed with a garage sale.

Content curation is what turns a warehouse full of art and artifacts into a museum. A good curator sifts through the content to find pieces that are valuable for an intended audience. Their job is to direct attention to worthy content—and in doing so, make the museum a worthwhile place to visit.

Your blog readers and social media followers are drowning in content. You can be the content curator that helps direct their attention to what is most helpful, educational, or entertaining. Content curation, as part of your editorial strategy, can help make your blog a more valuable destination for your readers.


Why Content Curation Is an Essential Part of Your Marketing Mix

10 Easy Wins to Improve Your B2B Marketing Leads

Joshua Nite
Joshua Nite
B2B Marketing

And now, a brief message from Captain Obvious and his sidekick, Sidekick Boy:

The goal of marketing is to generate leads that convert to sales, thereby generating revenue.

What a thunderously, crashingly obvious statement! Captain Obvious saves the day again.

But seriously, it’s useful for marketers to occasionally contemplate this most fundamental truth about our profession. We’re not here to just raise awareness, get subscribers, or foster engagement. All of these goals should be parts of a strategy to get to the ultimate goal: lead generation.

We have more tools now than ever before to measure how our efforts translate to leads. Unfortunately, that means marketers—especially in B2B—are under more pressure than ever to improve the quantity and quality of the leads we deliver to sales.


10 Easy Wins to Improve Your B2B Marketing Leads

What’s Your Open Rate? How to Write Compelling Intros for Mobile Email Marketing

How many of your current marketing tactics are over five years old? Marketing is a fast-paced profession; even if you’re still using the same channels, odds are your strategy has changed. How about ten years old? Twenty? Thirty?

It’s surprising, then, that a marketing channel nearly forty years old is still one of the most relevant for digital marketing. Email marketing has been a steadily effective channel for decades, and advances in technology only make it easier to track, personalize, and optimize your campaigns.


What’s Your Open Rate? How to Write Compelling Intros for Mobile Email Marketing

Contagious Content Marketing: How to Give Your Content Viral Potential

For some marketers, going viral is the holy grail of content marketing. It’s easy to see why. You put out content, people organically start sharing it, and it takes off until you’ve racked up millions of views. Millions of brand impressions without a penny in paid promotion. You can’t blame marketers for chasing that particular dragon.

That said, it’s important to get one thing straight: “Going viral” is not a content marketing strategy. It’s a pleasant side effect that can happen with well-crafted content, yes. But the chance of virality is no substitute for well-researched, relevant content amplified to the most relevant audience through organic, paid, and influencer channels.

If you’re planning on going viral to get your content seen, you’re playing the lottery instead of investing in your brand’s future.


Contagious Content Marketing: How to Give Your Content Viral Potential

Don’t Skip Leg Day: 7 Content Marketing Must-Haves for Healthcare Marketers

Never skip leg day.

That is, when you’re working out, it’s important to change it up. Vary your routine and work different sets of muscles. It’s the difference between looking incredible, and looking like Mr. Incredible.

Your healthcare marketing needs just as much variety as your fitness routine does. Different types of content will appeal to different audiences, or the same audience in different ways. Stick with a single content marketing strategy—whether it’s white papers, webinars, or trade events—and you may see gains in one area. But you’re skipping leg day, and you’re going to end up top-heavy.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of variety to be had in healthcare content. With the content types below, you can build a well-rounded workout that will improve your content marketing’s overall fitness.


Don’t Skip Leg Day: 7 Content Marketing Must-Haves for Healthcare Marketers

The Big Top: A New Model for SEO-Driven Content

Joshua Nite
Joshua Nite
Content Marketing, SEO

For over a decade now, the fundamental unit of content marketing has been the blog post. Your post may be a block of text, an infographic, or a listicle about memes, but the underlying structure is the same. A regular cadence of posts to the company blog is the foundation of most content marketing strategies.

The problem is, each individual blog post has only a small window of effectiveness for SEO. A post might go viral, get hundreds of shares, and then sit in your archives for eternity. Identifying and promoting evergreen content can get more mileage out of a good post. But by nature and design, these posts aren’t built to be an enduring SEO resource. Think about it: When was the last time you clicked through on a blog post that was over a year old?


The Big Top: A New Model for SEO-Driven Content

10 Infographics to Guide Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your brain can identify and retain details of an image in 13 milliseconds. That’s less than a 20th of the time it takes to blink your eyes. So it’s no surprise that visual content is on the rise as attention spans shrink. If you could choose between a consumer spending 20 seconds with a wall of text or 20 seconds with an image, it makes sense to go with the latter.

In other words, people like looking at stuff. As such, infographics are rapidly becoming an essential component of a solid content marketing strategy. Free tools like Canva and Pixlr make it easier than ever to turn your data into compelling visual content.


10 Infographics to Guide Your Content Marketing Strategy

How to Inspire Your B2B Audience with Killer Content Marketing

B2B content marketers: It’s time to get over our inferiority complex.

Yes, the B2C folks are over there marketing cool stuff like basketball shoes and energy drinks, while we’re stuck with cloud software solutions and medical imaging machinery.

Yes, we’re marketing to business professionals on a buying committee that has to commit to million-dollar deals. Which would buy a lot of basketball shoes and energy drinks.

But that does not mean B2C has more fun. It doesn’t mean B2B is boring. It doesn’t mean we have to play it safe.

Can B2B content be as compelling, as emotional, as vibrant—let’s face it—as cool as B2C?

As we say in Minnesota, yabetcha.


How to Inspire Your B2B Audience with Killer Content Marketing

Social Media Marketing Report: Does Your Engagement Measure Up?

If I had to sum up marketing’s relationship with social media in a single nerdy meme, it’d be this:

Yes, much as Obi-Wan Kenobi was dismayed to find that Anakin had turned to the dark side, many marketers feel betrayed by social media. Each platform offered the potential to build an audience and deliver content straight to their feeds. They were supposed to be a powerful tool for organic reach. But one by one, they fell to the dark side of the algorithm.

But don’t throw away your social media channels just yet. After all, if you strike them down, they will become more powerful (sorry, that’s the last Star Wars reference). Instead, let’s have a clear-eyed assessment of what organic engagement looks like on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and see where to go from here.


Social Media Marketing Report: Does Your Engagement Measure Up?