B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

April Henderson on Data-Driven, Empathetic B2B Content #CMWorld

Forrester’s April Henderson started her Content Marketing World 2019 session with a classic cautionary tale:

Johann Rall was fighting for the British at the turning point of the Revolutionary War. The night before the Battle of Trenton, he was out celebrating at the home of a local Loyalist merchant. That merchant had seen General Washington amassing his forces and knew the attack was coming.

So what did the merchant do? He created relevant content! He wrote Rall a note and slipped it across the table. Rall nodded, put the note in his pocket… and continued his evening of revelry. The British were caught unawares, and the tide of the war began to turn. That lack of content engagement might be how America won the war.


April Henderson on Data-Driven, Empathetic B2B Content #CMWorld

Lee Odden Shares His Secret to Content Marketing Fitness #CMWorld

Let’s face it: Too many of us are yo-yo marketers.

We deploy a campaign the way someone might approach a fad diet: With nothing but our initial enthusiasm to keep it going.

And like a fad dieter, we get results… for a little while. Then the campaign runs out of steam and we’re back at square one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if those initial successes could last? If we could go from “fad diet” marketing to lean, mean marketing machines?

At his Content Marketing World 2019 session, TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden laid out a blueprint for how to do just that.

Not only is Lee a champion of always-on marketing that gets sustainable results over time, he’s also achieved a dramatic physical transformation in the past year. He’s lost 65 pounds and just finished his first half-marathon.


Lee Odden Shares His Secret to Content Marketing Fitness #CMWorld

Carlos Abler Details How Content Marketing Can Contribute to the Greater Good #CMWorld

Can content marketing make the world a better place?

Let’s dial that in tighter: Can brands, businesses, make the world a better place?

And can they do it while making money at the same time?

According to content marketing leader Carlos Abler, not only can brands provide social value, they must – and, not for nothing, it’s in their best business interest to do so.

In his session at Content Marketing World 2019, Carlos shared a blueprint brands can follow to find the convergence of business value and social value.

How Can We Make Content More Valuable to Customers?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Content needs to be customer-centric, it needs to have value, and it needs to be relevant to the customer’s needs. Most content marketers could recite a similar mantra in their sleep. So if we all know better, why does content consistently miss the mark?


Carlos Abler Details How Content Marketing Can Contribute to the Greater Good #CMWorld

Ghosted: What’s a Content Marketer to Do When Your Audience Goes Silent?

How Content Marketers Can Deal with Audience Abandonment

The all-encompassing digital takeover has completely changed the way we communicate and interact as people. Naturally, in our professional realm we tend to tie this back to marketing, but the reality applies to just about every aspect of human relations. 

This includes dating and courtship, of course. The terms of engagement (so to speak) have transformed wildly. Whereas romance still can and does sprout through chance meetings, or encounters at the bar, or mutual college friend circles, it’s increasingly common for these fated connections to take place through online matchmaking sites and dating apps. (I would know — I’m marrying an amazing gal this weekend who I originally met on such an app!)


Ghosted: What’s a Content Marketer to Do When Your Audience Goes Silent?

16 Can’t-Miss Acts at the Greatest Content Marketing Show on Earth: #CMWorld 2019

Can't Miss Acts at CMWorld 2019

Come one! Come all! Come several! Come few! 

Step right up! Don’t be shy! You there in the back, with the funny hat, step right up! You over there with the earrings and the weird mustache, come on in! There’s room for everyone under the Big Top, and it’s time for the Greatest Content Marketing Show on Earth!

That’s right, Content Marketing World is mere days away. There is no more exciting place for a content marketer to be next week than Cleveland, OH(sure, it would be great if it were in Hawaii next year, but Cleveland is not without its charms). There’s a lot to look forward to: The opening night festivities! The keynotes! The sessions! The potential to see amazing marketing geniuses do bad karaoke!


16 Can’t-Miss Acts at the Greatest Content Marketing Show on Earth: #CMWorld 2019

5 B2B Brands Delivering Great Customer Experiences

Lane Ellis
Lane Ellis
B2B Marketing

Colorfully painted wooden planks image.

Today’s B2B customers expect more B2C-like experiences, and here are five brands delivering great customer experiences that go far beyond the tired tradition of boring-to-boring.

Research from Gartner has shown that 89 percent of firms compete primarily on customer experience. Not all companies may be taking this to heart, however, as according to additional research some 60 percent of marketers fail to take into account consumer expectations, despite 95 percent seeing increasing expectations from customers.

Making memorable customer experiences a priority can help build successful campaigns and make for delighted customers, and with further recent research showing that just 14 percent of B2B survey respondents view customer experience and support as a top priority, there may be no better time to work on delivering great customer experiences.


5 B2B Brands Delivering Great Customer Experiences

The Great Marketing Get-Together

Lane Ellis
Lane Ellis
B2B Marketing

State fair season brings tasty new foods-on-a-stick and a grandstand full of marketing lessons for those willing to walk the midway.

State fair season brings tasty new foods-on-a-stick and a grandstand full of marketing lessons for those willing to walk the midway.

The Minnesota State Fair, known affectionately as the Great Minnesota Get-Together, begins tomorrow, and we’ll explore some of the wild new food concoctions on offer this year, and dig in to a bucket-of-cookies-size list of surprising things it can teach us about marketing.

The fair, which began all the way back in 1859, is one of the largest in the U.S., now often topping the 2 million attendee mark each 12-day season and offering fair-goers 322 acres of summer fun in the form of amusement rides, live music from at least four stages, art, animals, parades and more.


The Great Marketing Get-Together

B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange Wrapup #B2BSMX

B2BSMX header

What do you get when three B2B thought leader brands come together to form a combined event featuring top B2B marketing experts? B2BSMX

This week in Boston, a new event launched called the B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange combining the best of three of the best resources in B2B: FlipMyFunnel from Terminus, RevTalks from the Pedowitz Group and Demand Gen Summit from Demand Gen Report. Together with another track focused on Labs and Case Studies, they powered over 50 sessions for about 1,000 registered attendees.

Lee Odden Nick Nelson
As a media sponsor, TopRank Marketing was invited to shine a light on some of the talent at the event though speaker interviews and liveblogging presentations. Nick Nelson and I attended numerous sessions each day allowing us to accelerate our B2B sales and marketing knowledge as well as our connections with thought leaders, practitioners and vendors in the industry.


B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange Wrapup #B2BSMX

B2B Marketing Spotlight: Shonodeep Modak, CMO NA at Schneider Electric #B2BSMX

Shonodeep Modak

Shonodeep Modak is CMO of North America at Schneider Electric. He has more than 18 years of commercial experience across energy, oil & gas, electrical distribution, automation and aftermarket services where he has architected and led nimble, data-driven global teams to propel portfolio expansion and deliver double-digit returns.

At the recent B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange conference, Shonodeep presented on how to restructure your marketing department around the customer vs. around your products or services: Opening Up The Panel Door…Rewiring How Your Marketing Team Works.

During the first day of the conference, Shonodeep and I met to discuss his presentation, his experiences at companies like GE and ExxonMobil, what’s broken with today’s marketing departments and where to marketing leaders can start to fix their own organizational structure.


B2B Marketing Spotlight: Shonodeep Modak, CMO NA at Schneider Electric #B2BSMX

The 10 Commandments of Modern B2B Marketing – Dave Gerhardt, Drift #B2BSMX

Drift is widely regarded as a pioneer in modern marketing, and their Vice President of Marketing Dave Gerhardt has been instrumental in establishing this reputation. 

Taking on his first role as a marketing leader, he helped grow the chatbot platform from a startup with no market recognition to a $10 million company in less than two years. He also co-authored the book Conversational Marketing along with Drift’s founder David Cancel. 

While his company has experienced powerful growth and attained status as a leading innovator, the journey hasn’t always been smooth and seamless. Dave says there are a number of things he wishes he would’ve known before getting started, and he shared them on Tuesday at B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange in Boston, dubbing them his “10 Commandments for Modern Marketing” (with a stated emphasis on the word modern).


The 10 Commandments of Modern B2B Marketing – Dave Gerhardt, Drift #B2BSMX

CMO Maria Pergolino Charts the Path to Creating an Industry Category with Strategic Marketing #B2BSMX

Maria Pergolino at B2BSMX

What is the ultimate goal for any business or marketing unit? 

There are many valid answers to this question. But I think the subject of Maria Pergolino’s REVTalk on Tuesday morning at B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange (B2BSMX) in Boston offers a worthy aspiration for just about any organization: creating a category. 

Brands that are universally held in high esteem and pointed to as shining examples of marketing mastery – such as Uber, Salesforce, and Starbucks – often share this distinction. Their names ring synonymous with what they do. 

As a seasoned marketing executive who’s overseen this outcome at a number of different companies over the years, Maria has developed acute expertise on category creation, and offered us a glimpse of her process.


CMO Maria Pergolino Charts the Path to Creating an Industry Category with Strategic Marketing #B2BSMX