B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

5 Key Insights from TrackMaven’s 2017 Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report

In today’s changing digital landscape, marketers know that having good data and analytics are vital for understanding the impact of their digital marketing efforts. After all, in order to drive performance and prove ROI, you have to be able to measure what’s working and what’s not so you can address issues and capitalize on opportunities.

While digging into your brand’s own web and marketing analytics is an absolute must, understanding how you measure up to your industry peers can bring more insight and context—something TrackMaven’s 2017 Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report aims to help with.

To create the report, TrackMaven used its digital marketing analytics platform to analyze a year’s worth of data—including social media performance, blog performance, public relations performance, and website health metrics—from over 700 businesses. The end product not only highlights trends, but also provides benchmarks and analysis of the most effective marketing channels across 13 industries and 39 sub-sectors.


5 Key Insights from TrackMaven’s 2017 Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report

Showing Some Love: 7 Sweet B2C Valentine’s Day Marketing Examples

Caitlin Burgess
Caitlin Burgess
B2C Marketing, Digital Marketing

While Valentine’s Day has been traditionally known as the day couples honor their love and affection for one another, it’s turned into the fourth-largest shopping day of the year with attached and unattached consumers making holiday purchases for the special people in their lives.

As a result, smart B2C brands and marketers are upping their Valentine’s Day marketing game by getting creative to tap into new audiences, boost awareness and drive sales.

With that said and in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, below we share some clever, sweet and endearing Valentine’s Day marketing examples from B2C brands.

#1 – M&M’s

Chocolate is arguably one of the top go-to Valentine’s Day gift items. But with probably thousands of options to choose from, candy makers face some stiff competition.


Showing Some Love: 7 Sweet B2C Valentine’s Day Marketing Examples

New Benchmarks from Marketo: How Does Your Organization Measure Up?

Digital Marketing Benchmark ReportIf digital marketing were a competitive sport, it would be freestyle swimming. We’re all in our respective lanes, each with different audiences to reach. We all have our own unique set of strategies, and our own budget limitations to work with. We’re all trying to get to our finish line as fast as we can. And we all could benefit from the occasional glance sideways to see what everyone else is doing.

This half-competitive, half-isolated feeling is why marketing benchmarks are so valuable. Benchmarks help us determine if our strategies, investments and results are comparable to our peers. They can reinforce what we’re already doing and provide a road map for the future.

This year, there’s a new player in the benchmark reporting game: The brilliant minds at Marketo. They just released their 2017 Marketing Benchmark Report for North America, and it’s a doozy.


New Benchmarks from Marketo: How Does Your Organization Measure Up?

Is Your Content Marketing Designed for the New Customer Journey?

Thanks to the rise of the internet, the explosion of social media and the development of mobile technologies to feed these two innovations, the customer buying journey has become much more self-directed. According to a Forrester, 74% of business buyers say they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase.

As a result, content marketing has emerged as an incredibly effective way to arm consumers with the information they seek and need, increase brand awareness, enhance engagement, and ultimately inspire action and conversions.

But content marketing isn’t about creating and sharing as much content as possible. It’s about creating quality content that allows you to be the best answer, whenever and wherever your audience is searching. And understanding today’s customer journey will be paramount to your content marketing success. Below is a great illustration from Forrester on the many intricacies that journey can entail. As you can see, it’s not an easy, neat sales funnel these days.


Is Your Content Marketing Designed for the New Customer Journey?

20 Talented Brand Marketers to Follow on LinkedIn

Marketers are always looking for new ways to inform, engage and inspire action from our target audiences, often looking to both established and well-known brands for motivation and creativity.

Thankfully, behind many of our favorite brands there are bright and talented marketing experts whom we can learn from and be inspired by.

With that said, below are some gifted brand marketers you should be checking out, connecting with or following on LinkedIn.

1. Jason Miller

Group Manager of Global Content and Social Media Marketing, LinkedIn

As the leader of global content and social media marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Jason Miller is dedicated to helping marketers understand how to take advantage of digital advertising and content marketing opportunities on the professional social network.


20 Talented Brand Marketers to Follow on LinkedIn

10 Kick-Ass Cyber Monday & Holiday Deals for Digital Marketers

10-deals-for-digital-marketers

Digital marketers everywhere—especially our friends in the B2C marketing world—have spent the last weeks and months perfecting their marketing strategies for the holiday season. Now that the most wonderful time of the year is officially here, we want to make sure our fellow marketers don’t miss out on deals that can help them perfect their craft.

So, in the spirit of the holiday season, we’ve put together this handy list of Cyber Monday and holiday deals that any marketer would absolutely love to scoop up. From books and conference tickets to free tool trials, you’ll find a variety of great deals.

Digital Advertising

#1- $100 Bing Advertising Credit

Bing Ads Cyber Monday Deal


10 Kick-Ass Cyber Monday & Holiday Deals for Digital Marketers

Get the Marketing Budget You Need in 2 Steps

Leila De La Fuente
Leila De La Fuente
B2B Marketing, B2C Marketing

marketing-budget-you-need

It’s November 10th and my Christmas lights are up. To be honest, I hung them November 1st, but don’t tell anyone.

The end of the fiscal year is fast approaching, and for us marketers, it’s more than holiday parties and eggnog; that means it’s time to stake our claim of 2017 budgets.

In the review of any digital marketing budget proposal, executives are going to look for the answer to these two questions:

  1. What did you do drive business this year?
  2. How do you plan to drive business next year?

Your budget proposal presentation should hand these answers on a shiny silver platter to those responsible for approval. I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of marketing professionals as they prepare for this big moment, and there are two important elements that prove to be most effective at earning budgets year after year: proving your ROI, and mapping potential to dollars.


Get the Marketing Budget You Need in 2 Steps

Content Marketing: 10 Daily Habits to Create More Powerful Content

more-powerful-content

Marketing is a game of inches. We tweak a headline to get fifty more clicks. Add visual interest for ten more subscriptions. Change the button on the landing page to get five more conversions. All the little gains add up over time to generate real results.

Writing more effective copy is a game of inches, too. You don’t write Twilight one week and Moby Dick the next. Instead, every day you can work to be a little bit better than the day before.

The tricky part is if you’re not steadily improving your writing, you’re actively moving backward. There’s no such thing as maintaining the status quo—it’s self-improvement or bust.

The following ten daily habits can help you make steady incremental improvement. Try as many as you can for 28 days, and be amazed at how those daily inches add up.


Content Marketing: 10 Daily Habits to Create More Powerful Content

7 Spookily Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns for Halloween

Ashley Zeckman
Ashley Zeckman
B2B Marketing, B2C Marketing

spookily-successful-digital-marketing-campaigns

Q: What’s the ratio of a pumpkin’s circumference to its diameter?
A: Pumpkin Pi

All jokes aside, Halloween presents a huge sales opportunity for B2C (and even some B2B) brands. In fact, Halloween is only second to Christmas as the most commercially successful holiday. And a recent survey found that Halloween spending is estimated to reach $8.4 billion dollars this year, the highest in survey history.

Depending on your line of business, this presents an enormous opportunity for marketing departments to help generate a ton of cash over a short amount of time. However, the bar is incredibly high and competition is stiff, which means that consumers are looking for clever, creative and memorable marketing campaigns. The seven spooktacular campaigns below made their mark this year.   


7 Spookily Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns for Halloween

20 Jokes Only a Marketer Could Love

jokes-only-a-marketer-could-love

It’s well past time for marketers to get serious about comedy. The best way to connect with an audience is by authentically appealing to them on a human level. Adding humor to marketing is one of the most powerful ways to make that appeal.

Telling a joke does more than provide a moment’s diversion. When people share in a joke, it creates a sense of belonging. If you’ve ever sat around trading in-jokes with your friends, you know what I mean.

Humor can be a way to draw a circle around a group and pull them in—to say, “If you understand this joke, we’re in the same tribe. You get me and I get you.” That’s a powerful message to send to your potential customers. And it’s a good way to get the less relevant folks to opt out, too.


20 Jokes Only a Marketer Could Love

Join The TopRank Marketing Book Club

Ashley Zeckman
Ashley Zeckman
B2B Marketing, B2C Marketing

TopRank-Marketing-Book-Club

“No two persons ever read the same book.” – Edmund Wilson

Each person that picks up a book has a different experience when they consume the information. Our team at TopRank Marketing is filled with individuals that thirst for knowledge. That is why we are so happy to announce the launch of the TopRank Marketing Book Club.

Not only is this a great opportunity for our team to consume information, bond and discuss our views on the material, but we would like to invite you to participate as well. Want to learn what it is all about?

How TopRank Marketing Book Club Works

The first rule of book club: we want everyone to talk about book club. This club wasn’t just created for our internal team; our goal is to have it made up of other people around the globe with similar interests that want to join our discussion.


Join The TopRank Marketing Book Club

Holiday Marketing Must Haves for Online Retailers [Checklist]

holiday-marketing-musthaves

The air is crisp and the leaves are falling which means that the holidays are just around the corner. And for many online retailers, the holiday season is the busiest (and most stressful) time of year. Proper planning can be the difference between a poor or pleasant experience for your customers, gift recipients and staff.

In 2014, overall online sales during the holiday season increased by 13.9% from the previous year and that number is only expected to increase in 2015. With holiday sales accounting for approximately a quarter of all online purchases during the year, it is essential that your business is prepared to take advantage of the opportunity and meet market demand.


Holiday Marketing Must Haves for Online Retailers [Checklist]