Content Marketing

Content marketing is the planning, creation, promotion and measurement of content for a specific audience and intended to inspire a business outcome. With over 90% of B2B and B2C marketers engaging in content marketing, it’s more important than ever to make sure your content stands out from the crowd.

As the only blog to be named #1 content marketing blog three times by Content Marketing Institute, TopRank is dedicated to helping marketers understand the opportunities, best practices and current trends in the world of content marketing.

Browse our content marketing articles to find tips, guides, expert interviews, conference liveblogging and best practices.

How Music Can Help Make Your B2B Content Sing

Joshua Nite on Mar 27th, 2023
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

I asked ChatGPT to write the introduction for this post. Here’s what it gave me:

In the world of B2B marketing, creating engaging and effective content is crucial for attracting and retaining customers. However, the process of brainstorming ideas and putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) can sometimes feel daunting and unproductive. That’s where music comes in. Listening to music has been shown to have a multitude of benefits for the brain, including improved mood, increased focus, and enhanced creativity. In this blog post, we’ll explore how incorporating music into your writing process can help B2B marketers produce better content and connect with their audience on a deeper level.

How Music Can Help Make Your B2B Content Sing

Feeding Today’s Hunger For Better B2B Content Marketing Experiences

Art Allen on Mar 22nd, 2023
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

It’s a great time to be a B2B content marketer. The appetite for content marketing within B2B audiences is high, and content marketers say it remains by far the best tactic in terms of ROI.

But as content marketers we have to tread carefully: to paraphrase the old proverb, an opportunity is just a crisis waiting to happen. We need to make sure we are giving our readers what they want, because if we don’t, they’ll look elsewhere — and they might not come back.

And we don’t have to look far to know we can’t take our audiences for granted. The wild and frankly erratic moment happening in the world of social media has seen participation and engagement on social channels drop significantly. All except for TikTok, that is.

Feeding Today’s Hunger For Better B2B Content Marketing Experiences

What Does B2B Content Marketing Look Like in 2023?

Katelyn Drake on Mar 6th, 2023
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Sometimes marketers can spot trends as they are on the rise and sometimes we are hit over the head with them (can we say ChatGPT?).

What we’ve seen so far this year has been a mix of both: trends that have been gaining steam for a long time and quick pivots as marketers adapt. The past six months alone have given us everything from AI writing to Twitter uncertainties. Everyone loves to talk about their predictions at the start of the new year, but it’s always interesting to watch reality unfold.

Are we crystal ball-gazers? Of course not! But we’ve been watching and listening and have seen some themes emerge for B2B content marketing — trends that will likely continue beyond 2023.

What Does B2B Content Marketing Look Like in 2023?

5 Ways ChatGPT Will Change the Future of B2B Content Marketing

Harry Mackin on Feb 27th, 2023
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

If you haven’t heard the jokes yet, you will. ChatGPT is the terminator, and all of us content marketers are Sarah Connor. It’s only a matter of time before the evil machines seize our jobs out from under us and send us scrambling for one of the six journalism positions left on the planet. If, someway, somehow, we want to stay in marketing, our only desperate recourse will be to learn how keywords actually work, or worse… try PAID SEARCH.

…Ok, so the reality isn’t all that dramatic, no matter what those jokers in SEO want you to believe. There is, however, a grain of truth behind all the ribbing: the fact is, ChatGPT and advanced machine learning AI like it is going to change how content marketing works forever. In fact, it already is. It’s just not going to replace content marketing or content marketers.

5 Ways ChatGPT Will Change the Future of B2B Content Marketing

How to Create Memorable B2B Experiences for When Your Prospect Is Ready to Buy

Nick Nelson on Jan 4th, 2023
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

The concept of jogging someone’s memory seems, on its surface, like an unscientific and inscrutable undertaking.

Memories and mental associations pop up at random. Right? The smell of a bakery reminds you of grandma’s cinnamon rolls. The color of a street sign invokes your old high school colors and jovial pep rallies. A friend’s choice of words causes you to blurt out a line from a classic comedy movie.

The thing is, these moments aren’t random. The memories are physically stored in your brain, and the scenarios and experiences that took place caused them to trigger in your consciousness.

Understanding this cause-and-effect relationship holds the key to effective B2B marketing that bridges brand with demand and leads to sustainable customer pipelines.

How to Create Memorable B2B Experiences for When Your Prospect Is Ready to Buy

Elevate B2B Content: Learn From Our Top 10 Content Marketing Posts

Lane Ellis on Dec 28th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

What were the top B2B content marketing articles that published on the TopRank Marketing blog this year?

Content encompasses nearly everything we read, watch, or listen to, and as our CEO Lee Odden said years ago, it also represents a significant part of the reason the need for search technology began in the first place.

We’re proud of the continued content marketing successes our team of marketers at TopRank Marketing have achieved during another unique year, for a wide-range of major B2B clients. As 2023 draws ever closer, we wanted to take time to share our top 10 content marketing articles of the year — each filled with insights, best practices, research, examples, and a look at the future.

Elevate B2B Content: Learn From Our Top 10 Content Marketing Posts

Why Great Top-of-Funnel Content Matters for Lead Generation

Joshua Nite on Dec 19th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

When a storm is on the horizon, everyone battens down the hatches, boards up the windows, and hunkers down to wait it out.

Right now there’s a recession on the horizon for B2B businesses, and we can see the storm preparation starting. Budgets are getting leaner, new requests met with more scrutiny, and marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove the effectiveness of their work.

This is when many marketing departments focus on lead gen, throwing everything they’ve got at the bottom of the funnel.

It’s a common response. But it’s a mistake.

Here’s why top-of-funnel marketing matters for lead generation, even if — especially if — the economic future is uncertain.

Why Great Top-of-Funnel Content Matters for Lead Generation

Planning, Creation & Promotion: 5 Top Tactics For Creating Inspired B2B Content

Lane Ellis on Nov 16th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing

5 top tactics to create inspired B2B content group of marketers at table image

How can marketers create the kind of inspired B2B content and customer experiences that will overcome today’s challenges and surpass tomorrow’s higher expectations?

With the right planning, careful creation, and strategic promotion, there isn’t any need for a secret formula for successful B2B content, as our chief executive and co-founder Lee Odden recently shared with top B2B marketers at the 2022 Content Marketing Conference.

2023 is set to see more content than ever come into existence, as the 4.6 billion pieces of content that are produced every day in 2022 expands, through ever-increasing output from human hands as well as artificial intelligence-augmented or generated content.

With so much competition for limited attention, how can B2B marketers build content that stands out?

Planning, Creation & Promotion: 5 Top Tactics For Creating Inspired B2B Content

How to Create More Authentic Influencer-Driven Content to Attract Qualified Prospects

Joshua Nite on Nov 14th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

When you think about who is influential in your industry, you likely think about professional influencers first. These are the consultants, public speakers and authors, the ones who give keynote speeches and have huge followings on social media.

These folks are absolutely essential as part of your influencer mix. Their reach, knowledge and professionalism are incredibly valuable.

However, you need more than just these folks for authentic and useful content. To create the kind of experience that earns the attention of qualified prospects, you need to expand your definition of what an influencer is — and what influencer content should look like.

Here’s how to optimize your influencer marketing to create authentic experiences that attract your most valuable audience.

How to Create More Authentic Influencer-Driven Content to Attract Qualified Prospects

Why Relationship Marketing Is Essential To B2B Lead Generation

Nick Nelson on Nov 7th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Conversion Optimization

One of the oldest, and creepiest, adages about the value of content marketing is that you can’t ask someone to marry you on the first date.

Weird as it might feel, there’s a good reason this metaphor has held sway. A marriage is a serious and high-stakes commitment, and nobody wants to enter one without truly feeling like they know and trust their future partner.

In the business realm, purchase influencers and decision makers are under huge pressure to get it right. It’s not enough to understand the product, its price, or its features. Buyers want to believe in the brand and the people behind it.

Increasingly, significant business purchases need to be buoyed by a strong relationship. (The non-romantic type, to be clear.) Smart and strategic content marketing is how those relationships are built.

Why Relationship Marketing Is Essential To B2B Lead Generation

10 Creative Horror Movies to Inspire Your B2B Marketing

Joshua Nite on Oct 31st, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

We’ve been saying for years that B2B marketing should be emotional, exciting, entertaining and engaging — in short, creative. Great marketing not only wins those industry awards, it gets better results.

We’ve proven as much with the work our agency puts out. But it’s nice to get some third-party vindication. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute just published a report called “Cashing in on Creativity.” They analyzed over 1500 B2B ads and found two huge takeaways:

Only 5% of ads have highly creative messaging
This top 5% can drive a 10-20x bigger market share growth

In other words, we don’t have to measure creativity in moonbeams and rainbows. We can measure in dollars and cents.

10 Creative Horror Movies to Inspire Your B2B Marketing

B2B Content Marketing: Making Small Budgets Do Big Things

Nick Nelson on Oct 24th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

The latest B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Report found that 67% respondents are being asked to do more with the same resources compared to a year ago.

Many teams will keep being pressed to work under constraints in the coming year as economic uncertainty affects planning and budgets. In the latest CMO Survey, released in September, results showed that marketers “generally expect the growth of their marketing spending to slow or be flat in the coming year,” with waning optimism around the economic outlook likely a central factor.

(Image source)

The most reliable way to drive marketing results is to (smartly) invest more. This can lead to more ambitious campaigns and more robust promotion, among other things. But when a big budget isn’t available, B2B marketers can still do big things.

B2B Content Marketing: Making Small Budgets Do Big Things