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 to Accelerate Reach and Engagement of B2B Content Through Co-Creation

Nick Nelson on May 12th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

“Look, I made this!”

Sharing things we create is a human compulsion that traces back to childhood. Whether you’re showing your mom a drawing so she can pin it up on the fridge, or linking social media followers to your latest blog post, it’s natural for people of all ages to proudly broadcast their creative output.

Therein lies the power of co-creation for content amplification. “If you want your content reach to be great, ask your community to participate.”

Let’s explore this approach to content collaboration from a B2B marketing perspective.

Why Co-create Content for B2B Marketing?

There are many benefits to collaborative content creation. TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden covered several in his writeup last year on winning at B2B influence with the magic of content co-creation. Among them:

How to Accelerate Reach and Engagement of B2B Content Through Co-Creation

Trust and the Search for Answers: How Influence Optimizes SEO Performance

Lee Odden on May 3rd, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, SEO

According to the annual Global Digital Overview Report from We Are Social and Hootsuite, 81% of internet users search online for a product or service to buy and 74% have purchased online. Without question, digital engagement and commerce is the new normal and is as relevant for B2B companies as it has been for B2C.

During the pandemic, search engines have become even more important as B2B brands and buyers alike digital transform to virtual engagement for information discovery, consumption and interaction. As a result, many companies have invested more in search engine optimization in order to capture the fast-growing opportunities to be the best answer for customers at the moment of need – when actively searching for solutions.

Best practices for SEO abound on the web including this list from SEMrush:

Trust and the Search for Answers: How Influence Optimizes SEO Performance

B2B Content Marketing: 10 Tips to Level Up Your Writing Skills

Joshua Nite on Apr 27th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

What is the biggest challenge a writer faces?

Nothing.

Well, by “nothing,” I mean a blank white screen and a blinking cursor.

It mocks you with its unlimited potential. It fills you with fear that anything you put on that screen won’t be an improvement over its pristine emptiness.

We content marketers have to face this challenge nearly every day, and somehow find a way to write content that connects, engages, and persuades.

I’ve spent my entire adult life working in the content trenches — first as a comedy writer, and now as a content marketer. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up that can elevate your writing and make that blank screen less daunting.

10 Tips for B2B Marketers to Elevate Their Writing Skills

#1: READ

B2B Content Marketing: 10 Tips to Level Up Your Writing Skills

Beyond SEO: B2B Content Optimization for Trust and Customer Experience

Lee Odden on Apr 26th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

As the world’s most popular search engine, Google says its mission is to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

To be the best answer for customers that are looking for solutions, B2B marketers need to understand the opportunities to make information easy for search engines to find, index, and sort in search results.

A big part of optimizing the customer’s search experience is understanding myriad data sources and file types that can be included in search results. By understanding these opportunities, B2B marketers can inventory their digital assets and create a better, more holistic SEO strategy that realizes the benefit of inclusion and visibility in all the places and formats that matter to customers who are looking.

Beyond SEO: B2B Content Optimization for Trust and Customer Experience

5 Things B2B Content Marketers Need to Know About Working with Influencers

Lee Odden on Apr 12th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing

Given the rapid increase in influencer engagement amongst B2B brands over the past year, the opportunity and impact from working with influencers has become clear, especially with influencer content marketing according to the B2BIMReport:

Results – 63% of B2B marketers agree that marketing would have better results if it included an influencer marketing program.
Always-On Wins – 12X more marketers who run alway-on influencer marketing programs are very successful vs those running periodic campaigns.
Impact on CX – 74% of B2B marketers agree that influencer marketing improves customer and prospect experience with the brand.

1. B2B Content Influencer Marketing defined:

The practice of engaging internal and industry experts with active networks to collaborate on content in a way that drives mutual value and helps achieve measurable business goals.

5 Things B2B Content Marketers Need to Know About Working with Influencers

How B2B Brands Can Boost Confidence in Livestream Video, Podcast and Clubhouse Marketing

Lee Odden on Mar 8th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Without a doubt, the challenges and changes of 2020 have pulled business customers towards digital formats more than ever, especially with video and audio content.

Is Text Content Dead? Of course, text will always have its place in content marketing like this very blog post, but video and audio in recorded or live formats have emerged as a top preference for customer engagement. Whether livestreaming on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook or publishing podcasts and hosting rooms on breakout audio social network, Clubhouse, content marketers have a significant opportunity to create more engaging experiences to meet the evolving expectations of their customers in 2021.

How B2B Brands Can Boost Confidence in Livestream Video, Podcast and Clubhouse Marketing

5 B2C Content Marketing Techniques that B2B Marketers Should Steal (And 5 They Shouldn’t Touch)

Joshua Nite on Mar 2nd, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

B2B marketers, are we over the B2C envy yet?

We used to have a legitimate reason to be envious. B2C marketers got to be more creative, personal, emotional, and interactive. We were stuck with dry, logical appeals with no-frills presentation.

These days, though, B2B marketers can be just as dynamic and creative as our B2C counterparts. And we not only can, we should.

Yet we still hear that drumbeat: “B2B marketing needs to be more like B2C.”

Does it really?

I would argue yes, but only to a certain point. B2B is its own discipline with its own best practices. There are a few recent developments in B2C that we should borrow, but there are just as many strategies and tactics that don’t translate as well.

5 B2C Content Marketing Techniques that B2B Marketers Should Steal (And 5 They Shouldn’t Touch)

Problem Solved: Increase B2B Content Marketing Success by Conquering 4 Conundrums

Nick Nelson on Feb 23rd, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

In his recently-published book, What’s Your Problem: Become a Better B2B Marketer by Enhancing Your Problem-Solving Skills, Steve Goldhaber argues that the discipline of content marketing boils down to a simple consistent objective: solving problems.

It’s a reasonable framing. Almost every piece of marketing content is essentially aimed at solving a problem. This really gets to the fundamental intent of B2B content marketing as a practice: by helping our audience solve day-to-day problems and overcome business challenges, we hope that they’ll eventually consider using our product or service to solve a bigger problem.

But content marketers can’t focus solely on solving problems for customers. We also need to look inward and address key challenges that threaten the value and impact of our problem-solving content. The old saying about “getting your own house in order” comes to mind.

Problem Solved: Increase B2B Content Marketing Success by Conquering 4 Conundrums

6 Eye-Opening B2B Content Marketing Statistics for 2021

Nick Nelson on Feb 16th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

“You can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.” – Homer Simpson

Homer might be right, generally speaking. But I still maintain that good, accurate, timely statistics from trusted sources can serve as vital guideposts and benchmarking tools, especially when it comes to business strategy.

This certainly applies in my own corner of the business world: the fast-changing and critically important field of B2B content marketing.

Trends in content marketing tend to reflect broader truths, since we’re talking about the ways in which companies and customers interact and communicate. Because of this, I like to keep a close eye on new research and data as it surfaces, filing away nuggets that strike me as especially telling.

6 Eye-Opening B2B Content Marketing Statistics for 2021

21 New Marketing Jokes for Unprecedented Times

Joshua Nite on Feb 9th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Why write jokes about marketing?

Why write, to be specific, 101 jokes about marketing over the last five years?

I came to marketing from the comedy world, and was genuinely surprised back then at how little personality there was in B2B content. Back in 2015, people were still asking whether B2B marketing could be funny — whether it would torpedo a serious brand to come out with humorous content.

Now we’ve finally admitted that B2B buyers like to laugh just like everyone else. And we’re seeing that humor can be a powerful way to bring people together. Used the right way, it can illustrate the shared human experiences that unite us all, showing that our trials and triumphs make us more alike than we are different.

21 New Marketing Jokes for Unprecedented Times

5 Ways to Humanize Your B2B Content Marketing – And Why It Matters

Joshua Nite on Jan 27th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Never underestimate the corporate world’s ability to take something that should be intuitive, and make it weird by overthinking it.

Case in point: We used to say, “B2B doesn’t have to be boring.” Which indicates that for a long time, folks truly believed that B2B did have to be boring — that B2B buyers were a unique species of creature that operated without emotion and wanted the driest content possible.

Now we’re talking about how we need to “humanize” B2B content. And doesn’t that sound like some kind of filter you run your content through after you make it? I picture something that looks like a fax machine, where you load the content in the top, and push a big red button marked “HUMANIZE.”

5 Ways to Humanize Your B2B Content Marketing – And Why It Matters

5 Standout Traits of the Best B2B Content Marketers

Nick Nelson on Jan 24th, 2021
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

My favorite part of playing a sports video game is the “Create a Player” function. It gives me the opportunity to set realism aside and dream up the most legendary, dominant athletic specimen imaginable. On the basketball court, no real-life point guard would be able to match up against “Dimes McGee,” my customized 7-foot-10 wunderkind with 99 ratings for shooting, passing, ball-handling, speed, and defense. Talk about optimization!

What if you could “create a player” in B2B content marketing? Which attributes would you want to max out in order to fabricate the most successful practitioner possible? It’s a fun and interesting question to contemplate, in large part because the answers now are different than even a few years ago.

Which traits and characteristics define the most effective B2B content marketers in 2021?

5 Standout Traits of the Best B2B Content Marketers