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 Optimize Original B2B Research Content For Credibility and Impact

Lee Odden on Aug 17th, 2020
Content Marketing

For many in the B2B marketing world, original research provides an effective way to build thought leadership and drive content for owned and earned media.

Unfortunately, many research reports from B2B companies are dry, uninspired and focus solely on pontifications from the brand point of view. Such unremarkable content isn’t helping customers, especially if they never see it due to information overload or they don’t trust it.

“With more information, options and people involved in a buying process, buyers are paralyzed when trying to move forward.” Gartner

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

More often than not, B2B research reports have marketing objectives focused on building brand thought leadership, attracting new names for nurturing and to serve as a resource for sales. Since most B2B brands don’t have the credibility and distribution to reach their marketing goals on their own with such reports, they rely on advertising and PR to attract attention.

How to Optimize Original B2B Research Content For Credibility and Impact

A Day in the Life of a Content Marketer During the Pandemic: Challenges and Tips

Nick Nelson on Aug 13th, 2020
Content Marketing

I’ll never forget the night that everything really changed.

It was my wife’s birthday, March 11th. I took her out for dinner at a lovely restaurant in South Minneapolis, and for a couple of blissful hours, over exotic cocktails and delicious food, we unplugged from the loudening noise of a worrisome outside world.

After we walked out of that restaurant, there would be no more tuning out.

Stepping out from the darkly lit building, I looked down at my phone, and tried to process the sudden rush of stunning headlines:

WHO declares global pandemic. NBA suspends season. Trump addresses the nation. Tom Hanks has coronavirus. Tom Hanks!

A Day in the Life of a Content Marketer During the Pandemic: Challenges and Tips

In Search of Trust: How Authentic Content Drives Customer Experience

Lee Odden on Aug 10th, 2020
Content Marketing

The experience customers have through marketing content can be one of the most important differentiators for brands today.

And yet 58% of B2B buyers don’t not believe claims made by the vendors they most recently bought from (TrustRadius).

It’s hard to create a great experience if customers don’t trust brand communications.

Trust is the gateway to influence perceptions, behaviors and actions and brands that want to succeed in the uncertain environment of today’s digital world need to double down on building trust with their customers. But how?

Today’s increasingly digital buyers have high expectations of the companies they do business with: buyers want personalized and relevant information, they want a consistent experience across channels, they want confidence in the brand as a company that cares about privacy, their customers and the community.

In Search of Trust: How Authentic Content Drives Customer Experience

6 New Rules for B2B Marketing in the COVID-19 Era

Joshua Nite on Aug 4th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing

I was supposed to go to an Alanis Morissette concert this July. When the pandemic hit hard in March, I wasn’t ready to cancel my ticket yet. Surely, surely we would have it sorted in time for an outdoor concert four months from now. I held out hope. Then, in June, she rescheduled for July, 2021. And now I’m wondering if that will be enough time.

Isn’t it ironic?

Don’t you think?

All of which to say: This pandemic has been around for longer than we thought it would, and is looking to linger far longer than we would like. What seemed like a brief, surreal interlude to be gotten through has now become a reality to live with, at least for the time being.

6 New Rules for B2B Marketing in the COVID-19 Era

5 Unheralded SEO Tools for Content Marketers

Lane Ellis on Jul 29th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, SEO

Are you using the latest search engine optimization (SEO) tools to help with your content marketing efforts?

Don’t worry, as we’ve got you covered with a look at some of the most helpful SEO tools to help you refine and augment your content marketing plans.

Sorting through lists of the seemingly endless number of available SEO tools can be frustrating as well as a hit and miss proposition, however we’ve put this collection together so that you can skip the search and get right into SEO tools you can use today to help you create amazing content marketing stories.

Let’s jump in with our collection of fresh SEO tools to boost your content marketing experiences.

1 — Google Lighthouse

5 Unheralded SEO Tools for Content Marketers

Why Content Marketing is More Important Than Ever for B2B Brands

Nick Nelson on Jun 30th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

In his recently published eBook, Corona Marketing, Joe Pulizzi recounts how he and his wife launched the website Content Marketing Institute in 2007 at the exact time as a devastating financial crisis was beginning to unfold in the United States.

“At the time, we believed things couldn’t have been bleaker,” Pulizzi writes. “Looking back though, this was absolutely the best time for my wife and I to start a business.”

Why is that? Because their commitment to providing useful, helpful and relevant content – even at a time where it was difficult to drive direct revenue with that content – paid major dividends as the market recovered.

Why Content Marketing is More Important Than Ever for B2B Brands

Manufacturing Runs: 9 Summer Content Marketing Tips Drawn from the Diamond

Nick Nelson on Jun 23rd, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Baseball and content marketing are two of my greatest passions. When I think about it, there are some intrinsic similarities between the two that aren’t hard to see.

Much like content marketing, baseball is rhythmic and methodical by design. Sure, there are the flashy home runs (and it helps when your favorite team *ahem* set the all-time record a year ago), but at its core, baseball is about strategy, patience, and sequencing: Accept the inevitability of failure and learn from it. Take good at-bats, call the right plays, string together base runners, manufacture runs.

via GIPHY

Sadly there is no baseball season right now, but if there was, it’d be inching toward “the dog days of summer” – a term given to those stretches in July and August where the relentless heat and daily grind start to wear on ball players as they battle their way through a marathon 162-game schedule.

Manufacturing Runs: 9 Summer Content Marketing Tips Drawn from the Diamond

How To Level Up Marketing Content From B2B Influencers

Joshua Nite on Jun 18th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing

Why do you even need a content person for influencer marketing?

After all, the influencers are providing the content. You just have to collect their pearls of wisdom, make them look pretty in a PDF, and you’re good to go, right?

I’ll confess, on my first influencer marketing project, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. Over the last few years, however, I’ve come to understand the role that content marketers can play in shaping influencer content.

It’s the content lead’s job to shape the conversation with the influencer. We have to ask the right questions, and provide a structure and framework to elicit thoughtful, detailed responses.

How To Level Up Marketing Content From B2B Influencers

20 Marketing Jokes for Marketers Working from Home

Joshua Nite on May 28th, 2020
B2B Marketing, B2C Marketing, Content Marketing

I’m not here to lie to you: Sheltering in place is getting pretty old.

I do count my blessings, of course. My family and I are healthy. My wife and I both can work from home; our kids are pretty great; we actually enjoy each others’ company.

Still. There are only so many loaves of bread you can bake, puzzles you can solve, board games you can play before the ennui sets in.

If you’re like me, you could use a laugh right now. And I need to exercise my comedy muscles before they atrophy.

And in a world where people are still writing articles called, “Should You Include Humor in Your B2B Content,” we need constant reminders that people like jokes. People like to laugh. Laughter brings you closer to your audience and creates a connection.

20 Marketing Jokes for Marketers Working from Home

Hyperspace: 5 Surprising Marketing Lessons From ’80s Arcade Games

Lane Ellis on May 27th, 2020
Content Marketing

What can marketers in 2020 learn from the low-resolution stand-up video arcade games of the 1980s?

Here are five surprisingly-modern marketing lessons that we can learn from and implement today, with roots that come directly from vintage ‘80s arcade games.

Slap that fire button and let’s warp ahead and take a nostalgic look back at a simpler time in both video gaming and marketing, and then hyperspace ahead to today’s vastly different landscape.

1 — Defender: Fire & Forget for a Constant Content Cadence

Photo by Author

Williams Electronics’ Defender is my all-time favorite stand-up video arcade game, an insidiously difficult side-scrolling spaceship-protecting-the-world shooting match juggernaut from 1981 programmed by early video game legend Eugene Jarvis.

Hyperspace: 5 Surprising Marketing Lessons From ’80s Arcade Games

Why SEO & Influence are Critical to Pandemic Era Content Marketing

Lee Odden on May 25th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, SEO

On this Memorial Day of 2020, it is important we remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice serving our country – not only in the military, but those on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you to first responders, law enforcement, healthcare workers and all that support them!

The health and economic crisis we are all facing now compounds the many other uncertainties of our time including trust and expectations in the brands we buy from. The COVID-19 pandemic and our society’s reaction to it have changed the reality we have lived with into something different and very digital.

Why SEO & Influence are Critical to Pandemic Era Content Marketing

How to Hit a Marketing Home Run with Experiential Content

Nick Nelson on May 7th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

While their importance pales in comparison to many other things taken away by our society’s ongoing lockdown, I do find myself missing sports. Going without them during a difficult time causes me to appreciate the comfortable routine and reliable distraction they provide all the more.

Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m longing for baseball especially — everything from strikeouts and singles to slides and steals. But there is no part of the game I miss more than home runs.

Home runs are among the most satisfying individual achievements in sports. When a batter goes deep, he takes care of everything, going from home plate to home plate and putting a run — or more — on the board single-handedly. It is the literal representation of “covering all your bases.”

How to Hit a Marketing Home Run with Experiential Content