B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Riding The Razor’s Edge of AI in B2B Marketing

Lane Ellis
Lane Ellis on Oct 26th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing

Riding the razor’s edge in AI in B2B marketing mountain climber image

Where can artificial intelligence (AI) play a genuinely helpful role in B2B marketing efforts, and when does it go too far and become a creative liability for marketers?

AI has increasingly crept into our daily lives, and B2B marketers are facing these and other new questions, confronted with keeping a healthy balance between some of the efficiency and time-saving gains AI can deliver, and running the risk of implementing too much AI and not enough of the human touch.

AI has continued its inevitable refinements from the first online customer service help chatbots to today’s software that ostensibly writes many forms of text, to the ever-more-impressive AI-generated digital images of programs such as DALL-E.


Riding The Razor’s Edge of AI in B2B Marketing

Happy Holidays from the Team at TopRank Marketing

2020 has been a uniquely challenging year for marketers the world over, yet the difficulties have served to bring us together in new ways, and as we enter the holiday season all of us at TopRank Marketing bring you special wishes for health and happiness.

For all of us this has been one of the most challenging years in history, and as each of us works hard to meet the hurdles that 2020 has thrown in our path, we can take pride in what we’ve accomplished despite the difficulties that none of us could have envisioned a year ago.

The trust our new and long-time clients have continued to place in us has allowed us to reach record levels of client retention, and for this we are very thankful.


Happy Holidays from the Team at TopRank Marketing

17+ Top Virtual Marketing Conferences for Summer 2020 & Beyond

Lane Ellis
Lane Ellis on Jul 22nd, 2020
B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing

Smiling Woman at Computer Image

Virtual marketing conferences offer a wealth of benefits to marketers looking to learn and increase brand awareness, and in the current crisis they represent the only event opportunities for marketers.

How do you go about finding events that match your business and B2B marketing needs, however?

With in-person marketing events not likely until well into 2021, more virtual events than ever taking place, making it harder than ever to find the ones that can best help build your business, expand your communication opportunities, and offer the most relevant new industry education from top marketing industry experts.

MarTech Today Chart

Marketers are getting more out of virtual events, too — with 75 percent in a recent survey saying they were satisfied with their virtual event experiences. Online events also hold their own unique advantages.


17+ Top Virtual Marketing Conferences for Summer 2020 & Beyond

Top 10 B2B Digital Marketing Trends in 2020

B2B marketing trends 2020

As a kid I was a big fan of Science Fiction with a rich imagination about the world in 2020 with flying cars, floating cities and the possibility of aliens among us that sparked numerous ideas about what’s possible.

Of course that’s not exactly how things turned out (not so sure about those aliens) but B2B marketing is definitely entering an age of possibility.

Without question, the future is bright for digital with Forrester predicting that digital marketing spending will reach $146 billion by 2023. In B2B, there are important shifts from more B2C inspired tactics to a more focused effort to engage Millennial age buyers: 45% of B2B technology buyers are now Millennials and more than 70% of millennials are included in B2B buying decisions.


Top 10 B2B Digital Marketing Trends in 2020

10 Years of Women Who Rock in Marketing – CMO Edition 2019

50 Women CMOs

In recent years headlines like ‘Men twice as likely to be CMOs than women’ were pretty common.

If you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time, you know that the role of CMO is already associated with high demands and turnover.

Some might argue that women in CMO roles face an even greater challenge given their underrepresentation in marketing leadership despite the marketing industry being overwhelmingly female.

While women are underrepresented as CMOs, there’s research that shows women in CMO roles are paid better (on average) than their male peers. Even more promising is that “Nearly half the marketing leadership hires in the first six months of 2019 were women“.


10 Years of Women Who Rock in Marketing – CMO Edition 2019

Grateful and Glad: What the TopRank Marketing Team is Most Thankful For

What the TopRank Marketing Team is Most Thankful For in 2019

For centuries, American families and friends have come together on Thanksgiving Day to feast and give thanks for all of life’s beautiful gifts.

But I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again—Thanksgiving isn’t limited to one day in the TopRank Marketing realm. Every day, I see attitudes of gratitude.

To date in 2019, our team has typed the words “thank you” in Slack communications a whopping 7,737 times, and “thanks” 4,113 times.

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As is TopRank Marketing tradition, I’ve asked team members to share what they’re most thankful for in work and in life. Here’s what many had to say.

What the TopRank Marketing Team is Most Thankful for in 2019

Lee Odden

CEO


Grateful and Glad: What the TopRank Marketing Team is Most Thankful For

Why California’s New Data Privacy Law Matters to Marketers Everywhere

There’s No Time Like the Present to Lock Down Your Data Privacy Practices

Be compliant or be complacent. These are the two options facing brands and marketers today, as data privacy laws continue to increasingly take hold.

For those paying attention, it’s been clear for some time that Europe’s GDPR regulations were only the beginning of a global effort to formalize and enforce protections for internet users and their personal data. But with California’s landmark privacy legislation, CCPA, set to become enforced in 2020, data privacy is no longer a distant foreign concern for American businesses, if it ever was.

Be compliant or be complacent. These are the two options facing brands and marketers today, as data privacy laws continue to increasingly take hold. @NickNelsonMN #dataprivacy #digitalmarketing Click To Tweet

What is the CCPA?

At a high level, the purpose of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is quite similar to that of GDPR: It’s about giving people transparency into, and control over, how their personal data is used by companies. 


Why California’s New Data Privacy Law Matters to Marketers Everywhere

Trick or Treat: The Spellbinding Marketing Sweets the TopRank Team Can’t Resist

Caitlin Burgess
Caitlin Burgess
B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing

Spellbinding Marketing Sweets the TopRank Team Can’t Resist

Admit it. On Halloween night, the fierce competitor within you sprinted from home to home to claim as much sugary bounty as your pillowcase could carry. But the loyalist and purist in you was on the hunt for a specific candy treat. A treat that put all the rest to shame; a treat that always hit the sweet spot.

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For me, that coveted treat was: the Almond Joy. Sweetened coconut. Crunchy almonds. Smooth milk chocolate. Devilishly delicious, but ghoulishly elusive amongst a sea of KitKat- and Snickers-purchasing households. (Here’s to you, organic reach on Facebook.)

As marketers, we all have our favorites. From tactical techniques that sweeten our marketing mix to the integration of marketing elements to tantalize our audience’s taste buds, the TopRank Marketing team weighs in on both fun- and king-size marketing treats they can’t resist.


Trick or Treat: The Spellbinding Marketing Sweets the TopRank Team Can’t Resist

Q3 Wrap-Up: What’s Changed For B2B Marketers & What’s Ahead in 2020?

QQ Digital Marketing Recap Standing Businesspeople Image

We’ve now reached the end of the third quarter of 2019, one filled with many significant B2B marketing changes and several surprising twists and turns that will combine to affect how the industry moves forward as we enter Q4 and push forward to 2020.

Q3 saw numerous exciting shifts in new directions, and a few seemingly slight changes in course that are nonetheless poised to make big impacts in 2020.

We’re always working to bring you the most relevant B2B marketing news, including over 180 weekly industry news videos, hosted by Tiffani Allen, Joshua Nite and others here on our blog and on our TopRank Marketing YouTube channel.

Each quarter we reflect on what’s happened in digital marketing and look ahead with key trends. Let’s examine both the challenges and opportunities the quarter’s top B2B marketing news has brought our industry.


Q3 Wrap-Up: What’s Changed For B2B Marketers & What’s Ahead in 2020?

Tales from the Trenches: How to Transition from Marketing Doer to Marketing Leader

Alexis Hall
Alexis Hall
Digital Marketing

I was roughly five years into my marketing career when I began managing my first direct report. It was the biggest challenge I faced yet. I was now being evaluated on the actions, successes, and failures of another person—and I also knew it was my responsibility to give them the support and tools they needed to have more successes than failures.

I felt as if I didn’t know how to influence, motivate, or persuade another person. But I was given the opportunity to try and to learn. I had a great group of bosses, mentors, and peers giving me advice, listening to my concerns or wins, and allowing me to make mistakes.


Tales from the Trenches: How to Transition from Marketing Doer to Marketing Leader

Trust Factors: Why Your Brand Should Take a Stand with Its Marketing Strategy

Earlier this year, Salesforce made waves by announcing a policy that compelled retailers to either stop selling military-style rifles and certain accessories, or stop using its popular e-commerce software. 

For a massive brand like this to take such an emphatic stand on a divisive social issue would’ve been unthinkable not so long ago. But in today’s world at large, and consequently in the business and marketing environments, it’s becoming more common. This owes to a variety of factors, ranging from generational changes among consumers to a growing need to differentiate. 

But, like so many other trends and strategies we see emerging in digital marketing, I think it mostly comes back to one overarching thing: the trust factor.


Trust Factors: Why Your Brand Should Take a Stand with Its Marketing Strategy

Pantheon’s Roland Smart Details the Secret to Agile Marketing Transformation #DSMPLS

Roland Smart at Digital Summit Minneapolis

Run a Google search for “agile marketing” today and you’ll see 144 million results. It’s an insanely hot topic, which has steadily grown more applicable and desired from it’s “Scrum” beginnings.

Why are marketers today so obsessed with agility? Roland Smart, podcaster, author of “The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage” and Vice President of Marketing for Pantheon*, shared his insight on the subject at Digital Summit Minneapolis this week.

For starters, the average marketer’s tenure is just 18 months. After all, we need to get results—and we need them fast. Second, while our strategies and tactics have been artfully crafted with insight and data, once we put everything into the wild, we need to be able to act fast to monitor, measure, and optimize performance—while also navigating budget and “waterfall” resourcing limitations and challenges. And finally, today’s marketers are often managing a growing tech stack, making an agile approach a match made in heaven.


Pantheon’s Roland Smart Details the Secret to Agile Marketing Transformation #DSMPLS