Online Marketing

Online marketing encompasses a broad range of strategies and tactics, but the overall goal remains the same, attracting new business, engaging with customers and converting more leads to sales. With nearly three billion Internet users, online marketing is the key to attracting new eyes, spreading brand awareness and growing your business online.

 

Named a top Marketing Blog by Advertising Age, the experts at TopRank Marketing are here to teach you how to become an online marketing master!

 

Browse our online marketing news and articles to find, tips, guidelines, and current best practices.

 

Joshua Nite

5 Questions to Answer BEFORE You Develop a Social Media Strategy

Joshua Nite     Online Marketing, Social Media

Last weekend I decided to build something. So I went to Home Depot and asked a nice man in an orange apron to tell me what supplies I needed. “Okay, what are you building?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, something…maybe out of wood? Perhaps a birdhouse, or some furniture, or a planter,” I replied. “Don’t worry; I have lots of tools and I’ve seen other people build things, so I’m ready to go. Just tell me what I need to buy.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he replied.

Okay, so none of the above happened (call it poetic license). It’s a ridiculous scenario, right? Who would start building something without knowing what they needed, why they were building it, and what the finished product would be?


5 Questions to Answer BEFORE You Develop a Social Media Strategy
Alexis Hall

Should I Hire an In-House Digital Marketing Specialist or Tap an Agency for Help?

Alexis Hall     Online Marketing

The digital marketing landscape is changing at a rapid pace, with many organizations planning to up their budgets and diversify their tactics in the coming years. In fact, according to Forrester research, CMOs will spend nearly $119 billion on search marketing, display advertising, online video and email marketing by 2021.

“Over the next five years, search will lose share to display and social advertising while video will scale,” Forrester said. “These changes reflect a new emphasis on quality over quantity, a dynamic that will reintroduce human intervention into programmatic ad buying, turn marketers into growth hackers, and put long-tail publishers out of business.”


Should I Hire an In-House Digital Marketing Specialist or Tap an Agency for Help?
Elizabeth Williams

3 Mouth-Watering Content Marketing Case Studies That Bring Home the Bacon

Elizabeth Williams     Online Marketing

If you’ve ever been pregnant, lived with a woman who’s pregnant or even just been around a pregnant woman, you can guess it is not smart to lie to a woman who’s pregnant about food.

Well that’s how I felt today. 6 months along and in arrives a marketing email with the subject line: “[Infographic] Good Marketing starts with good snacks.” Yes, I understand, I’m not literally going to get any food out of this, but I expect to see some mouth-watering graphics upon opening the email. Nope.

Instead I found food references in the copy like “Are you giving your prospects nourishing snacks or asking them to bite off more than they can chew?” and “Make your content highly snackable”. Still, this email teased me enough to click on the CTA to the infographic: Surely within it food will reside!


3 Mouth-Watering Content Marketing Case Studies That Bring Home the Bacon
Ashley Zeckman

Making B2B Marketing Gold: A Look Back at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum #MPB2B

Ashley Zeckman     Online Marketing

Image via MarketingProfs

To open up the 2017 MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, Chief Content Officer Ann Handley shared a challenge for attendees to keep top of mind while at the conference (in addition to tap dancing, but more about that later):

#1 – Find Your Squad

This has been a running theme for the B2B Marketing Forum for as long as I can remember. Because the conference is capped at around 1,000 attendees, you actually have the opportunity to run into some familiar faces during the conference.

Even if you traveled to the event with members of your own team, it’s important to make the effort to meet new people, “your people”. I’ve been lucky to meet some really amazing people at conferences and continue to be in contact with many of them to this day.


Making B2B Marketing Gold: A Look Back at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum #MPB2B
Tiffani Allen

Digital Marketing News: The Perfect Sales Page, YouTube Changes & Instagram Polls

Tiffani Allen     Online Marketing, Online Marketing News

How to Write a Persuasive Sales Page (Even If You Hate Selling) [Infographic]
Selling doesn’t have to be ‘sleazy’ — it can be helpful, timely and informative. This infographic shows exactly how to perfect your website’s sales page to be informative, helpful, and not at all creepy to your intended buyers. MarketingProfs

YouTube Changes Rules Regarding Videos With External Links
YouTube is restricting which accounts are able to add external links at the end of videos. The new requirements are that the user is a member of the YouTube Partner Program and your channel must have 10,000 total public views (or more). Search Engine Journal


Digital Marketing News: The Perfect Sales Page, YouTube Changes & Instagram Polls
Tiffani Allen

Digital Marketing News: LinkedIn Top Content, Twitter Gets Character & Apple Goes Google

Tiffani Allen     Online Marketing, Online Marketing News

The Content Preferences of LinkedIn Members [Infographic]
What kinds of content do LinkedIn users prefer? A new infographic shows that LinkedIn users prefer content that’s informative, educational and relevant. MarketingProfs

Giving you more characters to express yourself
Twitter recently announced they’re giving us an additional 140 characters with which to convey our deepest, Tweetiest thoughts by upping their character count to 280. They believe this will encourage more active posting on their platform. Twitter

Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac
Apple has finally made the plunge with Google – when you search with Siri on your iOS device or Mac, you’ll be shown search results from Google. In other news, none of that would have made any sense 20 years ago (according to Josh Nite). TechCrunch


Digital Marketing News: LinkedIn Top Content, Twitter Gets Character & Apple Goes Google
Caitlin Burgess

Beyond Google Keyword Planner: 7 Easy-to-Use SEO Research Tools for Generating Content Ideas

Caitlin Burgess     Online Marketing

As a content marketer, you know that your target audience needs to be at the center of your content strategy. After all, modern content marketing was born to help you create valuable content that satisfies your audience’s quest for answers throughout their customer journey.

However, as the digital landscape becomes increasingly crowded with content — and you feel more and more pressure to create content in less time — you’re likely looking for quick and dirty ways to create SEO-friendly, best-answer content that doesn’t require loads of your precious time. As a result, your first stop on the research train is likely Google’s Keyword Planner tool. But, let’s face it, while it’s an excellent tool, it can only get you so far.


Beyond Google Keyword Planner: 7 Easy-to-Use SEO Research Tools for Generating Content Ideas
Tiffani Allen

Digital Marketing News: Predictive Analytics, Blockchain and Email Marketing Industry Report

Tiffani Allen     Online Marketing, Online Marketing News

Predictive Analytics: Predicting Customer Behavior to Improve ROI
As marketers, we’re always trying to stay ahead of the curve. But, does that curve factor in what customers or clients are looking for? This infographic shows us how predictive analytics can help do just that. Business 2 Community

IAB sets up Blockchain Working Group for advertising
Does blockchain have a place in marketing? According to recent reports, blockchain is no longer only for those trading bitcoin, it can provide a highly secure and transparent way to manage funds. MarketingLand

2017 Email Marketing Industry Report
Marketers are feeling overwhelmed. They don’t have the resources needed to do the marketing they’d like to do. This is evident in email marketing particularly because many marketers surveyed say email marketing drives ROI but it’s not integrated with their marketing strategy overall. Digital Marketing Depot


Digital Marketing News: Predictive Analytics, Blockchain and Email Marketing Industry Report
Tiffani Allen

Digital Marketing News: Better Text Ads, Lifestyle Templates & AMP for AdWords

Tiffani Allen     Online Marketing, Online Marketing News

Seven Tips for Writing Better-Performing Expanded Text Ads [Infographic]
Writing text ads is a challenge – how can you be compelling enough to drive a conversion with such limited space? There are several tricks of the trade explored in this new infographic. MarketingProfs

Google to Advertisers: Get Your Mobile Landing Pages Ready
Google recently announced that in two weeks, AdWords advertisers can use AMP pages as landing pages for their ads. This provides a seamless user experience when searching through Google and could have implications for page rank. Search Engine Journal


Digital Marketing News: Better Text Ads, Lifestyle Templates & AMP for AdWords
Joshua Nite

How to Find the Stories in Your Data for Compelling Reporting

Joshua Nite     Content Marketing World, Google, Online Marketing, Web Analytics

Our hyper-connected digital world is defined by an overabundance of data. Everything’s measurable, trackable, and quantifiable. Want to know how many people died on screen in your favorite movie? Or how much ice cream the average American eats per year? The data’s at your fingertips.

The ready availability of data is great for marketers. It helps us optimize performance, personalize content, and prove our value to the business.

But data in a vacuum isn’t informative or useful. It’s not about the facts and figures themselves; it’s about how we shape that data into compelling stories.

As an Analytics Advocate at Google, Adam Singer has years of experience finding and revealing the meaningful narrative in datasets. His presentation at Content Marketing World 2017 was all about how to create clean, informative, compelling data visualizations.


How to Find the Stories in Your Data for Compelling Reporting
Amy Higgins

Stop the Marketing Killjoy: 5 Ways You’re Turning off Audiences with Bad Video

Amy Higgins     Content Marketing, Content Marketing World, Online Marketing, Video

It might only be 1pm in the afternoon, but it’s five o’clock somewhere – a perfect time for a great dry martini.

Research “how to make the perfect dry martini”, and you’ll get over 1,560,000 results. Ask a content marketer “how to tell a good story”, and you’ll get about the same quality of results — except when you ask the fabulous Tim Washer. Like the perfect dry martini, Tim’s strategy for how to tell a good story is simple, neat, and well…perfect.

In his session at Content Marketing World, Tim not only shared how improv can help your B2B marketing, but he shared the five ways you can kill the joy in your videos.

What are his simple rules of how to stop the marketing killjoy?


Stop the Marketing Killjoy: 5 Ways You’re Turning off Audiences with Bad Video
Tiffani Allen

Digital Marketing News: Visual Content Trends, Facebook Ads Controversy & Bing Retargeting

Tiffani Allen     Online Marketing, Online Marketing News

The Hottest Visual Content Marketing Trends in 2017 [Infographic]
Visual content can help you boost your content marketing efforts in terms of engagement and resonance. This infographic shows the most common types of visual content marketing, what type of visuals consumers prefer and more. Social Media Today

Facebook’s Ad Metrics Come Under Scrutiny Yet Again
There’s been some recent controversy over Facebook’s estimated audience size that it gives to advertisers. A research firm recently compared their estimated audiences in the U.S. against the Census and found discrepancies totaling in the tens of millions in some cases. Fortune

Bing Ads Now Shows Remarketing Bid Adjustment Suggestions Based on CPA Data
Bing has announced that they’ll be using advertisers’ data to help them drive more leads through retargeting bid adjustments. This includes giving recommendations to advertisers and helping them estimated the changes in conversions they can expect. Search Engine Journal


Digital Marketing News: Visual Content Trends, Facebook Ads Controversy & Bing Retargeting