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.

How to Promote Your B2B Podcast

Over 1/4th of the entire population of the United States listens to podcasts at least monthly. That’s over 81 million people. What’s more, the most avid listeners log six and a half hours a week of listening time. Eighty percent finish every episode in its entirety.

There’s enormous potential here for engaging an audience. Think about how long someone might stick with a 1,000 word blog post (like this one). Five minutes? Ten? But they might listen to a 25-30 minute podcast on the same topic.

Podcasting holds a lot of promise for marketers, especially in the B2B space. Our agency has helped multiple B2B Fortune 500 companies produce and find an audience for their podcasts. It takes strategy and coordination, but the barrier to entry is relatively low. Of course, “making” the podcast is the easy part. As with any content, the challenge is successfully getting it to your target audience.

How to Promote Your B2B Podcast

5 Essential Questions to Guide Your B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy

Ashley Zeckman
Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Online Marketing

5 questions about b2b influencer marketing strategy

Greetings friend! If you’re here, I assume it’s for one of three reasons:

You’re interested in the concept of influencer marketing and want to identify if it’s a fit for your B2B brand.
You’re dabbling in influencer marketing and are looking for ways to formalize your strategy.
You fell down some crazy internet rabbit hole and you aren’t quite sure how you got here.

Regardless of the reason, I’m happy you’re here.

Today, we’re going to dig into five essential questions that many B2B marketers are asking themselves about influencer marketing—everything from what it actually is (very important) to how to gain leadership buy-in and show value.

So dig in, enjoy the ride and be sure to add any of your own questions in the comments!

5 Essential Questions to Guide Your B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy

B2B Marketing Examples: 7 Bold Examples of Interactive B2B Content

Joshua Nite
B2B Marketing, Online Marketing

If you’re not convinced that interactive content in the B2B space can work: Well, first check out these interactive content stats.

If you’re still on the fence, here’s an object lesson from a master of audience engagement:

Freddie plays that 100,000-person crowd like an instrument. You can feel the energy, even through a tiny YouTube window.

When you invite your audience to be part of the show, the results can be magical.

Now, odds are your brand can’t match the raw charisma of Freddie Mercury in tight jeans. But you can still get your audience cheering with interactive B2B content.

Here are a few great examples to light your creative fires and open your B2B minds to the possibilities of interactive.

B2B Marketing Examples: 7 Bold Examples of Interactive B2B Content

10 Free Online Courses to Optimize Your Marketing Skills

Lane Ellis
Online Marketing

Silhouettes of men and women on colorful background.

No matter how much you already know, in today’s fast-paced marketing world there’s always plenty more to learn.

Today more than ever options for learning new marketing skills abound, and the sheer number of choices can sometimes be overwhelming.

Online courses can be an excellent way to advance your career through learning, and offer a go-at-your-own-pace cadence along with the ability to fit in as much or as little instruction as you wish, whenever and wherever you want.

With more than 70% of companies seeing online learning as essential to long-term strategy (Digital Marketing Institute), it’s no wonder that online courses are flourishing.

We’ve picked out 10 organizations offering online courses for optimizing your marketing skills, and best of all, each one is either completely free or offers free trials that allow you to try out content before you make a commitment.

10 Free Online Courses to Optimize Your Marketing Skills

How Marketers Can Improve the Customer Experience (And Why They Should Want To)

Joshua Nite
Online Marketing

Recent research from Gartner shows that 89% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. The way your brand makes customers feel can mean the difference between advocating for the brand or going with a competitor.

So, who owns customer experience?

It’s not just the customer service team or the Chief Experience Officer or any other dedicated department. Every touch point with a customer or potential customer is an opportunity to enhance the experience. It’s everyone’s responsibility.

As customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author Blake Morgan puts it:

“Today, companies are thinking about customer experience in everything they do, from hiring and leadership development to marketing, supply chain, logistics, IT infrastructure, product design and continuous improvement for the entire business.”

How Marketers Can Improve the Customer Experience (And Why They Should Want To)

The Next Level of Influence: 30 Essential Influencer Marketing Statistics

Joshua Nite
Online Marketing

Pop Quiz: When influencer marketing is done right, who wins?

a) Your brand
b) The influencers
c) Your audience
d) All of the above

In case you missed the last few classes, the answer is D. In the ideal influencer marketing engagement, your brand gets a boost in credibility, authority, and exposure to a new audience. The influencer gets a cool content asset to promote, association with other thought leaders, and is able to grow their influence in their niche. And the audience gets awesome content neither the influencer nor the brand could have produced on their own.

Getting to that “everyone wins” stage requires strategic planning and execution, though. You can’t just throw money at someone with a big Instagram following and expect results.

The Next Level of Influence: 30 Essential Influencer Marketing Statistics

Webinars That Wow: 5 Tips for Create Engaging Webinars #MPB2B

Alexis Hall
Marketing PR Conferences, MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Online Marketing

Think about it. Do you enjoy being marketed to?

As marketers, we love our jobs; we love marketing. But like anyone else, it’s safe to say that we don’t enjoy receiving cold pitch emails, or downloading gated white papers, or spotting that “Request a Demo” ad for the 10th time.

As Mark Bornstein, Vice President of Content Marketing at ON24, said during his Keys to Engagement Driven Webinars session at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum 2018, we’ve a reached a tipping point.

While the channels have changed, marketers are still very much relying on passive tactics that simply don’t engage. Modern audiences want to learn, but they also want to be inspired. And our professional expectations are very much evolving alongside our personal lives. With the Netflix model, we can choose to consume the content we want, when we want to.

Webinars That Wow: 5 Tips for Create Engaging Webinars #MPB2B

7 Must-See #MPB2B Sessions Plus Exclusive Insights From Top B2B Marketing Speakers

Ashley Zeckman
Influencer Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Online Marketing

The air is crisp and the leaves have fallen which means it’s time for one of my favorite Fall events: MarketingProfs B2B Forum.

Each year, B2B marketers from around the globe gather for this epic event. And this year, the forum is moving to San Francisco (we’ll miss you Boston) for the very first time.

At the conference, TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be guiding an expert panel of B2B influencer marketers who will dig into what it REALLY takes to create and scale a successful program. Shortly after, I will be taking the stage to share how you can identify influencers and tap into their superpowers with my Stranger Things themed presentation. We’d love to see you at both sessions if you can make it!

7 Must-See #MPB2B Sessions Plus Exclusive Insights From Top B2B Marketing Speakers

Top Brand Personalization Secrets From Scott Monty at #Pubcon 2018

Lane Ellis
Online Marketing, Online Marketing Strategy, Pubcon

Scott Monty Speaking at Pubcon Photo by Lane R. Ellis
Scott Monty brought his nuanced and precisely-paced neoclassical style of marketing to Pubcon Pro Las Vegas 2018, leading off with a Longfellow poem — a refreshing non-technical respite from the buzzwords otherwise pouring forth from most presenters at the tech-savvy conference, as he delivered a mainstage address about social media, trust, and personalization.

Scott, who was a classics major, began by noting that much of human nature is constant all around the world, with people holding the same shared motivations, including many great human truths behind what we do that still apply today — perhaps more than ever.

We’re faced with a huge trust deficit, however, as confidence among us in general has plummeted, which Scott sees as a primary gap to be filled.

Top Brand Personalization Secrets From Scott Monty at #Pubcon 2018

Content Marketing World 2018: What We’re Most Excited About

Anne Leuman
Content Marketing, Content Marketing World, Online Marketing

Every year, close to 4,000 marketers from across the globe make a pilgrimage to Cleveland, OH for the annual Content Marketing World extravaganza — the largest content marketing conference in the world. And this year will be no different.

We’ve been attending CMWorld since the inaugural event back in 2011 — and we still get butterflies each and every year. The week’s schedule is filled to the brim with sessions and workshops from the industry’s leading marketers and experts, making it impossible not to look forward to what the conference has in store.

But with so many great speakers and a packed schedule, which sessions are a must-see? As CMWorld veterans, we want to help you plan ahead and get a front-row seat to the sessions that help you reach your marketing goals. Check out our list of can’t-miss sessions and things we’re excited for down below.

Content Marketing World 2018: What We’re Most Excited About