Lee Odden

B2B Marketing Spotlight: Ann Handley on Being a “Badaxe” Marketer #mpb2b

Lee Odden on Sep 12th, 2019     B2B Marketing, Interviews, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Interview Ann Handley
Twelve years ago I had the good fortune to connect with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs and she’s been a positive influence to me on what’s possible in content and B2B marketing ever since.

I’m not alone.

During that time, we’ve both grown as marketers. Well, maybe I’ve grown, but Ann has exploded. She regularly fills keynote rooms at conferences, draws long, long lines of people to get one of her best selling books signed and her company MarketingProfs has attracted over 600,000 subscribers.

Ann Handley is a marketing influencers’s influencer or more creatively, she’s an Annfluencer.

Since Ann is the very first Chief Content Officer ever, a multi-book best selling author, international keynote speaker and who I like to call, The Khaleesi of Content, we’re pretty fortunate to share the following interview. And after recent events in Toronto, you call also call her a “badaxe” marketer.


B2B Marketing Spotlight: Ann Handley on Being a “Badaxe” Marketer #mpb2b
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Ashley Zeckman

Learning Changes Lives: Top Insights from #MPB2B & 5 Tips for Rocking Marketing Events

Ashley Zeckman     B2B Marketing, Influencer Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

The MarketingProfs B2B Forum is hands-down one of the BEST conferences you can attend as a marketer. The keynotes are inspiring, the sessions are high-quality and the vibe makes you feel at home. Ann Handley and the MarketingProfs team work incredibly hard to orchestrate this great event each year and it shows.

The team at TopRank Marketing has been attending conferences like this one for decades and has been able to hone our focus to make the most of the time and investment that are made. Below are some highlights to help you get the most bang for your buck at events.

5 Tips for Getting the Most out of Marketing Conferences

Speaking


Learning Changes Lives: Top Insights from #MPB2B & 5 Tips for Rocking Marketing Events
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Alexis Hall

How Collaborating with Influencers Can Help You Save the Day and Change the World of Marketing

Alexis Hall     B2B Marketing, Influencer Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Influencer marketing is a phrase on the tip of most marketer’s tongues, but many are still struggling to figure out exactly what it means in the context of their B2B business and how to implement.

At last week’s MarketingProfs B2B Forum in San Francisco, TopRank Marketing’s Ashley Zeckman took the stage to help set the influencer marketing story straight and provide insights into what it REALLY takes to develop a successful B2B influencer marketing program.

Why the Sudden Need for Influencer Marketing?

Trust in marketers has fallen. In fact, a recent study by HubSpot found that only 3% of people trust marketers (just over lobbyists and politicians). And B2B marketers specifically are facing the worst of it. MarketingProfs and CMI’s most recent report found that only 51% of B2B marketers state that their marketing is moderately successful and 61% of them still don’t have a document content strategy.


How Collaborating with Influencers Can Help You Save the Day and Change the World of Marketing
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Ashley Zeckman

How Dell, SAP and Dun & Bradstreet Collaborate with Influencers to Scale Successful B2B Content #MPB2B

Ashley Zeckman     B2B Marketing, Influencer Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

This week at MarketingProfs B2B forum, some of my favorite influencer marketers took the stage for a lively discussion on how they’ve been able to scale content creation by collaborating with influencers.

The panel was led by TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden and included the following rockstar marketers:

Dr. Konstanze Alex – Head of Corporate Influencer Relations, Dell

Amisha Gandhi – Vice President, Influencer Marketing, SAP Ariba

Luciana Moran – Senior Vice President, Content & Creative, Dun & Bradstreet

If you’re interested in influencer marketing, then you’re in for a real treat. In this post, I’ll outline some of the best insights for B2B influencer success. But first, let’s look at WHY influencer marketing is a must-have for B2B marketers.


How Dell, SAP and Dun & Bradstreet Collaborate with Influencers to Scale Successful B2B Content #MPB2B
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Alexis Hall

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

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

Creating Engaging Webinar Experiences

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
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Alexis Hall

How High Impact Marketers Approach Marketing Strategy #MPB2B

Alexis Hall     B2B Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Planning for 2019 is well underway and most marketers are asking themselves if their plan will really impact results. Many marketers start with goal revenue numbers. And from there, work backwards to corresponding goals for leads, channels, tactics and audience targets. Unfortunately, the words that no marketer wants to hear ring clear from leadership: do more with less budget.

So how can you do more with less? How can you ensure success in the ever-changing landscape of the B2B consumer?

Samantha Stone, the Founder of the Marketing Advisory Network, suggests that marketers flip the usual model for 2019 planning. If you start with marketing strategy,  you can stop doing “more” and instead focus on a few tactics your team executes incredibly well, that can have a significant impact on the organization.


How High Impact Marketers Approach Marketing Strategy #MPB2B
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Ashley Zeckman

How B2B Marketers Can Drive Growth in the Age of Assistance #MPB2B

Ashley Zeckman     B2B Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

One of the key themes for this year’s MarketingProfs B2B Forum is the importance of ongoing learning. And part of learning is growing. And part of growing means stepping outside of your comfort zone.

Gopi Kallayil, the Chief Evangelist for Brand Marketing at Google opened his morning keynote by encouraging the audience to do things that make you uncomfortable. And to prove his point, he involved the ENTIRE audience. How?

He started by asking the audience to raise their hand if they were either a fan of or expert Bollywood dancers themselves. Then, he asked all those people to join him on stage. Here’s proof that it worked:


How B2B Marketers Can Drive Growth in the Age of Assistance #MPB2B
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Lane Ellis

50 B2B Marketing Influencers and Experts to Follow 2018

Lane Ellis     B2B Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

B2B Marketing Influencers 2018

MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2018 is here, as some of the world’s savviest B2B marketing leaders and innovators come together in San Francisco for a much-anticipated conference.

To help business marketers find helpful voices to learn from, we’ve sorted through the nearly 100 excellent speakers and are thrilled to publish our annual list of B2B marketing influencers speaking at MarketingProfs B2B Forum.

List Methodology: First, we pulled the list of all speakers from the MarketingProfs website. Then we added those speakers to the Traackr influencer marketing platform to crawl each speakers’ respective social profiles and start tracking their content and the impact of that content amongst their networks. Using Traackr’s algorithm for ranking, we then sorted the speakers according to their respective social influence: reach, relevance, resonance, and audience metrics.


50 B2B Marketing Influencers and Experts to Follow 2018
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Ashley Zeckman

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
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Dan Rasmussen

Learn How to Connect Actions to Results Using Marketing Attribution

Dan Rasmussen     Digital Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

We’ve all been there. The big marketing campaign you spent months on just ended, it was a smashing success! Champagne was popped, there were pats on the back all around, life was good. But when the dust finally settles, you’re left staring a mountain of data square in there eyes, wondering if the marketing attribution you set up tells the real story.

Fortunately for you, during this year’s MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, Dayna Rothman of BrightFunnel broke down how you as a savvy marketer can orchestrate the buyer journey and turn it into a science by properly leveraging data and analytics.

The “Marketing Holy Grail” is to turn the buyer journey into a science by sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time.


Learn How to Connect Actions to Results Using Marketing Attribution
Alexis Hall

Everything You Need to Build a LinkedIn Marketing Tactical Plan

Alexis Hall     LinkedIn, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Over the last five years, we’ve seen an evolution in the way B2B marketers are talking about and using social media. We’ve evolved from asking “Should we be doing it?” to “Is what we are doing worth it?” to now “How do I make this really effective channel even more effective?”.

According to a recent study from Oktopost, 79% of B2B marketers believe social media is an effective marketing channel (Oktopost). And for many B2B marketers, LinkedIn is THE social media channel. In fact 43% of marketers say they’ve sourced a customer from LinkedIn (Hubspot).

But could we be doing better? Can we use LinkedIn more effectively?


Everything You Need to Build a LinkedIn Marketing Tactical Plan
Ashley Zeckman

If You Only Had $1k to Invest in Content Marketing, How Would You Spend it?

Ashley Zeckman     Content Marketing, MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Budget is always top of mind for content marketers, but especially this time of year. In order to get even close to the budget that you want or need, you have to justify the spend.

Unfortunately, we’ve been ineffective at content for a while. But the question is, can we change the narrative?

In his presentation last week at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, GE Digital’s Chris Moody gave the audience insights into why we’re ineffective, and what we can do to improve, without having to spend a significant amount of money.

Where Are We Failing?

While approach and hurdles will vary from brand to brand, there are three key reasons that content marketing isn’t working today. Below are three stats that paint a very clear picture of where we’re going wrong:


If You Only Had $1k to Invest in Content Marketing, How Would You Spend it?