B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Get Ready For Video In 2021: Watch 5 Creative Examples of B2B Marketing on YouTube

Lane Ellis
Lane Ellis on Sep 16th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Video, Visual Marketing

Smiling man against a creative colorful background image.

What’s new at YouTube, and how are B2B marketers using the world’s largest video platform in creative and engaging campaigns?

Let’s take a look!

Google’s omnipresent YouTube brought in revenue of over $15 billion in 2019, has over two billion monthly active users (MAUs), and by some estimates is considered as the world’s number two search engine, making it nearly inescapable for B2B marketers seeking to host and promote video content. While not necessarily out of this world, YouTube’s orbit casts a wide swath in the B2B marketing universe.

Planets VisualCapitalist Image

During the pandemic, video and webinar content has seen the largest increase in views according to recently-released PathFactory survey data, leading the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to suggest that “Now Is the Time for B2B Content.”


Get Ready For Video In 2021: Watch 5 Creative Examples of B2B Marketing on YouTube

5 B2B Brands Innovating with AR & AI Marketing

Lane Ellis
Lane Ellis on Nov 13th, 2019
B2B Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Visual Marketing

Successful corporate team of partners and coworkers.

Augmented reality and artificial intelligence aren’t just for B2C marketers anymore, and as we move into 2020 we’re likely to see a new decade of B2B that keeps moving farther away from “Boring-To-Boring” and towards more to B2C-like experiences. AR and AI are a key part of what consumers increasingly expect to find in those experiences.

The swiftly rising number of mixed-reality consumer app installations is expected to jump from 3 billion to 10 billion by 2024, with associated ad spending forecast to climb from $2 billion in 2019 to $11 billion, according to new Juniper Research data.

While AR and AI in consumer-facing efforts keeps expanding with a full head of steam, such as Warner Bros. first-ever embedded AR for its upcoming “Scoob!” film trailer and mobile app, many in the B2B landscape have scarcely begun to tap into the AI-infused technology available.


5 B2B Brands Innovating with AR & AI Marketing

Design for Dummies: 5 Tips to Liven Up Your Written Marketing Content

Marketing Design Tips for Non-Designers

I’m not a designer. I’m not artsy. I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

I’m a writer to the core. But, as much I love words, I recognize that they don’t jump off the screen and grab people’s attention. Let’s face it: even the most beautiful prose is pretty ugly, from an aesthetic standpoint. You’re not going to find a framed portrait of blocky text hanging at the Guggenheim anytime soon.

As a marketer who is admittedly lacking in design skills, I’ve done an awful lot of reading on the subject, and I do my best to soak up knowledge and advice from the awesome group of visual wizards here in the TopRank Marketing design department.


Design for Dummies: 5 Tips to Liven Up Your Written Marketing Content

Camera Shy: 7 Tips for First-Time Video Marketers

Video Marketing Tips for First-Timers

Video isn’t for the faint of heart. You need to feel confident enough to put yourself, and your brand, out there. But it’s a medium that a lot of marketers are exploring as it holds a lot of potential.

In fact, Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts that 82% of all internet traffic will be video by 2021. Video is a main source of content consumption, including everything from the news to YouTube tutorials. And as marketers looking to demonstrate thought leadership and credibility, video presents a unique opportunity to get in front of and educate your target audience. However, 64% of marketers agree that video is the hardest type of content to produce, turning many people away from embracing video.  


Camera Shy: 7 Tips for First-Time Video Marketers

How to Get Started with Video Content Marketing (Without a Blockbuster Budget)

Back in my day, all online content was text-based. If you had two animated .GIFs on a website, you had to wait 30 seconds for the site to load. Four .jpgs on a site would crash your browser. We were grateful when posts were just words! We didn’t whine about “visual stimulation” or “content variety” back then, let me tell you.

Of course, we also dressed like this:

So maybe we didn’t get everything right. For better or for worse, the early days of the Internet are long gone, and modern consumers want video content. Over half of all people online watch videos daily. And they’re not just watching cat videos and Jimmy Fallon clips: 59% of executives say if text and video are available on the same topic, they prefer the video. And 54% of senior executives share work-related videos with colleagues weekly.


How to Get Started with Video Content Marketing (Without a Blockbuster Budget)

10 Infographics to Guide Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your brain can identify and retain details of an image in 13 milliseconds. That’s less than a 20th of the time it takes to blink your eyes. So it’s no surprise that visual content is on the rise as attention spans shrink. If you could choose between a consumer spending 20 seconds with a wall of text or 20 seconds with an image, it makes sense to go with the latter.

In other words, people like looking at stuff. As such, infographics are rapidly becoming an essential component of a solid content marketing strategy. Free tools like Canva and Pixlr make it easier than ever to turn your data into compelling visual content.


10 Infographics to Guide Your Content Marketing Strategy

7 Interactive Content Tools to Delight Your Audience

Your audience is reading your content on a device that is capable of wonders. Whether they’re using a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, it can do much more than display text. What’s more, they’re connected to the internet, with limitless potential for communication and conversation.

In this context, interactive content makes a whole lot of sense. Why serve up nothing but plain text if, with just a little more effort, you can offer engaging experiences?

Interactive content might seem gimmicky, especially to B2B marketers. And I’ll be the first to admit: It is gimmicky. It’s absolutely designed to grab attention. But if your content provides value—if it’s worth paying attention to—interactive elements can help you bring in an audience. Interactivity isn’t a substitute for quality, just a supplement.


7 Interactive Content Tools to Delight Your Audience

Life After Vine: 5 Tips to Help Brands Move on With Video

life-after-vine

Vine, the social media app known for 6-second video loops, is shutting down. Twitter announced its decision to discontinue the video service in a press release last week.

According to Marketing Land, Vine debuted in 2013 when mobile video wasn’t really a thing. But the rise of Snapchat, and the addition of live video capabilities on Facebook and Instagram, has drawn Vine’s top stars, audiences and advertising dollars away from Vine. In addition, rolled out its own native video platform in January 2015, serving as yet another Vine rival, the publication noted.

For some, the loss of Vine seems to be part of the natural evolutionary cycle of the digital world. But others are saddened and even angry at the loss of the platform. Shortly after the announcement, in a The Verge article by Casey Newton, one of Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann reportedly said:


Life After Vine: 5 Tips to Help Brands Move on With Video

Social Media Images Part 1: Sizes, Best Practices and Tools

images-social-media

When battling other businesses for your customers attention on social media, you have to stand out in order to get noticed. That can mean being disruptive, going against standard marketing practices, or doing something unique that draws the attention of your customers away from the “noise” of social media. One way to accomplish that goal is to harness the power and creativity of images.

Images can make a big impact on getting noticed in a customer’s social media feed. Research has found that 90% of the information that the brain processes is visual, and the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than anything that’s read. What that means to marketers using social media is when someone is looking at their feed and scrolling through all of the posts, they are processing the images faster than the text.


Social Media Images Part 1: Sizes, Best Practices and Tools

Best Practices for Video Marketing on Social Networks from Cisco, SAP & Bally Switzerland

Emily Bacheller
Emily Bacheller
Social Media, Visual Marketing

video marketing social networks

Driven by consumers’ insatiable appetite for video content, video marketing has become an important part of social media marketing. With platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram launching their own video applications, videos can be optimized for success beyond web pages and YouTube to where customers are actively seeking, consuming and sharing video content: social networks.

Whether you’re a video marketing pro, or unsure of where to begin, here are several useful tips for launching video marketing campaigns on multiple social networks.

But first…

Is Video Marketing Really Worth It?

Internet users have been watching videos to entertain or inform themselves for decades, but most marketers are only now beginning to take advantage of the power of video marketing. Video is becoming increasingly democratic, with self-service video editing programs making it so that you don’t have to have deep pockets or a degree in cinematography to create an effective marketing video.


Best Practices for Video Marketing on Social Networks from Cisco, SAP & Bally Switzerland

How to Make Free Stock Images Work for Content Marketing

stock images, success, content marketing

Visual content is king, but what happens if you don’t have a massive library of brand images to use for your online content? Do you try a simple Google image search and grab something that might be approved for commercial use? Or, do you simply go image-less and rely on your copy to carry the weight?

If you’re pillaging images from Google’s regular search, stop right now. Google might tell you that it’s approved for commercial use, but there are other resources that provide greater assurances (and more relief for your legal team).

In this post I’ll show you where to find (truly) free stock images, and how to use those images for the best visual impact on your content marketing.


How to Make Free Stock Images Work for Content Marketing

Social Media Video – Essential Tips and Takeaways from #SMBMSP74

TopRank Marketing Editor
TopRank Marketing Editor
Social Media, Visual Marketing
SMBMSP-Video-Social-Media

Panelists including, from left, Jeff Achen, David Krejci, Farrington Starnes and Chuck Olsen address the audience at the January 23 SMBMSP event.

Digital marketers have known for some time that video is an essential part of the marketing mix: 76% of B2B companies use video as a content marketing tactic. Video is also an important part of a social media content strategy. After all, YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google and Facebook has more than 1 billion daily video views.

Great examples of companies using video to enhance both B2C and B2B marketing are in high demand whether from major brands, agencies and small DIY businesses. At TopRank Online Marketing we’re always on the lookout for social media video trends and new examples to share with our community and clients. That’s why seven members of our team attended a recent Social Media Breakfast at 514 studios in Minneapolis – to learn how other companies are implementing video as part of a social media strategy.


Social Media Video – Essential Tips and Takeaways from #SMBMSP74