B2B Marketing Blog

B2B Marketers on the Move: Springing Forward With Fresh Leadership Opportunities

Lane Ellis on Mar 23rd, 2022
B2B Marketing

The B2B marketing landscape consists of rapid-fire changes, accompanies by growth that often happens so fast that it can sometimes be difficult to fully appreciate.

For more than 20 years TopRank Marketing has been honored to help a wide array of the world’s top B2B marketers and brands elevate and go beyond merely being competitive, to standing out from the crowd with a variety of creative, award-winning successes. In this spirit, we regularly take the time to congratulate and honor business marketers, thought leaders, industry influencers as well as our own talented team members who have recently advanced in their careers.

B2B Marketers on the Move: Springing Forward With Fresh Leadership Opportunities

5 Ways to Build B2B Content That Resonates With Your Audience, and Why They Work

Harry Mackin on Mar 18th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

B2B marketing has a content problem: there’s more of it all the time… and the people we actually want reading it have started tuning it all out. We can’t exactly stop the content deluge (look, we’re even contributing to it right now!), so instead we’ve got to figure out:

Why are decision makers tuning out content?
How can we keep them from tuning out ours?

Why isn’t B2B content resonating?

LinkedIn-Edelman helped answer this first question in their 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study. Their conclusions aren’t really all that surprising.

Decision makers can really appreciate good thought leadership content (64% said it was a better basis for assessing a potential vendor than marketing materials or product sheets), but…. only if it isn’t boring.

5 Ways to Build B2B Content That Resonates With Your Audience, and Why They Work

B2B Marketing News: Top B2B Demand Gen Priorities, Instagram’s New Ad Format, Podcasting Ad Spend Rises, & LinkedIn’s New Tech Marketing Guide

Lane Ellis on Mar 18th, 2022
Online Marketing News

B2B Marketers’ Biggest Demand Generation Challenges
68 percent of B2B marketers say that email is their top channel choice for demand generation efforts, followed by organic social at 39 percent, paid social at 36 percent, and website or blog efforts also with 36 percent — one of several findings of interest to digital marketers contained in newly-released survey data. MarketingProfs

Study: Global Contextual Ad Market To Hit $335B By 2026
The global contextual advertising market is expected to reach nearly $200 billion in 2022, and $64.6 billion in the U.S., with increases forecast to top $335 billion by 2026, while activity-based advertising is expected to hit $195 billion by 2026, according to recently-released report data. MediaPost

B2B Marketing News: Top B2B Demand Gen Priorities, Instagram’s New Ad Format, Podcasting Ad Spend Rises, & LinkedIn’s New Tech Marketing Guide

Ongoing Optimization: Strategic SEO Tips For B2B Marketers In 2022

Lane Ellis on Mar 16th, 2022
B2B Marketing, SEO Tips

How can B2B marketers improve their search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and focus in the fast and furious digital landscape of 2022?

The search marketing arena has always been one of swift changes, and keeping up-to-date with ever-shifting SEO machinations and technical search intricacies can be more than a handful even for top B2B optimization professionals.

Don’t let the complexities that SEO efforts sometimes entail deter you, however, as there are still bountiful and easy-to-achieve benefits for the B2B marketer in many aspects of optimization.

Let’s jump right in and take a look at some of the SEO tactics B2B marketers can apply and benefit from today.

Ongoing Optimization: Strategic SEO Tips For B2B Marketers In 2022

Winning B2B Calls to Action That Get Responses & Convert Browsers into Buyers

Nick Nelson on Mar 11th, 2022
B2B Marketing

Calls to action (CTAs) are often treated as an afterthought in content creation, which is odd since they are arguably the most consequential element.

Digital marketers and their campaigns are evaluated through a great many factors, which are growing more deep and nuanced as analytics evolve, but conversions are still the name of the game. It’s the easiest thing to measure and the surest sign that your content made an impact.

With this in mind, it’s probably worth taking a step back and rethinking your CTA strategy. If you’re cruising on autopilot and running a generic “Download guide” or “Request demo” at the end of every content piece, you are probably leaving opportunities on the table to better engage (and convert!) your audience.

Winning B2B Calls to Action That Get Responses & Convert Browsers into Buyers

B2B Marketing News: Enterprise Content Marketing Study, Google’s New Ads Features, LinkedIn’s Spark Event, & Instagram’s Expanded Creator Tags

Lane Ellis on Mar 11th, 2022
Online Marketing News

Here’s What B2B Marketers Want Out of Their Content Efforts
91 percent of B2B marketers view creating brand awareness as the primary purpose of content marketing efforts, according to recently-released survey data of interest to digital marketers. The study also showed that 85 percent viewed generating demand and leads as a top purpose of content marketing, while 81 percent pointed to building trust and brand credibility. MarketingCharts

“Building brand awareness fills up the top of your funnel by making sure that relevant people know about your brand. One of the best ways to do so is by creating and distributing valuable thought leadership content.” — @AfiyaAddison Click To Tweet

Instagram Launches Updated Creator Tags to Provide More Credit for Content Contributors
Meta-owned Instagram has rolled out new tagging features that will allow digital marketers to better indicate the influencers and creators involved in the creation of content shared on the platform, offering new exposure opportunities for content that has been created by multiple professionals, Instagram recently announced. Social Media Today

B2B Marketing News: Enterprise Content Marketing Study, Google’s New Ads Features, LinkedIn’s Spark Event, & Instagram’s Expanded Creator Tags

The Gated Content Dilemma in B2B Marketing: Here Are the Best Practices

Joshua Nite on Mar 9th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Q: How many lead gen marketers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Please fill out the form below and we will email you the punchline.

The great gate debate continues to rage throughout the B2B marketing world. What once was a landscape full of sparse landing pages with lead gen forms has become an ocean of content. But still, there’s little consensus about how to get the most value out of what we marketers create.

Does ungating content devalue it? Does gating content make it inaccessible to the audience you’re most trying to reach? We all agree that getting people’s contact information is a value exchange. The debate is whether we offer the value first, or we demand that the reader do so.

The Gated Content Dilemma in B2B Marketing: Here Are the Best Practices

Free The Story: How B2B Marketers Can Use Digital Storytelling To Bring Content Alive In New Ways

Lane Ellis on Mar 7th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

How does digital storytelling help B2B marketers bring content to life in powerful new ways?

With more B2B buying research and ongoing customer engagement than ever taking place online over the past two years, there have never been as many opportunities to benefit from digital storytelling, yet greater competition has made it vital to create content that truly stands out and engages.

Let’s take a look at how well-crafted digital storytelling can propel B2B content to new successes, and how B2B marketers can breathe new life into content in a variety of digital formats.

Free The Story: How B2B Marketers Can Use Digital Storytelling To Bring Content Alive In New Ways

B2B Marketing News: Marketers Prevent World War III, Podcasts Are Booming, The State of Influencer Marketing

Lee Odden on Mar 4th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Online Marketing News

What types of content would B2B marketers create with more resources? Research from Parse.ly reports that two-thirds of the marketers surveyed say they have created more content over the past year and 48% of respondents say they would like to produce a little more content than they currently create. Top formats include videos, infographics, ebooks, reports, white papers, events/webinars, case studies, email newsletters, social media posts and blog posts. . MarketingCharts

The Client: Ukraine. The Brief: Prevent World War III. A group of agency professionals and freelancers from Ukraine’s creative industry has issued a weighty brief to the global creative community: help prevent a third world war. AdWeek

B2B Marketing News: Marketers Prevent World War III, Podcasts Are Booming, The State of Influencer Marketing

Faster Frontiers: How Does 5G Technology Affect B2B Marketers?

Lane Ellis on Mar 2nd, 2022
B2B Marketing

How will 5G technology change the way B2B marketers tell brand stories, and what new opportunities will the speedier forthcoming mobile standard offer?

With impacts that will range from slight in some areas to deeply significant in others, the upcoming rollout of 5G cellular network technology is poised to change how the world of B2B marketing operates.

“5G will unlock a raft of new applications: IoT, process management, and utility metering for enterprise; and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), immersive haptic and 3D holographic experiences for consumers,” Kevin L. Jackson, CEO at GC GlobalNet, recently observed.

Let’s take a brief look at what these changes are, and what B2B marketers can expect as we enter a new frontier of freedom from speed limitations in a world that’s more mobile than ever.

Faster Frontiers: How Does 5G Technology Affect B2B Marketers?

Words of Business Wisdom From 10 Women Who Inspire Great B2B Marketing

Elizabeth Williams on Feb 28th, 2022
B2B Marketing

When I look back at my childhood, my mom, first generation Bachelors degree in tow, worked four days a week. And ‘ran’ the evenings on her own at home while my dad was dairy farming. When she looks back, her mother ran the household and picked up shifts waitressing when the farm wasn’t making ends meet. And before that, working outside the home wasn’t something my great grandmother would have dreamed of.

It is on the backs of everyday women like my mother, and the likes of Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others, that I was able to enter the workforce without a single thought of my gender having an impact on my professional life. While at the same time, knowing I had a real choice of whether to be a stay at home mom, full time employee or somewhere in between.

Words of Business Wisdom From 10 Women Who Inspire Great B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing News: Trust Is Key In B2B Virtual Selling, New Google Ads Features, Podcast Ad Spend Climbs, & Marketing Data Effectiveness Survey

Lane Ellis on Feb 25th, 2022
Online Marketing News

Ad Spending Surges 19% In January, Expands For 11th Consecutive Month
The U.S. advertising market’s rate of spending grew by 19.2 percent in January compared to the same month in 2021, with digital categories continuing to see the best performance, driving ad market expansion that has now grown 11 consecutive months, according to newly-released report data. MediaPost

Brands Turn Up the Dial on Podcasting
Podcast advertising spending climbed by 60 percent in 2021, with accompanying growth rate forecasts seeing $2.2 billion in spending by 2023, both figures representing a healthy rebound from 2020 pandemic-driven deceleration, according to recently-released Association of National Advertisers (ANA) report data. ANA

B2B Marketing News: Trust Is Key In B2B Virtual Selling, New Google Ads Features, Podcast Ad Spend Climbs, & Marketing Data Effectiveness Survey