B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

4 Spooky Marketing Lessons from Classic Halloween Monsters

Halloween is objectively the best holiday of the fall-winter season. You don’t have to go broke buying people gifts. You don’t have to cook an enormous meal (then pass out after gorging on turkey). The only obligations for Halloween are to play dress up and eat candy!

Not to mention I’m somewhat partial to the holiday’s aesthetic. Give me skulls and bats over tinsel and garland any day of the week, and twice on Friday the 13th.

Sure, there’s a horror/scary element to Halloween. But it’s a fun, safe kind of scary. If you’ve spent an hour on social media recently, you know there are scarier things than ghoulies and ghosties.

But Halloween isn’t just fun. It’s educational, too! I realized this year that some of my favorite Halloween monsters are hiding valuable lessons for marketers. For example…


4 Spooky Marketing Lessons from Classic Halloween Monsters

How the World’s Top Marketers Make Emotional Connections to win in the Marketplace

LoveworksApple. Google. Disney. These are some of the most admired and in many cases, loved brands in the world.  No doubt, many companies are envious of the connection these top brands have been able to make with their customers.  A strong connection between brands and consumer manifest in many ways from retention to word of mouth to premium pricing.

As companies focus in on creating more content and utility in their marketing, more organizations are beginning to realize the importance of creating an emotional connection. This is along the lines of meaningful vs. mechanical marketing I’ve often talked about.

I was reading a book recently that focuses in on exactly this topic: Loveworks: How the world’s top marketers make emotional connections to win in the marketplace by Brian Sheehan.  Brian agreed to do a guest post answering a pretty important question in today’s age of information overload: What makes a company loved?


How the World’s Top Marketers Make Emotional Connections to win in the Marketplace

It’s Not SEO Anymore, It’s Marketing. Deal With It.

Customer Centric SEO

Optimize For Customer Experience

When people learn I’ve recently written a book called Optimize they usually ask what it’s about. I say it’s about optimizing customer discovery and engagement with content. The response I usually get is something like, “Oh, cool. I thought it was about SEO.”

Well, in a way optimizing content and customer experiences is SEO. That’s because what most of the better SEOs practice today is really more about the promise of marketing: attracting, engaging and inspiring customers to buy.

Whether it’s Google, Social Networks, Online News Media, Digital Assets or any other channel/format for content – best practices optimization is in effect for smart companies that want an advantage.


It’s Not SEO Anymore, It’s Marketing. Deal With It.

Marketing – What’s Your Definition?

marketing

Marketing? View from beach house on Sunset Beach, Oahu where I didn’t think a lot about marketing.

I’m blogging on a plane coming back from a week in paradise. That’s part of my process for returning to the “real world”.  As a marketer I cannot help but think what’s behind the communications and actions of companies I engage with as a consumer. My time on Oahu talking with local residents and surfers in Haleiwa was a notable contrast to the techie social media marketing world I live in day to day.

In today’s digital age, things move fast. New models of communication establish themselves quickly and new categories of brand and consumer engagement continuously emerge. Defining the means for communicating with and engaging with customers is by no means static whether you’re trying to reach cosmopolitan buyers in London or tourists of a sleepy village on a tropical island.


Marketing – What’s Your Definition?

3 Thoughts on the Future of Online Marketing

future of online marketingIn the world of online marketing, search and social media are evolving at an incredible pace.

Consider these stats: Google sites handle about 88 billion queries a month but did you know, twitter is approaching 20 billion?

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year and Hitwise has reported that Facebook tops Google in weekly web traffic.

Social media is hot, but is by no means mutually exclusive of search. Search has expanded beyond Google and marketers must now consider other search channels such as internal Facebook search and mobile search as channels where customers are looking.


3 Thoughts on the Future of Online Marketing

Getting Marketing & Development Teams Working Together – SES Toronto

It’s a common story: an online marketing professional returns from a conference full of exciting new ideas and tactics, only to fail at selling those ideas internally.  In many cases, marketing and IT/development professionals don’t always understand each other, and as a result potentially high value projects stall out and never see the light of day.

How can you get your marketing and IT teams working together?  The following panel of speakers moderated by Tracy Falke, Social Media Specialist at Freestyle Interactive tackle the subject matter:

  • Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch
  • Puneet Bhasin, Independent IT Consultant,
  • Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association

Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association



Getting Marketing & Development Teams Working Together – SES Toronto

5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy

Twitter MarketingSo you want to succeed with Twitter eh? Before you run off and chase shiny butterflies and little blue birds, take a seat and collect yourself. Then read the following tips on creating a potential Twitter marketing strategy that will help you become more productive and successful using Twitter for business.

First things first. Who are you trying to connect with?

1. Describe your target audience on Twitter.  If you’re not an active participant on Twitter, then research. Do the homework and write it down, including Twitter handles of actual target users. If you’ve been able to go so far as develop a persona that represents your customers that spend time on Twitter or social media sites in general, that’s even better.

The first step in scoring is knowing all about the goal.


5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy

5 Ways to Electrify Your Social Network

social networking

A typical situation for many marketers when it comes to social networks is this: Setup LinkedIn profile, check. Corporate LinkedIn page, check.  Facebook profile, check. Facebook Fan Page, check. Twitter account, check. Corporate blog, check. Check check check!

But where’s the buzz? Where are the fans, friends, followers, comments, links, traffic, search engine rankings? Where’s the customer engagement? And the most pressing question of all: What is all this social web participation doing for our company and our customers?

Showing up to the game doesn’t mean there will be an audience. This is as true with the social web as it is offline.  The problem that marketers have with attracting interested customers and growing their social networks often stems from approaching social participation tactically and without a plan.  Testing and experimentation is great, but if what you’re doing is something that has a cost and is to be accounted for, then you’d better have a plan and objectives.  How can you score without a goal?


5 Ways to Electrify Your Social Network

Book Review: Achieving The OPEN Brand by Way Of An Open Worldview

theopenbrand

“For the first time in the history of calculating the ROI of marketing expenditures, influence behaviors and patterns of the volume achievable only on the social web begin to offset the overall cost of marketing,” quotes the new book “The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World” by Resource Interactive’s President Kelly Mooney and Innovation Consultant Dr. Nita Rollins.

While not appearing on page one, this idea is certainly one of the most important, and likely most sought after skim through takeaways marketers (both on the client and agency side) will seek when first hunting for the knowledge contained within this book.


Book Review: Achieving The OPEN Brand by Way Of An Open Worldview

Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics

Online Marketing Tactics

Earlier this week we started a poll on what online marketing tactics our readers would use most in 2008. The polling plug-in allows for only one choice and over 100 people have responded so far. We’ll keep the poll running for another week or so, but here are the top ten tactics rankings so far out of 35 listed and the percentage of votes for each.

With the vote count at over 150, I’ve updated the top ten as of 02/13/08:

  • Blogging (27%)
  • Email marketing (16%)
  • Search engine optimization (14%)
  • Pay per click (9%)
  • Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (5%)
  • Blogger relations (4%)
  • Online public relations (3%)
  • Viral marketing (3%)
  • Free content (white papers) (3%)
  • Corporate web site (3%)

Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics

PRWeb Tags it Up

PRWeb is at it again with a new announcement on the addition of Technorati and PRWeb tags to the PRWeb news wire and press release distribution service. The press release, “Holy SHIFT! PRWeb Plays Tag with Social Media” comments that the new features will make it easy to add Technorati and PRWeb specific tags to your press releases.

The SHIFT Communications’ social media release was in part a motivator for the new services as the release from PRWeb states:

“If you spend the time to create a press release following the template
outlined by SHIFT Communications, all you have is an electronic
document unless you have a distribution platform that supports its
features. PRWeb is that platform,” said David McInnis, CEO and Founder
of PRWeb.


PRWeb Tags it Up

marktd.com is Digg for marketing

Piers Fawkes from PSFK sent me a heads up on his latest channel, Marktd which is a library of marketing articles weighted in importance by users. It works like digg or del.icio.us where users submit articles and others vote on them. Articles are displayed as “New”, “Latest” or “Top” based on votes. The categories range from BtoB to Word of Mouth with some Public Relations in between. But nothing about search marketing. Perhaps that’s a category that should be added?

Submit your marketing stories to Marktd.com


marktd.com is Digg for marketing