5 Monstrous B2B Marketing Moves That Will Come Back To Haunt You

Are you making any of these five all-too-common yet often monstrous B2B marketing moves that will come back to haunt you?

As we once again greet the season of ghosts and all things haunted, it’s the perfect time to open that creaky cobwebbed door where B2B marketing horrors and nightmares await.

There’s no need to be afraid, however, as we’ve got the digital garlic you need to ward off even the most ghoulish of B2B baddies and their marketing missteps and mistakes.

Sit back, and let’s take a moment to look at five of the most monstrous and horrifying marketing moves that will only come back to haunt you, and in doing so we’ll go on a digital marketing ghost-busting adventure.

1 — Don’t Frankenstein Your Marketing Efforts

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Frankenstein is a symbol of all of those marketing pieces that don’t fit together, combined willy-nilly into a hodgepodge of fragmented marketing that doesn’t offer the kind of cohesive experience savvy marketers are constantly striving for.

A mad scientist can work in the movies, but when it comes to real-life B2B marketing, it pays to have a thoroughly sane and well-planned strategy, from concept creation and testing to deployment and measurement.

In today’s marketing landscape we’ve got more elements to consider for inclusion in digital efforts than ever before, however knowing which ones work harmoniously together  and which don’t is key in order to keep from creating a marketing Frankenstein.

We’ve taken several looks at how B2B marketers can best keep their efforts harmonious and cohesive, such as in the following articles:

• SEO Harmony: Why B2B Marketers Need To Integrate Search With Content Strategy
• How Influencers & Best Answer Content Help B2B Marketers Dominate in Search
• Optimizing Digital Assets: How B2B Marketers Can Combine the Best of External & Internal Search Findability

2 — Keep Dracula From Sucking The Life From Your Marketing

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Dracula and Nosferatu are symbols of marketing that sucks the life right out of your well-intended efforts.

Don’t let today’s digital draculas sabotage an otherwise excellent marketing effort, whether it’s in the form of “death by committee,” where the heart-blood of a campaign is weakened over multiple iterations, or by failing to begin with a strong message and then letting any energy it did have become hopelessly watered down.

Instead, infuse your B2B content marketing with healthy doses of the best answers and information your target audiences are seeking, and look to include energizing, memorable, and interactive elements to your marketing output.

We’ve got you covered with examples of B2B brands successfully using fresh and compelling elements to bring brand stories to life, including how influence can multiply those efforts, such as in the following articles we’ve published:

• 5 Examples of B2B Brands Rocking With Influence in 2021
• Top 5 Benefits of Influencer Marketing for B2B Brands
• Livestream Marketing: 5 B2B Brands Rocking LinkedIn Live

3 — Take The Wraps Off Mummified Marketing

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Don’t let your marketing get buried alive like a big-screen mummy, perhaps never to be unearthed and reach its full intended effect.

Instead, remember that there’s an ideal time and place to unwrap every good marketing effort. Even if a concept must be temporarily scrapped, it could come back to life later on and have great success if rolled out at the perfect time and to the right audience.

Timing is everything, as they say, advice that’s especially true in B2B marketing. It’s key to know your audience, what their paint points are, the questions they’re asking, and where they’re looking for answers. Then providing solutions becomes a task so clear that even a mummy could do it.

Here are several looks at learning more about your audiences, and how to release — or even, in the form of repurposed content, re-release — your best digital output:

• 6 B2B Content Marketing Summertime Sizzlers To Increase Audience Engagement
• How to Accelerate Reach and Engagement of B2B Content Through Co-Creation
• Show Me The Numbers: 20 B2B Marketing Insights From Audience Poll Data

[bctt tweet=”“Timing is everything, as they say, advice that’s especially true in B2B marketing. It’s key to know your audience, what their paint points are, the questions they’re asking, and where they’re looking for answers.” — @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]

4 — What Would Scooby-Doo? Unmask Your Mediocre Marketing

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Great B2B marketing doesn’t need to wear costume masks, as authentic best-answer content shines brightly on its own merits.

If your best content is hiding, don’t wait for Scooby-Doo and his Mystery Machine cohorts to unmask it for you. Instead, redouble your efforts to get creative in how and where you publish, share, and promote your top content.

There have never been so many digital communication channels as today, and in 2022 the options are bound to increase. More B2B marketers than ever are experimenting with and finding success using new social platforms, whether it’s on Discord, Reddit, TikTok or through new features on existing platforms.

To help find new destinations for publishing your B2B marketing content, take a peek as these article we’ve published on the subject:

• How B2B Marketing Influencers Are Finding Success On New Social Channels
• 8 Things B2B Marketers Need To Know About Reddit in 2021
• How B2B Brands Can Boost Confidence in Livestream Video, Podcast and Clubhouse Marketing

5 — Let Casper Show That Not All Marketing Ghosts Are Ghoulish

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Every B2B marketer will eventually have one or more of the advertising ghosts we’ve looked at so far touch their lives and work, however these experiences don’t need to be sources of shame or distress.

Indeed, smart marketers are always learning from past haunted mistakes and sometimes-horrifying missteps, however as Casper the Friendly Ghost exemplified, it’s much better to embrace and own your unique history — warts and all — as it’s only through understanding what didn’t work that we can find what truly works the best.

Turning our marketing fears into successes and making learning a lifelong process is at the heart of the following pieces we’ve made available:

• 10 Horrifying Marketing Fears & How To Turn Them Into 2021 Successes
• What Can Marketers Learn From the Children In Our Lives? Plenty
• 5 Ways To Inspire Your Marketing With Gratitude

Send Marketing Cold Shoulders Back From Whence They Came

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By keeping Frankenstein’s disjointed efforts from your marketing, avoiding Dracula’s life-sucking bite, unwrapping mummified or mediocre marketing, and embracing our own haunted pasts like Casper, we can craft B2B marketing content that delights, informs, and drives business success.

No matter how you slice it, creating award-winning B2B marketing takes considerable time and effort, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Contact us today to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.

The post 5 Monstrous B2B Marketing Moves That Will Come Back To Haunt You appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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10 Actionable B2B Content Marketing Insights From New Research

Where is B2B content marketing headed in 2022 and beyond?

Continuing an impressive and time-tested marketing tradition, the recently-released twelfth annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research report from Content Marketing Institute (CMI), MarketingProfs, and ON24 offers up a bountiful array of insights for B2B content marketers, and helps us answer this key question and several others.

The 54-page 2021 edition provides a comprehensive look at how some of the top content marketers have been making an impact and achieving success during the past year, even with the unprecedented challenges we’ve all faced.

B2B content marketing is growing in importance, scope, and adoption by organizations of all sizes, and is poised to see further expansion in 2022 and beyond, as we’ll examine.

Let’s take a look at some of the insights and revelations from the research data that you can take action on and use today in your own B2B content marketing efforts, and include in your strategy for 2022 and well beyond.

1 — More B2B Content Marketing & Greater Success From Defined Strategies

The research’s own introduction summarizes as a key finding the significant success that content marketing has had in the B2B landscape over the past challenging year.

It should come as little surprise, as other recent research has also revealed that content-based business models are on the uptick, such as new report data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) contained in its latest “The Economic Impact of the Market Making Internet” study, published every four years.

The new IAB data showed that over half of all U.S. advertising and media employment is now derived from the Internet, with a healthy proliferation of business based on content creation — a fact that is backed up throughout much of CMI’s recent research.

Having a documented content marketing strategy is a basic yet vital factor seen in the most successful organizations, with 62 percent of the survey’s top performers having a defined strategy in place, compared to only 40 percent of all content marketers taking part in the study, while just 11 percent of the least successful performers said that they had a documented content marketing plan in place.

2 — More Successful B2B Organizations Outsource, Use Content Marketing Tools

A majority of the top marketers in the research — some 57 percent — say that their organization outsources some content marketing functions, a statistic that meshes with the importance of creating best-answer content, whether in-house or in the form of a top award-winning outside agency such as TopRank Marketing.

While only half of marketers who describe their organizations’ approach to content marketing as minimally or not at all successful say that they use content creation, calendaring, or collaborative workflow tools, a hefty 83 percent of the most successful organizations did make use of such technology, the report noted.

3 — Measurement, Creativity & Consistency Present In Top B2B Content Marketing

Another differentiator that places a stark contrast between the most and least successful content marketers is that 90 percent of the top performers have a program in place to measure the performance of content marketing efforts, while just 39 percent of the least successful organizations use such measurements.

Across the board, today’s B2B content marketers view 2022 with optimism for content marketing, as witnessed by 75 percent of those at the most successful organization who expect content marketing budgets to increase in 2022, with even 61 percent of those having the least success also expecting to spend more on content marketing next year.

The most successful firms utilizing content marketing tend to place a higher value on the attribute of creativity, a trait 92 percent of top content marketers said their organization sees as helping to craft successful content, while just 63 percent at lower-performing organizations strongly value such creativity in content marketing, the report noted.

Consistency has always been an important element of the process of content marketing, especially in the B2B landscape, however the new research shows just how key consistent customer experiences have become, with 81 percent of the most successful content marketers noting that their organization provides consistent content, while just 30 percent of those at the least successful firms remain consistent throughout the customer journey.

4 — Bolstering Customer Loyalty & Nurturing Audiences Are Key

Another glaring contrast between the most successful and the least successful B2B content marketers is how each utilizes content marketing to build customer loyalty and to nurture new leads or audiences, the research reveals.

78 percent of top performers make a point to use content marketing in loyalty-building programs targeting existing customers and clients, while only 34 percent of the least successful performers do.

64 percent of top performers use content marketing to nurture audiences, subscribers, or leads — a tactic that just 23 percent of the least successful organizations use.

[bctt tweet=”“B2B content marketing is growing in importance, scope, and adoption by organizations of all sizes, and is poised to see further expansion in 2022 and beyond.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]

5 — Empathy Allows B2B Marketers To Capture Greater Attention

The new research shows a general uptick in how content marketing has succeeded in capturing attention in the B2B realm even as competition has escalated as the pandemic has continued, and that the global health crisis has brought the practice of content marketing to more organizations, becoming an essential element to some.

Empathy has been a top concern when it comes to garnering that attention, the research also shows, a finding that we’ve emphasized, most recently in our senior content marketer Joshua Nite’s look at, “Why Empathy Matters More than Ever in B2B Content Marketing (And How to Get It Right).”

More than half of B2B content marketers in the new research said that over the past year it’s become more challenging to capture the attention of audiences.

6 — Video Investment In 2022 & A Different B2B Content Marketing Landscape

As I covered recently in our weekly Friday TopRank Marketing B2B marketing industry news, 69 percent of B2B content marketers said that they view video as a top area of 2022 investment, according to the new research.

Some 77 percent of B2B content marketers said that their content marketing strategy was different now compared to how it operated prior to the pandemic, with 4 percent noting an extreme difference, 15 percent who said it was very different, 22 percent who noted that it had differed slightly, and 36 percent who’ve noted a moderate difference in strategy.

7 — Large & SMB Organizations Benefit From B2B Content Marketing

CMI’s research pointed out that successful B2B content marketing helps organizations of all sizes achieve successful marketing outcomes.

From smaller B2B organizations that saw 27 percent of marketers in their ranks report high levels of content marketing success, to 30 percent from those at large companies, content marketing was seen a bringing success due to the value that it provides regardless of organizational size.

In 2021 75 percent of B2B marketers working at larger firms said that their organization utilized outsourcing, up from some 71 percent in 2019 — and even more tellingly, up significantly from last year’s 61 percent, the CMI research has noted.

8 — Putting Audience Needs & Journey Stages First

87 percent of the most successful B2B content marketers said that their firms focus on putting the needs of their audience ahead of their own organizations’ sales or promotional messaging, compared to only 41 percent of those from businesses with the least successful content marketing efforts, the research showed.

Similarly, 62 percent of those at top performers noted their organization crafted content with an eye towards the specific stages of buyer journeys, with just 17 percent of low performers taking these element into account in their efforts.

9 — Virtual Events, Research & Blog Posts Are Primary Elements

Today’s B2B marketers have more variety and choices than ever when it comes to the elements that can be used in content marketing, however certain digital assets have performed better than others.

The B2B content assets producing the best results over the past year include virtual events, research reports, blog posts under 3,000 words, eBooks and whitepapers, and the venerable case study, all ranking above video in the new research.

The nearly exponential increase in both the variety and volume of digital assets B2B content marketers are using every day now makes it more important than ever to accurately keep track of vast amounts of content, which is why more B2B firms are also taking a look at an implementing digital asset management solutions, as I explored recently in “Optimizing Digital Assets: How B2B Marketers Can Combine the Best of External & Internal Search Findability.”

10 — Content Marketing Hits Multiple B2B Targets

Finally, with all of these increasingly important B2B content marketing elements coming together to form a cohesive strategy, the CMI research has shown the top goals content marketing has brought to organizations from small or large.

80 percent of B2B content marketers said their organization’s content marketing efforts created brand awareness, with 75 percent noting it built brand credibility and increased trust, while 70 percent found content marketing successful in educating their audiences.

Additional benefits achieved by content marketing were greater loyalty among existing clients and customers, lead generation and nurturing, and content marketing’s ability to successfully drive attendance to virtual, in-person, or hybrid events.

Blast Off By Turning B2B Content Marketing Insights Into Action

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The 10-plus insights we’ve shared here can help propel your own B2B content marketing efforts to new heights in 2022 and beyond.

In order to help you further all aspects of your B2B content marketing strategy, here are five bonus articles we’ve recently published, each exploring how to craft successful best-answer content:

• Top 25 B2B Content Marketing Influencers and Experts To Follow
• Equilibrium: 10 Tips to Balance Creativity and Process in B2B Content Marketing
• 5 Tips for Promoting B2B Content Co-Created with Influencers
• 6 Timeless SEO Tips Content Marketers Can Do Now
• Write from the Heart for More Memorable B2B Content Marketing

Content marketing takes on added scope and potential for greater and more authentic audience connections when it joins with B2B influencer marketing, an area our CEO Lee Odden explored recently in an episode of our Inside B2B Influence podcast featuring Brian Solis, global innovation evangelist at Salesforce, “Inside B2B Influence: Brian Solis of Salesforce on the Future of Influence in B2B Marketing.”

No matter how you tilt it, creating award-winning B2B content marketing takes considerable time and effort, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Contact us today to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.

The post 10 Actionable B2B Content Marketing Insights From New Research appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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B2B Marketing News: B2B Digital Ad Spending Grows, Google Adds Knowledge Graphs For Podcasts, Instagram’s New Creator Features, & Gen Z Engagement Study Insights

IAB Projects 8% Growth In 2022 Digital Ad Spend, Warns About ‘Bad’ Ad Experiences
U.S. digital advertising spending is expected to see 8 percent growth during 2022 to reach $165.4 billion, and topping the $200 billion mark by 2025 — increases from 2020’s $139.8 billion, according to newly-released forecast data of interest to digital marketers. MediaPost

Podcasts Google Knowledge Panels Go Live
Google has added podcasts to the services that can have extended visibility Knowledge Panels among the search firm’s result pages, giving B2B marketers who utilize podcasts a potential new promotion opportunity, in a recent rollout from the search giant. SEO Roundtable

Advertising No Longer The Least-Trusted Profession, But Not By Much
Recently-released survey data shows that although advertising executives no longer rank as the least trusted profession, ad professionals are still seen by both U.S. and global audiences as having significant ground to make up when it comes to being seen as trustworthy, as doctors, scientists, and teachers were seen as being in the most trusted professions. MediaPost

IndexNow – Instantly Index your web content in Search Engines
Microsoft’s Bing has released a new indexing protocol and related third-party integration API — created in conjunction with search engine Yext — which allows for more complete indexing of websites, content management systems, and content delivery networks, Bing recently announced. Bing

Twitter Announces New #TwitterPrism Initiative to Maximize Inclusion within Advertising
Twitter has begun a diversity and inclusion initiative aimed at marketing partners, with its new #TwitterPrism program to help brands with programs including Cultural Context workshops and co-creation opportunities that bring together diverse creators and marketers, Twitter recently announced. Social Media Today

Reddit Brings Back View Counts in Post Insights
Social news aggregator and discussion platform Reddit has returned counts of how many times posts have been viewed, a metric the firm removed 2018 as it faced growth and scaling challenges. The return of view counts will be joined by additional new content view analytics information Reddit is looking to roll out to its 430-plus million average monthly active users, the firm recently announced. Adweek

B2B Exhibition Industry Performance Improves in Q2; Only 2 in 3 Events Cancelled
Overall combined physical and virtual B2B event industry performance has begun to see a rebound from 2020’s pandemic-led low point, with fewer exhibitions cancelling events, according to recently-released survey data from the Center of Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR). MarketingCharts

Instagram adds scheduling and ‘practice mode’ features for Live creators
Facebook’s Instagram social media platform has added the ability to pre-schedule content up to 90 days in advance, and a new connection-testing mode, two of several new features the firm has launched surrounding its Live creators feature, Instagram recently announced. TechCrunch

Twitter Shares New Insights into Gen Z Usage and Engagement
Some 70 percent of Gen Z Twitter users have said that they use the platform’s app to learn about new products — one of several statistics of interest to digital marketers contained in new report data from Twitter exploring how brands can connect to Gen Z using its platform. Social Media Today

eMarketer’s B2B Advertising Forecast 2021: 6 Key Insights & Revelations
Technology and financial services top the list of industries when it comes to B2B advertising spending, with tech products and services accounting for some 32 percent and FinServ 25 percent — two of numerous statistics of interest to B2B marketers contained in recent advertising forecast data. LinkedIn (client)

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at the “types of creative brief” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Q&A With Adobe’s Brian Glover: The New Era Of CX Initiatives — Demand Gen Report

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — Influencer Marketing for B2B [Podcast] — Digital Marketing Institute
• Lee Odden — The Top Content Marketers: 64 Influential & Educational Content Marketing Accounts You Should Be Following — Content Hacker
• Nick Nelson — 10 Tips for Finding Your Way as a New Entrepreneur — Small Business Trends

Have you found your own top B2B marketing news from the past week of industry news? Please drop us a line in the comments below.

Thanks for taking the time to join us for this week’s TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope that you will return again next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us on our LinkedIn page, or at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.

The post B2B Marketing News: B2B Digital Ad Spending Grows, Google Adds Knowledge Graphs For Podcasts, Instagram’s New Creator Features, & Gen Z Engagement Study Insights appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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Why Empathy Matters More than Ever in B2B Content Marketing (And How to Get It Right)

B2B marketers, ready for some TRUTH BOMBS?

Here we go: We need to make our content more human and more empathetic. B2B content doesn’t have to be boring; in fact, it can’t be boring and be effective. B2B buyers are just people — we need to talk to them like people.

Are you blown away by the depth and breadth of my insight? Ready to book me at your next marketing conference?

Okay, all sarcasm aside: We all have heard the old “B2Me” speech a dozen times. I’m not here to give it to you again.

Instead, I want to get deeper into the specifics of what it means to be empathetic and provide value with content.

I say this because, despite the hours of keynote speeches on the topic, B2B marketers are still coming up short. In a recent poll, 79% of buyers surveyed said they were served irrelevant content.

Your buyers need to make informed decisions and they crave intelligent direction. But a lot of them aren’t getting it.

Why Empathetic Content Matters Now More than Ever

Most B2B buyers are feeling the crunch right now. They’re looking to bounce back from the pandemic — many with newly-structured workforces and processes. They need to create momentum, establish a productive new normal, and roll with the changes that have been forced on every business.

And for most, they need to do all of the above within tight budgetary constraints and increased executive oversight.

In short, the pressure’s on to make the right decisions and champion change. Stagnating isn’t an option. 

To cope with these issues, B2B buyers rely on content that is trustworthy, helpful and informative. The brand that can become a trusted advisor is far more likely to win the business.

But when it comes to relevant, empathetic content, we’re talking about more than stat sheets, white papers or case studies. 

Three Key Elements of Successful Content

It can seem like marketing’s goals for content and buyers’ goals for reading it are at cross purposes. Marketers are trying to prompt action; buyers are trying to get information. In reality, though, the two goals go together fine. Informative content can provoke action, if it’s done right.

Truly valuable content should be:

• 1 — Helpful. First and foremost. But it’s important to define what “helpful” means. Helping means giving the reader information that can help them improve their working life. What information can you give that will make your reader better at their job? Or help them impress their boss, get promoted, or round out their skill set? A recent dispatch from Google put it this way: “People report that helpfulness is their top expectation of brands since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 78% saying a brand’s advertising should show how it can be helpful in everyday life.”

• 2 — Audience-Focused. Too often, marketing content starts with a brand’s product or service, and reverse-engineers it to fit the audience’s pain points. “Our product does X, therefore we need to prove that audiences need X, create that demand and then CTA to a demo.” But truly empathetic content is the other way around. It’s not centered on just the problem set that your solution can solve — it’s looking at the audience holistically.

• 3 — Purposeful. Consumers are growing more concerned with making sure brands’ values match their own, and the same is true for B2B buyers. Truly empathetic content helps the audience see their ideals reflected in your brand. A genuine expression of your brands’ values can help define who your customers are and start establishing a relationship.

[bctt tweet=”“Truly empathetic content helps the audience see their ideals reflected in your brand. A genuine expression of your brands’ values can help define who your customers are and start establishing a relationship.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites” username=”toprank”]

How to Improve your Content’s Empathy Quotient

So how do you make sure your content is helpful, focused on the audience, and purposeful? It doesn’t happen by accident. Here’s how our agency makes sure that our content passes the test.

• 1 — Keyword Research. People used to think of keyword research as a way to see how to convince search algorithms that their content was worthwhile. Now we know better: Keywords are an indicator of buyer intent. They tell us what people are searching for, what they need, and how they put that need into words. Keyword research is more than an “SEO play.” It’s foundational for creating helpful content.

• 2 — Content Architecture. Your brand should have content available for each stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to action to advocacy. The best way to make sure you have all the stages covered is to include it in your content planning. Aim for a mix that balances the top, mid and bottom of the funnel, with plenty of content to cover each.

• 3 — Organizational Data. Marketers should be using their internal customer data to guide content creation, but shouldn’t stop there. Your sales department have invaluable data about frequently asked questions, buyer behavior, demographics and more. Customer service can tell you what features customers value, what they need help with, and so on. Bringing in data from other departments will help you see the buyer as a whole person, not just a marketing audience.

• 4 — Influencer Contributions. Buyers want to see themselves and their ideals reflected in your content. When you co-create with influencers that your buyers already follow and trust, it’s easier to show how your brand is the right fit. In addition to the other plentiful benefits of influencer marketing, the way it helps establish credibility is a key component.

[bctt tweet=”“Your brand should have content available for each stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to action to advocacy. The best way to make sure you have all the stages covered is to include it in your content planning.” @NiteWrites” username=”toprank”]

Don’t Be Content with Unempathetic Content

B2B marketers have heard for years about how content needs to be engaging, entertaining, informative, and never boring. At the heart of all of these considerations, however, is that content needs to put the audience first. It needs to be based on a deep understanding of what your potential customers need and desire, and it must demonstrate your brand’s values and how they align with your audience.

In our neverending quest for more awesome content, empathy should be our guiding light and driving force.

Need help with your content? We’re here for you.

The post Why Empathy Matters More than Ever in B2B Content Marketing (And How to Get It Right) appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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Autumn of Search: In-Person & Virtual SEO Events for B2B Marketers

What are some of the top autumn B2B search marketing conferences that will take place in virtual, in-person, and hybrid fashion?

As we close in on 2022, more physical marketing events are taking place than were available last year, while others either offer a hybrid online option or are still digital-only experiences.

To help you sort out the many B2B marketing conference options available this fall, we’ve compiled our latest list of the top B2B marketing events to elevate and inform your business strategy, with a special focus on events in the search marketing and SEO space, while still including several general B2B marketing events that feature search industry elements.

Marketing conferences offer a true wealth of benefits to marketers seeking the latest learning, new networking opportunities, and the latest industry research and insight to increase brand awareness, but sometimes finding events that match your business and B2B search marketing needs can be challenging.

In just the last decade the number of conferences has risen drastically, making it harder than ever to hone in on the ones that can best help build your business, boost your networking opportunities, and offer the most relevant new industry education from top speakers, especially in world of B2B search marketing.

For this autumn we’ve gathered together events that place an emphasis on B2B search marketing in all its facets, and are happy to present them here, in chronological order. All events are virtual except where noted.

[bctt tweet=”“We’re all the same size rectangle on the Zoom screen.” — Vanessa Colella of @Citi” username=”toprank”]

Kick back and dig in to our collection of the top B2B search marketing and other B2B-related conferences and events taking place as we head towards 2022.

Autumn B2B Search Marketing Conferences to Inform & Elevate Your Strategy

Advertising Week New York — #AWNewYork
When: October 18-21, 2021
Where: New York City and virtual
Theme: Marketing & Sales
About: For 2021 a hybrid Advertising Week New York event will serve as a worldwide gathering of marketing, advertising, technology and brand professionals, offering major speakers including Amazon vice president of global brand and marketing Claudine Cheever, IBM Watson Advertising head of product marketing Lauren Lee and others. Kate Stanford, Google vice president for Ads Marketing will explore delivering empathy at scale and more, and is just one of six presenters from Google taking part in the event.

The Influencer Marketing Show — #IMSLONDON21
When: October 21, 2021
Where: London, UK. and virtual
Theme: Influencer Marketing
About: An in-person event in London, The Influencer Marketing Show offers brands, agencies, content creators and technology platforms a full day on influencer marketing education and strategy, with top speakers including Becky Owen, head of branded content – Creative Shop at Facebook, Madeline Orme, influencer strategist at Edelman, and others.

NOVEMBER

State of Search Conference — #StateOfSearch2021
When: November 1, 2021
Theme: Search Marketing
About: The one-day virtual State of Search Conference is set to explore search marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), and other search elements of digital marketing, featuring a variety of top industry speakers.

AI Summit Silicon Valley — #AISummit
When: November 2-4, 2021
Where: Santa Clara, CA.
Theme: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
About: Expected to take place in-personal, the 2021 version of AI Summit Silicon Valley presents all things artificial intelligence for business marketers, and includes leading speakers from AT&T, Xerox, HPE, IBM Services, Microsoft, Google and more, providing looks at modernizing the search stack using AI and other topics.

B2B Marketing virtual ABM Conference — #B2BMarketingABM
When: November 2-4, 2021
Where: London, UK and virtual
Theme: Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in B2B Marketing
About: The hybrid 2021 B2B Marketing ABM Conference is aimed at a deep-dive into the world of ABM for B2B marketers, with four content streams and three days of learning on-tap, and speakers from firms such as Autodesk, Dow Jones, Ericsson, and Panasonic, including sessions exploring intent data and more.

SEMrush Webinar — #SEMrush
When: November 4, 2021
Theme: Purpose-Driven Content & SEO
About: SEMrush’s November 4 webinar will examine the purpose-driven side of content and search optimization, with an eye towards driving organic search traffic and conversions, presented by Dale Bertrand, president at Fire&Spark.

Pubcon — #Pubcon
Where: Las Vegas, NV.
When: November 5, 2021
Theme: Search & Social
About: Now in its 21st year, Pubcon explores all aspects of search and social marketing, with this year’s old-school style single-day Pubcon Las Vegas offering a special focus on recent seismic changes in search engine marketing and optimization, with Pubcon’s famous industry networking opportunities.

SMX Next— #SMX
When: November 9-10, 2021
Theme: Search Engine Marketing
About: SMX Next explores actionable tactics to overcome today’s many search marketing obstacles, with session tracks dedicated to pay-per-click (PPC), SEO, link-building, and more, delivered by speakers including Microsoft senior director of product marketing Katy Hunter and Barry Schwartz, SEO editor at Search Engine Land.

DECEMBER / TBD / On-Demand / 2022

AdExchanger Industry Preview — #IP2021
When: On-Demand
Theme: MarTech
About: For 2021 AdExchanger’s Industry Preview is in podcast form, an annual global forum for marketing technology from AI to search and more, focused on what to expect in MarTech this year, with featured speakers from Axios, IBM, Amazon and others.

SMX Build— #SMX
When: December 14, 2021
Theme: Search Engine Marketing
About: SMX Build explores technical aspects of search optimization and SEO-friendly coding, with session tracks dedicated to discussion and live-coding examples, delivered by speakers to be announced.

The ABM Innovation Summit — #ABMSummit
When: TBD, 2021
Theme: Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
About: The ABM Innovation Summit explores account-based marketing’s role in B2B marketing and sales, with an eye towards the future. Last year’s event featured top speakers from firms including SAP, Salesforce, and Uberflip.

B2B Marketing Expo — #B2BMarketingExpoUSA
When: April 6-7, 2022
Where: Los Angeles, CA.
Theme: B2B Marketing
About: One of Europe’s top marketing events will bring its B2B Marketing Expo to California in 2022, expected to offer over 200 sessions, industry awards, and keynotes from top speakers from the American Marketing Association, EMRG, and others, including sessions dedicated to demystifying SEO and more.

Social Media Marketing World — #SMMW22
When: March 14-16, 2022
Where: San Diego, CA.
Theme: Social Media
About: Social Media Marketing World postponed its 2021 event and will hold an in-person conference in March, 2022, with a deep-dive into social media marketing focusing on new ideas and quality networking opportunities, including top presenters.

SearchLove 2021 — #SearchLove
When: March 24-25, 2022
Where: San Diego, CA. and virtual
Theme: Search Marketing
About: SearchLove provides a multi-day event focusing on search marketing for in-house and agency search engine optimizers, business owners, marketing managers and more, featuring top speakers including SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin, Moz’ Britney Muller, and The Nature Conservancy’s Lindsay Mineo.

DigiMarCon Midwest — #DigiMarCon
When: June 9-10, 2022
Where: Chicago, IL. and virtual
Theme: Marketing & Sales
About: Now pushed out to 2022, the in-person or online DigiMarCon Midwest digital marketing conference offers up emerging strategies on paid search, search engine optimization (SEO), visual and voice search, plus the latest innovative technologies and best practices to move your business to the next level, featuring top speakers to be announced.

Email Innovations Summit — #EISConf
When: June 21-22, 2022
Where: Las Vegas, NV. and virtual
Theme: Email Marketing
About: As its name implies, the Email Innovations Summit focuses on the email aspects of marketing, discussing the cutting edge of email marketing trends and featuring top speakers from leading firms to be announced.

MozCon — #MozCon
When: July 11-13, 2022
Where: Seattle, WA. and virtual
Theme: SEO and Search Marketing
About: MozCon will take place in Seattle over three days in July in 2022, exploring the latest search, SEO, conversion marketing, and local search marketing trends, featuring top speakers from leading firms to be announced.

INBOUND 2022 — #INBOUND2022
When: TBD, 2022
Theme: Marketing & Sales
About: INBOUND 2022 will present some of the biggest names and brightest minds in sales and marketing and other industries, and offers speakers from firms including Intuit, HubSpot and others. Past sessions have focused on SEO strategies derived from product design methodology and more.

B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange — #B2BSMX
When: TBD, 2022
Theme: Marketing & Sales
About: B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange brings together thought leaders in ABM, revenue marketing and demand generation, including an array of top speakers.

Get Search Marketing Events On Your Radar

via GIPHY

We hope you’ve found several new and helpful virtual, in-person, and hybrid B2B search marketing events to put on your radar and attend this autumn, and that the networking and industry learning you’ll experience from either these conferences or the many others available will help you reach newfound levels of B2B marketing success in 2022 and well beyond.

Crafting award-winning B2B marketing takes considerable time and effort, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Talk with us about how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.

The post Autumn of Search: In-Person & Virtual SEO Events for B2B Marketers appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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B2B Marketing News: B2B Tech Spending Rises, Twitter’s New Ad Features, Marketers See Diversity Progress, & New B2B Content Marketing Study

New Research: 86% Of B2B Software Buyers Rely On Third-Party Reviews When Making A Purchase Decision
55 percent of B2B buyers have said that their technology spending will rise during 2022, while some 86 percent of buyers look to online peer-review sites before making purchase decisions — two of several statistics of interest to digital marketers contained in recently-released survey data. Demand Gen Report

The future of events: B2B marketers weigh in-person vs. virtual attendance
73 percent of B2B marketers who are primarily focusing on physical events also plan to still attend virtual ones, with some 55 percent noting that in-person events will play a large role in their strategy, according to newly-released report data. SmartBrief

Oracle and Microsoft Introduce Enhanced AI Capabilities for Customer Data Platforms
New personalization and data gathering technology that come in the form of digital streaming are part of the latest addition from Oracle’s CX Unity customer data platform (CDP), while Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform is slated to gain new insights from a combination of client website, mobile app, and other data, the firms recently announced . Chief Marketer

Twitter to sell mobile ad unit MoPub for $1 bln
Twitter will sell its MoPub mobile advertising company, which it acquired in 2013 for some $350 million, to AppLovin Corp for more than $1 billion, as Twitter places greater emphasis on new products aimed at doubling its revenue by 2023, the firm recently announced. Reuters

YouTube Tests New ‘Engagement Graph’ Insights on Videos, Adds New Member Acknowledgement Feature
Google’s YouTube video platform is set to give live streamers an array of new tools for recognizing long-standing channel subscribers, along with additional options for viewing user engagement data and more, in its latest update, YouTube recently announced. Social Media Today

Global marketers are making headway with improving diversity in campaigns
Some 63 percent of global marketers have said that advertising campaigns featuring diverse people played a significant role in content decisions, with 34 percent having noted that an accurate representation of the world we live in was the most important objective for marketing campaign content — two of several statistics of interest to online marketers contained in recently-released survey data. The Drum

Twitter debuts new ad features, revamped algorithm ahead of ecommerce push
Twitter has launched a variety of new advertising options for digital marketers, including slide-show ads capable of linking to multiple destination landing pages or websites, along with updating how it matches relevant ads with users of the social platform, Twitter recently announced. Reuters

Snap Has More Advertisers On The Platform Than Ever Before
Snapchat has launched new features targeted at brands and advertisers utilizing the platform, along with a new augmented reality (AR) partnership, both part of Snap’s focus on attracting additional new advertising to the social destination. B&T

Instagram Adds Reels Ads into its Marketing API
Facebook-owned Instagram has launched features that will ease the process brands go through to incorporate advertising within its Reels short-form vertical video format, with the roll-out of a new Instagram Marketing API, the firm recently announced. Social Media Today

B2B Content Marketing Insights for 2022: More Budget, More Work, More Empathy [Research]
69 percent of B2B content marketers said that they view video as a top area of 2022 investment, while some 77 percent said that their B2B content marketing strategy was different now compared to how it was prior to the pandemic — two of numerous statistics of interest to B2B marketers contained in newly-released study data. Content Marketing Institute

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at the “we value your privacy” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Earth’s Unicorn Population Is Exploding — Wired

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lane R. Ellis — 10 Tips for Stretching Your Budget When Growing a Small Business — Small Business Trends
• TopRank Marketing — Leading Influencer Marketing Agencies for 2021 (Updated) — Influencer Marketing Hub
• Boomi — Boomi Positioned as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise iPaaS for the Eighth Year — Boomi (client)

Have you found your own favorite B2B marketing news item from the past week of industry news? Please drop us a line in the comments below.

Thank you for joining us for this week’s TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope that you’ll return next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us on our LinkedIn page, or at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.

The post B2B Marketing News: B2B Tech Spending Rises, Twitter’s New Ad Features, Marketers See Diversity Progress, & New B2B Content Marketing Study appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers, Experts and Speakers To Follow In 2022

The business landscape of 2021 includes a wealth of B2B influencers who are shaping the future of marketing for 2022 and beyond.

To honor and celebrate our industry’s B2B marketing subject matter experts, including many who happen to be speaking at this week’s MarketingProfs B2B Forum virtual event, we’re thrilled to publish our annual list of some of the world’s leading B2B marketing influencers.

Each year MarketingProfs B2B Forum is filled to the brim with the latest insightful B2B marketing tactics and strategies presented by a powerhouse lineup of exceptional B2B influencers, and this year is no different.

MPB2B will take place October 13 – 14, 2021 and features a stellar group of B2B marketing professionals the programming team at MPB2B has carefully assembled, in an updated virtual format designed to bring you all the freshest industry knowledge without any of the screen fatigue.

In the spirit of helping B2B marketing professionals learn more and connect with new voices, we’ve compiled our latest list of B2B marketing influencers — many who will be speaking at #MPB2B — to follow and learn from in 2022 and beyond.

List Methodology — Relevance Rules: Our starting point for this year’s list is a focus on the increasing value of resonance in today’s B2B marketing landscape, highlighting influencers with audiences that actively engage with their content centered around the practice of B2B marketing.

Today’s B2B marketing influencers face greater expectations for sharing content than ever, and the experts on our list all rate especially well when it comes to audience engagement and resonance.

Using a variety of ranking signals, we’ve identified and validated the credentials of a powerful group of B2B marketing experts, utilizing influencer marketing platform Traackr along with other metrics.

Our list this year highlights the increasing importance of resonance over mere follower numbers, as audience size itself is not a predictor of a successful outcome, and we’ve also placed increased importance on the degree to which each influencer’s social activity drives engagement on the topic of B2B marketing among their audience.

A variety of criteria go into such a ranking, including:

• Audience resonance
• Topical relevance of the content each influencer publishes
• Network engagement with on-topic content

Online data for these rankings is pulled not only from Twitter, but also from blogs, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, and several other platforms — an important item to know, as many lists rely entirely on Twitter and don’t take into account relevant influencer activity from additional platforms in the social media universe.

Many thanks go out to each of these generous B2B marketing influencers who provide top-notch B2B marketing best practices, tips, and advice during this year unlike any other.

In our list for 2021 you’ll likely see a few familiar faces, along with many new B2B marketing industry influencers, together forming a refreshing mix of professionals to follow and learn from into 2022 and beyond.

If you’d like to follow all 50 top B2B marketers in one shot, we’ve made a handy Twitter list for you. Enjoy!

Ann Handley @MarketingProfs
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: KICKOFF KEYNOTE

Michael J. Barber @michaeljbarber
Brand Consultant and Marketing Strategist

Andy Crestodina @crestodina
Co-Founder & CMO, Orbit Media Studios
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: Start Here: The (Non-Obvious) Prioritized Framework for Digital Marketing

David Meerman Scott @dmscott
Limited Partner and Strategic Advisor, Stage 2 Capital

Melanie Deziel @mdeziel
Chief Content Officer, StoryFuel

Margaret Molloy @MargaretMolloy
Global Chief Marketing Officer, Siegel+Gale

Jason Miller @JasonMillerCA
Senior Director, Brand Marketing, CampaignX

David Berkowitz @dberkowitz
Marketing Consultant, Serial Marketer

Joe Pulizzi @JoePulizzi
Joe Pulizzi, The Tilt

Stefan Doering @MrStefanDoe
Brand Strategy Lead, PwC

Lee Odden @LeeOdden
CEO, TopRank Marketing
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: The State of B2B Influencer Marketing

Mark Schaefer @markwschaefer
Executive Director, Schaefer Marketing Solutions

Christopher Penn @cspenn
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist, Trust Insights
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: What, Why, and How: Analytics Foundations of B2B Marketing

Justin Levy @justinlevy
Director, Social and Influencer Marketing, Demandbase

Larry Kim @larrykim
Founder, MobileMonkey

Amisha Gandhi @AmishaGandhi
SVP, Marketing, Tipalti

Ashley Faus @ashleyfaus
Content Strategy Lead, Software Teams, Atlassian

Tom Webster @webby2001
Vice President, Strategy and Marketing, Edison Research

Dave Gerhardt @davegerhardt
Chief Brand Officer, Drift

Cara Hogan @CaraHogan27
VP of Enterprise Marketing, Tomorrow.io

Mary Ellen Slayter @MESlayter
CEO, Rep Cap

Jay McBain @jmcbain
Principal Analyst – Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems, Forrester

Juntae DeLane @JuntaeDeLane
Founder & Chief Strategist, Digital Delane
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: Five Ways to Readjust Your Digital Marketing Plans for 2022

Jay Baer @jaybaer
Founder, Convince & Convert

Justin Keller @justinkeller
Vice President of Marketing, Terminus

Peter Isaacson @peisaacson
Chief Marketing Officer, Replicant

Pam Didner @PamDidner
Sales Enablement & Content Marketing Keynote Speaker, Relentless Pursuit
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: KEYNOTE with Pam Didner: It’s Time to Crush Your Campaign Plan

Joel Harrison @joel_b2beditor
Editor-in-Chief, B2B Marketing

Justin Rondeau @Jtrondeau
Head of Growth & Acquisition, Teamwork

Scott Monty @ScottMonty
Communications Executive, Chameleon Collective

Ashley Zeckman @azeckman
Vice President, Inprela Communications
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: The SCHITT’s Method for More Successful B2B Influencer Marketing

Chris Moody @cnmoody
Senior Directory, Analyst, Gartner

Corinne Sklar @csklar
Chief Marketing Officer, IBM iX

Jeannie Walters @jeanniecw
CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator, Experience Investigators
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: Three Universal Truths about Customer Experience

Jen Spencer @jenspencer
Chief Revenue Officer, SmartBug Media

John Jantsch @ducttape
Founder & President, Duct Tape Marketing
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: Rethinking the Customer Journey

Justin Gray @Jgraymatter
CEO & Founder, LeadMD

Kathleen Booth @WorkMommyWork
Chief Marketing Officer, clean.io

Maureen Blandford @MaureenB2B
Managing Director, B2B Unleashed

Melissa Ariana Case @startabuzz
Director of Content & Communications, ControlUp

Oli Gardner @oligardner
Co-Founder, Unbounce
#MPB2B Speaker, Presenting: KEYNOTE with Oli Gardner: The Marketing IQ Manifesto

Charlie Riley @Charlieriley
VP of Growth, Havoc Shield

Joe Chernov @jchernov
Chief Marketing Officer, Pendo.io

Matthew T Grant @MattTGrant
Director, Content Marketing, LeanIX

Gemma Davies @gdavies2
Senior Director, Head of Global ABM & CXO Engagement, Service Now

Gopi Kallayil @GopiKallayil
Chief Evangelist, Digital Transformation and Strategy, Google

Kelvin Gee @kgee
Head of Strategic Client Marketing, Central Programs, Oracle

Masha Finkelstein @masha3003
Marketing Technology Innovation and Best Practices, Intuit

Sangram Vajre @sangramvajre
Chief Evangelist & Co-Founder, Terminus

Tyrona Heath @tyrona
Director, Market Engagement, The B2B Institute, LinkedIn

BONUS: In addition to this list of 50 B2B marketing über-smarties, here is a list of some of our most insightful articles about B2B content marketing from the past 12 months:

• Inside B2B Influence: Brian Solis of Salesforce on the Future of Influence in B2B Marketing
• Top 25 B2B Content Marketing Influencers and Experts To Follow
• Inside B2B Influence: Sarita Rao of AT&T on Growing B2B Executive Influence with Social Media
• Equilibrium: 10 Tips to Balance Creativity and Process in B2B Content Marketing
• How Influencers & Best Answer Content Help B2B Marketers Dominate in Search
• 5 Tips for Promoting B2B Content Co-Created with Influencers

And here are the previous B2B marketing influencer lists we’ve published:

• B2B Marketing Influencers to Follow in 2020
• B2B Marketing Influencers to Follow in 2019
• B2B Marketing Influencers to Follow in 2018
• B2B Marketing Influencers to Follow in 2017

Thank you to influencer marketing platform Traackr for the use of their software to make this list possible, and to all of the top-notch influencers on the list.

Be sure to connect with TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden at the virtual #MPB2B conference,as he presents “The State of B2B Influencer Marketing” on Thursday, October 14 at 11:50 a.m. Eastern, and stay tuned for more B2B marketing industry coverage here on TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog.

The post 50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers, Experts and Speakers To Follow In 2022 appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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B2B Marketing News: B2B Content Consumption Rises, LinkedIn’s Ticketed Events, New Google Spending Report, & Microsoft’s Zero-Party Data

B2B Purchasers Are Consuming More Content Before Buying
60 percent of B2B buyers find value in receiving relevant information throughout the purchasing journey, while half say that they are consuming more marketing content before making purchases than they did before 2020 — two of several statistics of interest to digital marketers contained in recently-released survey data. MediaPost

LinkedIn is testing a new, paid ticketed events service Comments Feed
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn (client) has tested new paid event features hosted on the professional network’s platform, which would expand on its events hub and other virtual event offerings, and TechCruch takes a look at how the addition may help event organizers. TechCrunch

Amid Growing Reliance, How Will Marketers Enhance Their First-Party Data?
Some 63 percent of advertisers say that growing marketing email lists from newsletters is a top choice when it comes to growing first-party data, while 60 percent see website and app visitation behavior and social media activity as the best ways to gather first-party information, according to newly-released survey data. MarketingCharts

New Google Ads Budget Report Tracks Daily Campaign Spend
Google has rolled out a selection of new visual monthly spending reports for Google Ads campaigns, highlighting daily and monthly budgeting spending, limits, and forecast data, the search giant recently announced. Search Engine Journal

Microsoft Advertising Pushes Reliance On Zero-Party Data
Microsoft is increasingly looking at the digital data that people willingly share online, with its latest Microsoft Advertising offering incorporating what it calls zero-party data, voluntarily shared information the firm makes use of for increased transparency and control, Microsoft recently announced. MediaPost

Instagram ditches the IGTV brand, combines everything but Reels into an ‘Instagram Video’ format
Facebook’s Instagram has ended its IGTV brand, in a change that also brings a new video tab with more long form video options to the platform, allowing some video content up to an hour in length to be shared, the firm recently announced. TechCrunch

Google search’s next phase: context is king
Google’s latest shift in its search engine evolution has come in the form of its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update, the firm announced recently at its Search On event, and The Verge takes a look at how the update works to deliver more context-rich answers within search results. The Verge

New Spotify campaign aims to prick up ears of advertisers
With podcast advertising revenue expected to top $2.4 billion in the U.S. alone by 2025, Spotify has rolled out an initiative highlighting the power of deeply immersed listening audiences to bring more advertisers to its platform, Spotify recently announced. The Drum

TikTok reached 1 billion monthly active users
Short-form video creation firm TikTok has surpassed the one billion active monthly user milestone — a mark that the firm hopes will attract greater numbers of B2B brands, with the platform’s top markets being the U.S., Europe, and Brazil, TikTok recently announced. https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reached-1-billion-monthly-active-users/

What Happens on the Internet Every Minute (2021 Version) [Infographic]
What happens during each digital minute online in 2021 is the focus of the ninth-annual “Data Never Sleeps” report in infographic form, showing Internet population and social platform use growth and other insights of interest to digital marketers, Domo recently announced. Social Media Today

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at the “pain in the supply chain” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

They Said It at the ANA Brand Masters — ANA

Workplace Hero Unmutes Microphone to Laugh — The Hard Times

9 Best Youtube Ads of 2021 and 2020 — HubSpot

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — Webinar: How to Create Marketing Impact with Business Influencers — Digital Marketing Institute
• Lee Odden — How Companies Can Use Digital Brand Ambassadors for B2B Influencer Marketing — MarketingProfs
• LinkedIn — What’s Trending: Excel at Both Halves of Content Marketing — LinkedIn (client)

Have you come across your own top B2B marketing news item from the past week of industry news? Please drop us a line in the comments below.

Thanks for visiting and having a look at this week’s TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope that you’ll return again next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us on our LinkedIn page, or at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.

The post B2B Marketing News: B2B Content Consumption Rises, LinkedIn’s Ticketed Events, New Google Spending Report, & Microsoft’s Zero-Party Data appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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Optimizing Digital Assets: How B2B Marketers Can Combine the Best of External & Internal Search Findability

How can B2B marketers optimize a digital asset workflow that combines best practices for search findability both externally and within your organization?

With the global Digital Asset Management (DAM) market valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2025, according to study data from IMARC, it’s little wonder that more B2B marketers are looking at and utilizing solutions that help with search findability. Another recent report shows that the global DAM market size is expected to climb to $10.2 billion by 2027, representing a rise of 18.3 percent from 2021 levels.

From better external search engine findability to increased internal search efficiency, let’s take a look at just what digital assets are, and explore some of the solutions B2B marketers are using to manage ever-expanding digital content.

What Are Digital Assets In B2B Marketing

Just what is a digital asset, anyhow?

As we first explored in Why B2B Marketers Should Give a DAM: Top Tips on Digital Asset Management, digital assets are simply any computer files, stored anywhere — whether on your phone, tablet, desktop, network, or in the cloud.

Digital Asset Management — known as DAM, is a category of software that runs either on a local computer network or in the cloud, and is built to ingest and make it easy to organize an unlimited number of files — all those digital assets that business marketers create and use daily.

The more complex your marketing strategies and brand or business are, the greater the benefits of DAM will be, especially when accumulated over time.

The pandemic has also brought to light certain weaknesses for some businesses, as remote workers have placed additional strains on internal systems not necessarily designed for unified online access to digital asset libraries.

So how does DAM technology help with getting your content found?

Better Search Findability Externally

Most of the same signals search engines use to determine which online content is the best for solving the questions people are asking also help organizations with internal findability efforts, which means that well-optimized content successfully serves both purposes.

This dual power makes optimizing content and the individual elements that make up digital assets a smart choice for B2B marketers.

When potential customers can find your content through search, digital asset optimization has more often than not played an important role in ranking well within search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search marketers also benefit from a powerful and properly optimized DAM system, being able to systematically find internal search campaign assets, analytics data contained in spreadsheets or other formats, in ways that help make more data-informed search marketing efforts easier.

In many ways, the so-called findability of search marketing goes naturally well with a smart DAM solution, as both are centered around finding things — whether in the form of search engine query answers or finding a file you know you have but haven’t been able to quickly find until the arrival of a DAM system.

Better Findability For Your Organization

If your organization is like most others in the digital technology and B2B marketing sector today, you’re faced with more data in more locations than ever before — information that is likely ripe for optimization using digital asset management best-practices and techniques.

By nature B2B marketing involves large quantities of content in all its various digital forms, and a powerful DAM system enhances marketing by making it easy to find all the digital assets a business has ever created, both for current campaigns and when gathering past performance and return on investment (ROI) data.

DAM helps businesses elegantly and efficiently keep track of the entirety of their digital assets going back to their earliest files, preserving digital histories, and allowing teams to:

• Organize in multiple ways using many different views, such as timelines and maps
• Perform advanced searches such as “show me all photos from 2018 taken in winter that contain both our old spokesperson and our new one, and which contain a blue car and which were taken at night using a Canon camera older than 2015, which we haven’t yet used in a public campaign.”

Trying to do this could take ages to do manually, but a good DAM can make the task a snap, and ends up saving a great deal of time in the long run.

[bctt tweet=”“The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of digital asset management (DAM) will be, especially over time.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]

Bringing It All Together With A Digital Asset Management Solution

It’s entirely possible to implement and consistently use your own digital asset management plan, making use of your organization’s existing software and processes, however this approach will have a hard time matching the efficiency and effectiveness of making the jump to a dedicated and purpose-built digital asset management solution.

I took a look at over 30 of the leading players in the DAM world in our Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing, with solutions running the gamut from popular photo-centric consumer-oriented packages such as Adobe Lightroom, to enterprise workflow DAM systems including Canto and Adobe Experience Manager Assets.

That list was only a sampling of the many DAM solutions available, and with new or revised DAM providers entering the market regularly, such as Pics.io, if you’re searching for the ideal DAM match it can pay off to test both the established players and newcomers.

Jump Through The Digital Looking Glass

via GIPHY

It doesn’t take a fairy-tale mirror to create your own digital adventures in wonderland, just the proper planning, implementation, and consistent use of your own DAM system.

We hope the digital asset optimization areas we’ve touched on here will help guide you as you move ahead into 2022 and beyond, to a future that’s more findable than ever.

No matter how you slice it, creating award-winning B2B marketing takes considerable time and effort, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Contact us today to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.

The post Optimizing Digital Assets: How B2B Marketers Can Combine the Best of External & Internal Search Findability appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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Boosting B2B Marketing Credibility with Social Proof and Influencers: 4 Tips

This is gonna be the greatest blog post EVER.

Did you believe me there? You probably didn’t.

Sure, I might think it’s an awesome piece of content. But I’m not exactly an objective source. Now, if you were to come across a post on social media from someone you know and trust, linking to this blog post and saying it’s the best thing they’ve read all year? That’s a different story.

Therein lies the immense value of social proof, which is only growing more impactful as businesses and society evolve into a new era. A survey from Kantar Media last year found that 93% of people trust brand recommendations from family and friends, while only 38% trust information from advertisers. Meanwhile, 84% of people say they trust online reviews as much as their friends.

As a marketer, accepting this reality may cause some discomfort: We can’t control what people say! That’s why a great product and customer experience are table stakes. But when those pieces are in place, today’s marketers can take plenty of steps to strategically encourage and elevate social proof and influencer content.

Building Credibility for Your Brand the Right Way: 4 Key Steps

Going above and beyond with transparency, highlighting third-party voices, portraying influencer authenticity, and creating buzzworthy experiences are among the best ways to build credibility in our current business landscape. A closer look at each:

#1: Embrace Radical Transparency

In business, the term “radical transparency” is usually evoked as an internal management philosophy — keeping employees looped into everything that’s going on, good or bad, to increase engagement and investment. I feel the concept can also be applied externally.

Heightened business transparency is largely happening on its own, in a digital environment where customers and communities can keep a closer eye on a company’s activities and positions.

Why not lean into this transparency? When you proactively put everything out there for people to see, it fuels a perception that you’re not trying to hide anything. That’s a huge credibility booster.

A few examples of transparency that might be considered “radical” but should really start to become the norm:

• Openly acknowledge and address negative reviews instead of burying them
• Share product/service pricing upfront instead of obscuring these important details
• Own the mistakes you make as a company, and share what you learn from them
• Recognize the relative strengths of your competitors in marketing materials, rather than playing up only their weaknesses
• Be forthright about who your product or service is NOT a fit for

If there’s one thing business buyers don’t like, it’s surprises. Given the stakes, nobody wants to find out down the line that there’s an unexpected cost, or unmentioned implementation complexities, or unspoken functional limitations.

Radical transparency helps eliminate surprises and can dramatically increase buyer confidence.

#2: Put Third-Party Reviews and Analysis Forward

As noted earlier, customers tend to be more interested in hearing what other people say about your solutions than what you say about them. That’s not to say a company can’t toot its own horn, but this should be balanced by objective third-party voices.

Think about ways you can incorporate these trusted, unbiased perspectives into your own content. Highlight research from authoritative market analysis firms (e.g. studies from Gartner, Forrester, Nielsen) that helps establish a need for what you offer. Let trends and statistics do the talking. Build out authentic case studies that are more focused on illustrating your solution’s impact in a customer’s organization rather than just heaping lavish praise.

And of course: Point prospective customers to user review sites so they can see for themselves how people describe experiences with your brand. A recent article at Forbes shares tips on getting more reviews and leveraging them effectively.

[bctt tweet=”“Customers tend to be more interested in hearing what other people say about your solutions than what you say about them.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN” username=”toprank”]

#3: Aim for Authenticity in Influencer Partnerships

Influencer associations can be excellent sources of credibility for your brand … provided they are handled the right way. From our view at TopRank Marketing, that means taking a relationship-based approach more so than a transactional one.

Influencers who are recognized, respected, and trusted in a particular industry or niche can be tremendously valuable advocates. But when your association with them is superficial, that value is lost. Customers will see through it. Nobody’s putting a lot of stock into the genuine sentiments behind a glowing social media post that has an #ad hashtag at the end.

However, when you’re building long-term relationships with these influencers, to the point where they speak positively about your brand unprompted? When their audiences see them engaging with your people and co-creating impactful content? This is where the true credibility-boosting power of B2B influencer marketing lies.

Helping forge these kinds of authentic influencer ecosystems is an area where our agency specializes, so feel free to give us a shout if you want to learn more.

[bctt tweet=”“Influencers who are recognized, respected, and trusted in a particular industry or niche can be tremendously valuable advocates.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN” username=”toprank”]

#4: Give People Something to Talk About

Increasingly, this is the primary task of the new-age digital marketer: It’s not so much about coming up with different ways to say great things about your brand — it’s about coming up with different ways to get other people to say great things about your brand.

How is this done? There are many ways, including:

• Creation of compelling thought leadership that counters conventional wisdom and gets people talking.
• Virtual events that bring together like-minded people around shared passions and interests pertinent to your industry.
• Delivering notable customer experiences or content experiences that generate buzz on their own.
• Providing exceptional employee experiences that compel team members to openly share how much they enjoy the company and culture.
• Running polls, conversation-starters, and hashtags on social media that expand your brand’s relevant reach and connect it to key topics on your target audience’s mind.

Meanwhile, the type of radical transparency cited in Tip #1 can itself be a means to generate positive chatter about your brand and its credibility. In an older but still highly pertinent article for WIRED about the see-through CEO, Clive Thompson summarized why this is really the only way to go:

“Here’s the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won’t work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it – or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.”

Be part of the commentary. Take the lead in key conversations. Engage with leaders in your space. Act in a way that inspires other people to speak highly of your brand.

Credibility isn’t given; it’s earned. That’s a directive to which everyone across an organization must contribute. But marketers play a key role in earning and showcasing credibility for the brand, and I’d argue that it’s increasingly becoming our most critical job duty. Social proof and influencer marketing are vital cornerstones to doing it well.

Looking for specific guidance on advancing brand credibility through your marketing strategy? Check out my post from last year featuring six tips for infusing credibility into B2B content.

The post Boosting B2B Marketing Credibility with Social Proof and Influencers: 4 Tips appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

from B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank® https://www.toprankblog.com/2021/10/boosting-b2b-marketing-credibility-with-social-proof-and-influencers/
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