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US B2B ad spend set to pass $30b in 2023, nearly half the dollars will go to digital In the U.S. alone B2B advertising spending is expected to top $30 billion by 2023, with almost half going to digital, while display advertising spending is expected to surpass that of search advertising by 2023 — two of several insights of interest to digital marketers in newly-released forecast data. The Drum Salesforce completes $27.7B Slack acquisition Salesforce has put finishing touches on its $27.7 billion acquisition of business communication platform Slack, with the now-official purchase set to combine Salesforce’s data platform Customer 360 with Slack, Salesforce recently announced. Venture Beat Zenith: Online Video To Lead 2021 Global Ad-Spend Growth, At +26%; Digital To Take 58% Share Of Total 2021's most robust growth in global digital advertising spend is set to come from online video, climbing some 26 percent to $63 billion, according to recently-released forecast data. Overall...

How has B2B marketing changed forever during the pandemic? The voices and visions of B2B marketing have been forced to shift over the past few years, as have many of the goals and methods we strive for and use to connect with our current and potential customers. Some of these changes are subtle while others are decidedly not, yet each brings with it both new opportunities for embracing the future of B2B marketing along with risks for those who don’t heed the call when the winds of digital change shift. Let’s take a look at five of the most substantial changes in B2B marketing that the pandemic has driven, and explore new insights that can inform and inspire your efforts in the push towards 2022 and beyond. 1 — Remote Yet Closer B2B Relationships The remote Zoom, Slack, phone and email communication we’ve all had to embrace over the course of the pandemic have surprisingly brought closer B2B relationships in many cases. How being physically distanced from each other has actually brou...

Content is the research search began in the first place. Learning about how to get customers to visit newly created websites is where my search engine optimization education began. In that journey from before there was a Google to today, many things have changed. What has stayed the same is the opportunity to grow business by connecting customers to content by being the best answer and inspiring those customers to take action. The best SEO practitioners stay on top of what's current, always experimenting and evaluating what works for topics in a particular industry for the websites and content they're in charge of attracting customers to. At the same time, the best SEO advice isn't worth much if it doesn't get implemented. That's why many marketers with long term SEO experience emphasize the fundamentals. If content can be found in search, it can be optimized for better performance. With over 200 million search results for the phrase "search engine opti...

US influencer spending to surpass $3 billion in 2021 An increase of over 33 percent in influencer marketing spending is expected for 2021 — reaching $3.69 billion — recently-released forecast data shows, with a 12.2 percent rise predicted for 2022 and 11.5% in 2023, climbing to $4.62 billion, according to the forecast. eMarketer Ehrenberg-Bass: 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for your products As many as 95 percent of businesses aren't presently in the market for most services and goods, however not in all sectors, according to newly-released data from client LinkedIn and its LinkedIn B2B Institute. Marketing Week examines the data, and interviews Jann Martin Schwarz, global head of the LinkedIn B2B Institute, on targeting long-term B2B marketing goals and more. Marketing Week B2B Marketers' Biggest Lead Gen Challenges 45 percent of B2B marketers find creating targeted and engaging content the most difficult challenge when it comes to lead generation, followed by...

How is successful B2B marketing like a master jeweler working with diamonds of the digital marketing variety? Diamonds are forever, as the 1971 James Bond film and its title song made famous, and with the archival global power of the web, your B2B marketing efforts are also likely to endure — so why not strive to make them truly memorable? Also like diamonds, B2B marketing is a multifaceted endeavor. Let's explore five enduring tactics that can help you achieve B2B content marketing clarity and create your own digital marketing diamonds. 1 — Achieve Content Marketing Clarity via GIPHY Bring diamond-like clarity to your B2B content marketing by identifying and focusing on the heart of your effort’s primary goal. While it can be tempting to digress into periphery elements of the topic at hand, honing in on the purpose of your content and delivering a clear answer in providing it will make your marketing creations shine with diamond-like brilliance . Part of providing content mar...

B2B marketers have been pushing for personalized content for a good long while. Now we’re also trying to humanize content — to make the case that B2B buyers are human beings who want to connect with other humans on an emotional level. Isn’t it remarkable that we still have to make that argument?  But I’m not here to write another 1000 words about humanizing content. I want us to take it a step further, beyond personalization, humanization, personality and empathy. B2B content marketing needs to come from the heart. True, genuine heart is the last frontier in content. Every brand has an Instagram with behind-the-scenes content to boost authenticity. Every brand is striving to give at least the appearance of sincerity, personality and transparency. A lot of it is about as deep as the checkout clerk telling you to “have a nice day.” To stand out now, B2B content needs to hit on a more fundamental level.  Why Write from the Heart? Even as we talk about “human to human...

The past year or more has taught B2B marketer many lessons, especially the importance of creating digital first experiences that are credible, authentic and relevant to specific buyers. As part of the digital transformation of marketing, many B2B companies have adjusted their go-to-market approach to satisfy the changing customer expectations that have evolved during the pandemic. One of those adjustments in B2B marketing has been the increasing role of influence in delivering  credible, authentic and relevant digital experiences. Our initial B2B Influencer Marketing research from 2020 showed that going into the pandemic, confidence in working with B2B influencers was very high as were expectations of outcomes. Despite the growing confidence in working with B2B influencers over the past year, today there are important questions to be answered as more B2B brands enter the realm of influence and grow more sophisticated with the practice. Much of B2B influencer marketing has empha...

Twitter's Fleets Format To Disappear, Just Weeks After Ads Test Commenced Twitter has abandoned its Fleets feature that automatically deleted messages in the format after 24 hours, noting that the format and its accompanying full-screen vertical ads, hadn't performed as well as initially envisioned, the firm recently announced. MediaPost Digital to power a 10.4% recovery in global ad spend Global digital advertising spend will ascend to $311 billion to hit 15.6 percent growth in 2021, according to newly-release forecast data from Dentsu, the firm recently announced. Social ad spending is expected to rise even more swiftly at 23 percent, with video ads predicted to rise by 17 percent, according to the forecast data. The Drum Facebook Launches New 'Creative Guidance Navigator' To Provide Marketing Stats and Tips Facebook has launched a new mini-site of interest to digital marketers, highlighting a variety of the social giant's ad campaign options, with best-pra...

How can B2B marketers boost content creation productivity and avoid that dreaded black hole of inefficiency? As TopRank Marketing chief executive and co-founder Lee Odden said in 2018 in 16 Ways to Be More Efficient with Content Creation , “Without additional budget or writing resources, the most practical way to squeeze out more content creation productivity is by being more efficient,” and the same may be even more true today in 2021. There’s no denying that better efficiency offers benefits in many areas of a B2B marketer's work, so we wanted to share some of the galaxy’s top tactics, methods, and tips to improve your productivity through efficiency as we make the push through the rest of 2021 and plan ahead for 2022. Let’s strap on our B2B marketing jet-packs and hyperspace forward with five productivity pulsars to improve your efficiency. 1 — Work Smarter For Out-Of-This-World Marketing Efficiency Working in a smarter way saves time and increases productivity, and part of ...

For many, the past few months have opened up giving us a taste of "return to normal" but what does that mean? When most people say normal, what they often mean is comfortable. In the business world pre-pandemic comfortable is a dangerous place to be. Any company that did not adjust, adapt or pivot over the past year and a half probably isn't in business or doing as much business as they should. There have been many changes during the pandemic from digital transformation across all aspects of business to evolving expectations of customers. Companies and their marketers must be in tune with all of these changes in order to survive and thrive in a post-pandemic business environment. One way customers have changed in B2B is that they expect more from the digital experience. Recent research shows 90% of B2B buyers will turn to a competitor if a suppliers digital channel doesn't meet their needs. The elevation of expectations extends to service as well. "Expectation...