Tap Blogging

As with most marketing, there is no silver bullet to B2B influencer marketing but there are some essential best practices and strategies that have been proven time and time again. To uncover that secret sauce of working with B2B influencers, Episode 12 of the Inside Influence Show features Paul Dobson, Senior Director, Social and Influencer Marketing at Citrix. In addition to a few highlights from the 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing report, we discussed Paul's experience working with influencers at Citrix as well as: Where influencer marketing fits in the mix at Citrix Tips on being great at influencer marketing for a B2B technology brand Influencer Marketing vs. Influencer Relations The impact of influencer marketing on customer experience Advice on starting an influencer marketing program at a B2B brand How to get executive buy-in to an influencer marketing program How to decide which influencers to work with Examples of influencer engagement Opportunities to gr...

Some B2B Brands Are Going All-in On Digital Advertising B2B digital advertising spending has largely skirted the sizable losses seen in traditional ad spend, and certain B2B brands have started shifted more budget dollars to digital media, according to recently-released eMarketer study data of interest to B2B marketers. ANA The Road To Chatbots, Virtual Assistants For B2B Marketers, Per Forrester The B2B buyer journey has changed almost entirely into all-digital experiences, and B2B marketers who rush the process by using traditional chatbots or virtual assistants risk losing customers, according to newly-released Forrester survey data. MediaPost Facebook Expands Brand Collabs Manager to Include Facebook Groups, Adds New Group Post Options Facebook has augmented its Brand Collabs Manager tool, with the inclusion of several new partnership location features aimed at helping influencer marketing and brand partnerships through the use of sponsored Facebook group posts, the social m...

In 2020 B2B marketers continued to find new and creative uses of social media marketing during a pandemic year unlike any other, and we've been fortunate to feature many excellent articles on our blog over the year that explore how marketers are pushing social media marketing to fuel new levels of success. We're lucky to have a wealth of talented B2B marketing professionals contributing to the TopRank Marketing blog — which will celebrate its 18th year in 2021 — including our CEO Lee Odden, Joshua Nite, Elizabeth Williams, Anne Leuman, Nick Nelson, Debbie Friez, Birdie Zepeda, the author of this post, and Alexis Hall, among others. The insight and expertise our team has acquired helping some of the top brands in the world including 3M, Adobe, SAP, LinkedIn, and Oracle plan, implement and measure a variety of marketing programs has often made it here to our blog. To help our blog community grow their social media marketing knowledge, we're delighted to offer our annual li...

Without question the digital age we live in is marked by remarkable advancements as well as ease of information creation, distribution and proliferation. As they say, we live in an age of information overload. What can B2B marketers do to stand out? Simply create more "useful content"? For 2021 and beyond, the bar for stand out B2B marketing is much higher than utility. Our guest, Marshall Kirkpatrick on episode 11 of the Inside Influence Show featuring B2B Marketing Insiders , has some smart insights on how influence can play a role in creating (Dan Pink quote) and connecting the dots between the kinds of insights buyers are attracted to, that drive engagement and action. Marshall is the founder of Twitter influencer platform Little Bird which was acquired by Sprinklr where he is now Vice President of Influencer Relations, Analyst Relations, and Competitive Intelligence. During our talk, we covered highlights of the 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report , some im...

One-Third of B2B Tech Marketers Say They’ll Meet Their Original KPIs This Year 42 percent of B2B technology executives say they’ll meet their revised 2020 key performance indicators, while 16 just say they won’t meet KPIs — two of several items of interest to digital marketers in recently-released survey data. MarketingCharts Year-End Global/U.S. Ad Forecasts Improve Markedly Three recently-released global advertising spending forecasts predict a much stronger outlook for 2021 than in 2020, with improvements in the global market especially better — up an average of 7.8 percent in the studies compared to 4.5 percent for the U.S. MediaPost Guiding the new B2B buyer from attraction to advocacy It takes an average of 6.2 touch-points to go from a sales qualified lead to a closed sale, while 76 percent of B2B practitioners say customer expectations for digital experiences that are more personalized will reach all-time highs, according to newly-released Adobe and Forrester survey data...

Just what is a B2B influencer, and what do they actually look like? In our new third season of Break Free B2B Marketing video interviews we're having in-depth conversations with an impressive array of top B2B influencers, exploring the important issues that each expert is influential about. Successful B2B influencers have a rare mix of the 5 Ps — proficiency, personality, publishing, promotion, and popularity — as our CEO Lee Odden has carefully outlined in " 5 Key Traits of the Best B2B Influencers ." Ticking all of those boxes is Tim Crawford , CIO strategic advisor at AVOA, who we're thrilled to be profiling today. One way for B2B marketers to break free is by looking at what successful C-Level executives are doing and thinking. This is especially true in the middle of an unprecedented year, where what is “normal” for any business owner or leader is almost constantly changing. Tim Crawford has a unique insight into the minds of C-Level executives. He’s gained th...

2020 saw the continued rise in influencer marketing's scope and success in both B2C and B2B industries. This continued an explosion of interest in the practice over the past several years, and with more practitioners than ever now going all-in, influencer marketing has continued to be a primary focus on our blog throughout this extraordinary pandemic year. We're lucky to have a wealth of talented B2B marketing professionals contributing to the TopRank Marketing blog — which will celebrate its 18th year in 2021 — including our CEO Lee Odden, Joshua Nite, Elizabeth Williams, Anne Leuman, Nick Nelson, Debbie Friez, Birdie Zepeda, the author of this post, and Alexis Hall, among others. As an industry approaching $20 billion annually, influencer marketing is now far from a shiny new object to sophisticated marketers. The insight and expertise our team has acquired helping some of the top brands in the world including 3M, Adobe, SAP, LinkedIn, and Oracle plan, implement and measur...