The Top 50 B2B Marketplaces: A New Ranking
B2B marketplaces have raised more than $1.7 billion during the first nine months of 2021, with Faire, Joor, and Indigo AG topping the list of B2B marketplace startups, according to newly-released report data of interest to digital marketers. Modern Distribution Management

Why influencer marketing, still a small slice of digital budgets, seems recession-proof
U.S. organizations are expected to spend $6.16 billion on influencer marketing during 2023, climbing from the $5 billion seen during 2022, as influencer marketing has appeared to be more resilient than other forms of marketing, with influencer marketing budgets staying strong, according to recently-published forecast data. Insider Intelligence

20% Of Media Buyers Report Investing In The Metaverse
52 percent of decision-makers at brands and agencies have said that they are investing in metaverse marketing in order to build brand recognition and awareness, with 48 percent doing so as a new way of engaging existing customers, while 46 percent pinpointed investment aimed at boosting brand perception — three of several findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in newly-released survey data. MediaPost

Q&A with the director of Google Analytics: Getting Started with Google Analytics 4
With Google sunsetting its longstanding existing analytics incarnation in July of 2023, B2B marketers using the popular measurement system have some seven months to migrate to Google Analytics 4, and MarTech takes a look at how marketers and brands are moving to Google’s replacement analytics platform. MarTech

[bctt tweet=““When a customer is migrating to GA4, one of the first things they need to consider is how to get the data they care about the most into the system.” — Russ Ketchum of @GoogleAnalytics“ username=“toprank“]

Twitter is working on a feature to divide long text into a thread automatically
Twitter has tested the ability for its users to automatically split tweets longer than the 280-character limit — in place since 2017 — into multiple threaded messages, potentially offering marketers an additional way to share long-form content on the platform, Twitter recently announced. TechCrunch

How LinkedIn users are banding together to help those laid off
Microsoft-owned professional social media platform LinkedIn (client) has seen increasing use as a conduit for helping recently laid off workers find new positions, and WorkLife takes a look at the thriving practice on LinkedIn. WorkLife

WhatsApp Launches New Business Search Functionality, Expands In-Stream Payments
Meta-owned global messaging platform WhatsApp has rolled out new features that have made it easier to find businesses on the platform, giving brands an array of new exposure opportunities, WhatsApp recently announced. Social Media Today

Ads Work Better When They’re Near Relevant Content: Study
Some 67 percent of U.S. consumers have said that they are more apt to notice digital advertising when it is relevant to the content they are viewing, while 61 percent noted that they would be less likely to buy from brands that have ads appearing alongside disinformation, according to newly-published survey data. MediaPost

8 Graphic Design Trends that Will Dominate 2023 [Infographic]
Motion graphics with dynamic user experience (UX) designs, bold abstract shapes, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated imagery, and 3D elements such as typography and characters were among the top graphic design trends expected to grow in 2023, according to data from a recently-released design trend infographic. Social Media Today

Ad spend projected to grow 5.9% in 2023
B2B digital advertising is expected so see a significant increase during 2023, rising some 20.8 percent year-over-year, as the top high-growth category in the latest forecast data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which has also seen B2B advertisers placing increased interest in engaging streamers and the creation of brand-owned video content hubs. MarTech

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at “Black Friday & holiday shopping” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

New Sponsored Google Maps Feature Directs Every Driver To Denny’s — The Onion

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — How to Break Free of Boring B2B Content Experiences In 2023 [Webinar] — Rock Content
• Lee Odden — The Impact of Building Long-Term Relationships with Influencers with Lee Odden — Justin Levy

Have you come across your own important B2B marketing news item for the week that we haven’t yet mentioned? If so, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line in the comments below.

Thank you for taking the time to join us, and we hope you will return next Friday for another array of the most up-to-date and 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: Rising B2B Ad Spend, Top B2B Marketplaces, Influencer Marketing’s Resiliency, & WhatsApp’s New Business Search appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Source:: toprankblog.com

As the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving Day this week, we can all look back at another unique year of opportunities, challenges, and changes in the B2B marketing landscape.

Despite the challenges we’ve all faced, we’ve grown, adapted, and overcome, and now is an ideal time to look back on those parts of our lives for which we’re the most thankful this holiday week.

In 2022 our team here at TopRank Marketing has continued to expand, and we’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on thankfulness in both our professional and personal lives, continuing our annual traditional post sharing messages of gratitude.

Our ability to see and express gratitude even in challenging times can be especially meaningful and even replenishing.

Let’s take a moment to open our hearts and take in sentiments of thankfulness from our team.

What the TopRank Marketing Team is Most Thankful for in 2022

Jane Bartel

Director of Search & Content Marketing

This year I’m celebrating five years with TopRank Marketing, and am grateful to continue working with a team who takes such pride in their work. We are focused on making content marketing more data-informed, and it’s been inspiring to see all the ways my colleagues contribute to that process, and the truly impressive results that it produces for our clients.

My husband and I welcomed our first child last December. She’s healthy and goofy, and has enforced a certain balance in my life that I’m thankful for (and almost adjusted to).

Katelyn Drake

Director of Agency Marketing

I am beyond thankful that I’ve joined the smart, dedicated team at TopRank Marketing this year!

Personally, I am always thankful for family, friends that feel like family, and the entire village that surrounds me helping balance kiddos, work, life and my sanity (most of the time).

My Thanksgiving wish for all of us is that we find space to breathe, disconnect and enjoy the season!

Danielle Motley

Account Manager

Professional: The people. I’ve never worked at a company where the overall culture has been so positive and the people have been so friendly and kind.

Personal: I’m grateful that my personal passions are successfully evolving and my years of hard work are slowly but surely paying off.

LaTanya Williams

Social Media & Influencer Marketing Coordinator

I am thankful for having the opportunity to work with an incredible team of professionals at Top Rank Marketing. I can’t say enough about how amazing they are! I’m also thankful to have time to spend with my family and a chance to build new friendships in my personal and professional life.

Lane R. Ellis

Social Media and Content Marketing Manager

2022 held many new wonders and delights, a few challenges, all coming together to form a year I’m extremely thankful for.

I’m especially grateful for my wonderful family, friends, and associates.

Celebrating 21 years of marriage with my amazing wife Julie Ahasay tops my thankfulness list, along with the continuing joy of having my parents Konnie and Bob in my life, as well as my astounding and always-inspiring 105-year-old grandma Lilly Haldorsen, who still lives in her own house and gets out often.

I’m grateful for nearly 39 years of using the Internet, and thankful to still be able to run and mountain bike the beautiful trails of Duluth. I’m grateful to have been able to set a new longest-known cross-country ski streak of 202 days in a row, and for our loving cats Kukla Francis Oliver Ahasay and our new kittens Twister Laszlo Ellis and Arlo Gurthie Ellis.

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to reach out and give the world and its endless opportunities a cozy wintery embrace, so here’s a big virtual hug to all of you I’m fortunate enough to know, lovely family and friends. Thank you.

Zack Armstrong

Senior Account Manager

I’m thankful for the opportunity to join the TopRank team and am excited to grow personally and professionally within the organization in the coming years.

Theresa Meis

Content Strategist

I am eternally thankful for the privilege of watching my children grow into two of the most creative, kind, and hilarious people I know.

Mike Odden

Research Analyst

I am thankful for the opportunity to expand my knowledge of marketing that TopRank Marketing has given me over the years and the opportunity to work with such a great team.

Debbie Friez

Senior Manager, Social & Influencer Marketing

Health and wellness top my thank you list again this year. I have been lucky to avoid the ‘Rona, as have many in my family. But, I also know so many who have had health struggles, and I hope they know my thoughts are with them.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say thank you to my TopRank Marketing team for all they do and for blessing me with the opportunity connect with amazing thought leaders. I get to learn from so many great minds and my world is better for it.

TopRank Marketing Gives Thanks For You

All of us at TopRank Marketing are grateful for you, and thank you for being the supportive fans, amazing clients, friends, and enthusiastic influencers that have allowed us to elevate B2B marketing and achieve personal, professional, and brand success.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

The TopRank Marketing Team

The post Growing Gratitude: What the TopRank Marketing Team is Most Thankful For appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Source:: toprankblog.com

According to a study by Moz, backlinks are essential for local packs and localized organic ranking factors, in summary, it’s the backbone of any successful SEO campaign.

Unlike general link-building tactics, location has more impact on local link-building. Therefore, you need to get links from local sites which have locational relevance to your website.

In this post, I’ll be showing you 6 ways to find solid local link prospects that will help you rank higher on Google.

How to build local links

Since the goal is to drive more local traffic to your site, here’s how you can improve your ranking with local links.

1. Join your niche-relevant business association

One of the best ways to build local links is through niche backlinks. Niche backlinks are like targeted advertising. They help you reach your target audience and convert them in no time. You can get these kinds of links by joining your niche-relevant business association.

Conduct a targeted search for legitimate business association sites in your city on Google or any other search engine. This is because they have authority and the right local relevance.

Let’s consider the previous example of a pastry chef. To find relevant associations in your niche, type California chef association on Google. With an SEO tool, you’ll see the SEO metrics for each domain and page within the SERP. If you visit the page of any of the listed associations, you’ll realize that they do have URLs with outbound links to their members‘ sites.

In the USA, there are trade associations that negotiate with the government, and unions to provide members benefits. These associations have insane link values because they have links to government sites. Becoming a member of one of these associations through an application or subscription can help you get the needed backlinks.

2. Valuable, meaningful guest posts on local websites

One of the best off-page SEO tactics to win high-quality backlinks is guest posting.

What you need to do is to source for local sites in your niche that you can pitch to.

Let’s say you’re a pastry chef, you can use an SEO tool to search through several pages of content. Then you filter prospects by their SEO metrics.

Target those local websites with food and pastries blog posts as they’re likely to accept a guest post pitch.

Afterward, set a word count filter to show pages with at least 500 words along with a domain rating filter. This process will reveal the sites that have reasonable website authority.

With the few blogs left, you can start pitching for a guest writing opportunity. Consider pitching blogs by sending a direct email to the editor.

3. Generate backlinks from social media

Social media is not only to showcase your product but also enhance your website’s visibility. The truth is, with social media, you can generate as many local backlinks as possible by using your profile.

This process involves adding links to your social media profiles, pages, and groups.

Let’s consider Twitter as an example. Statista reported that Twitter had 7.1 billion website visits worldwide this year. The United States currently has the most Twitter users of 77.75 million users. And states like California and Florida are in the top ten of active Twitter users. Then let’s say you’re in California, you’ll be lucky to get enough clicks.

With the statistics above, it’s clear that you can get a good number of backlinks on this microblogging platform by setting up a decent profile.

One of the most suitable places to get backlinks on Twitter is your bio and website field.

Do you know that your profile has an actual field for your website? It does and with its over 100-character bio space, you can share your link in both places. The benefit of having your site link on your bio is not only to appear straight to your profile visitors but also to show up in Twitter search results.

Sites like Klout help to elevate your Twitter bio information but unlike Twitter, it’ll only hyperlink website links with http://.

Other places to include your site link is your photo and video tweets.

4. Local resource page link building

This is one of the most popular link-building tactics that have been around for a while.

Resource page link building is the practice of getting your site featured on web pages that link out to useful industry resources.

Here are some examples of resource pages.

• 18 Best SEO Tools That SEO Experts Actually Use in 2022
• 11 Best Digital Marketing Podcasts To Listen in 2021
• The Only 29 Free SEO Tools You Need

These are good resource pages because they link out to other related web pages.

To build links with this tactic, you must create a resource that will be of huge value to your local community (shopping guide, travel guide), then you find relevant resource pages. Search for websites with decent domain-level authority. Then visit the pages to check for external links to other websites. After you’ve reviewed the sites based on SEO metrics, scan the remaining prospects and reach out to suggest your resource. For example, Amit Raj got a link for a seafood business from a local university with a resource page.

5. Consider your top organic competitors‘ backlinks

The idea behind this is to find backlinks that help your competitors rank well on Google. You’ll need to find common links between your competitors and reach out to those sites. Search for competitors in your niche that are within your city. Then gather a list of those websites domains using SemRush or Map Pack.

Ensure you’re dealing with your real business competitors‘ sites and not directories.

Use a tool like Ahref backlinks tool or SEO spyglass to see websites that are linking to your competitors but not you. Look through the lists of sites and you’ll be able to find enough link-building opportunities.

6. Create content that caters to your local audience

This is another great local link-building opportunity. It involves creating relevant local content for a local audience.

Here, the first thing you should target is getting local keywords. For example, if you’re a pastry chef in California, you may search for the most popular cookie recipe in California.

Use keyword planning and research tools like Google keyword planner or SemRush to get the most popular local search queries.

Then your blog posts should be about local events and activities on a local scale.

It would be best if you also connected to local influencers and bloggers to get mentions from them either on their websites or social media. With this strategy, you can be sure to get local backlinks and clicks within your area. For instance, after reaching out to a local influencer, you can be listed among the top 10 pastry chefs in California, increasing your reach.

Final thought

Now, it’s over to you to put these strategies in place for your local link-building system. Even if the process seems challenging, take it a step at a time. You can’t predict the algorithm but at least you can try to be as creative as possible in building your brand’s SEO.

By using the tactics discussed in this post, start your journey to gaining local relevance and authority in your niche.

Guy Sheetrit is the CEO of Over The Top SEO, an award-winning marketing agency that provides customized SEO marketing solutions for ecommerce, local, and Fortune 500 companies. He can be found on Twitter @guysheetrit.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The post Six local link-building tactics for small businesses appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

Selfie with Tusar Barik & Jim Habig of LinkedIn at #b2believe

How can marketers put promise making into practice? LinkedIn Vice President of Marketing, Jim Habig, shared the keys to the power of storytelling, the importance of creativity, and the exciting opportunity ahead for B2B marketers at LinkedIn’s inaugural B2B marketing conference, B2Believe in San Francisco last week.

Without a doubt these are interesting times and many B2B marketers are experiencing a challenging economic market. Jim challenged the 800+ marketers in attendance that we need to prove our value more than ever before.

Despite challenges of budget reductions, hiring freezes and an uncertain economic forecast, there is hope.

We B2B marketers can’t always get what we want. But if we try sometimes we will find, we can get what we need.

Sound familiar? Who knew the Rolling Stones had insight into B2B marketing tenacity?

With the current economic and business environment, B2B marketers are urgently seeking direction on how to survive and thrive. Many revert to the same old playbook of cutting and reducing marketing investments which often ends up being counter productive. Marketing is what keeps the pipeline of sales active and helps brands stay relevant when buyers finally become in-market for solutions.

So what is LinkedIn’s perspective? Jim shared that B2B marketers need to move from a product mindset to a promise mindset. We need to translate complexity to simplicity for customers and we need to unlock the promise of our brand.

So who do you do this? There are some basic building blocks for making a promise to your customer. Jim shared that a promise for brands needs to be 3 things:

Memorable – If you’re not memorable, you’re not worth being bought. Stories are one of the most effective tools for being memorable. Brand assets can also connect with customers subconsciously along with characters, catchphrases and jingles that sink into your brain.

Valuable – They key to making your promise valuable is in understanding your customer. The right buying situation is what makes your promise valuable. For example: when an IT manager needs a solution, what needs to change, and who needs provide buy in.

Deliverable – If you can’t deliver on a promise, don’t make it.

So what are some examples of these 3 in action?

The Naysayer’s Favorite Word from Commercetools
Promise: „When your legacy tech just isn’t up to the task“

A Smooth CRM for Rough Seas from HubSpot
Promise: „Treat customers like people not conquests.“

„The New Frontier“ Super Bowl Ad from Salesforce
Promise „Look no further than our home planet.“

These brands make promises and they create memory structures to be more memorable. But we don’t need famous actors to become more memorable, valuable and deliverable. We simply need creativity, distinctiveness and the power of building memory.

LinkedIn is clear about it’s promise. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is built for B2B and LinkedIn is investing in making a better world for B2B.

What’s your B2B brand’s promise? What are you doing to make sure that promise is memorable, valuable and deliverable? The answers to those questions might just be the fuel to elevate your B2B marketing into 2023 and beyond.

If you would like to watch the following main stage presentations from B2Believe, they will be available on demand soon.

• Shaping the Future of B2B Together: LinkedIn Ads Product Roadmap
  Get an inside look at our product vision and how we’re working to build the right tools for B2B marketers from our VP of Product Management, Gyanda Sachdeva.
• Pushing Creative Boundaries: A Conversation with Ben Stiller
  In this session, Ben Stiller, actor, producer, director and Hollywood legend, will join Ty Heath, Director of Market Engagement, The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, for a conversation on creativity, storytelling and handling adversity in today’s constantly evolving world.
• Fireside Chat with Michael Park, CMO at ServiceNow
  Hear from Minjae Ormes, LinkedIn VP of Global Brand & Consumer Marketing and Michael Park, ServiceNow Chief Marketing Officer, on the changing talent and macroeconomic landscapes, and the importance of storytelling.
• Marketing in Today’s Macroeconomic Climate
  Hear from LinkedIn Chief Economist, Karin Kimbrough, for a discussion on the evolving landscape and how marketing teams can adapt.

The B2Believe event from LinkedIn was full of relevant, informative and inspiring content – hats off to LinkedIn for putting together some really compelling programming and for assembling such a diverse and talented group of speakers to share their insights and the perspectives of LinkedIn.

The post LinkedIn #B2Believe and The Playbook for Promise Making in B2B Marketing with Jim Habig appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Source:: toprankblog.com