TopRank Internet Marketing News

Sometimes, online marketing campaigns are dazzling, magnificent in scope and incredibly complicated. Thankfully, there are also great gains to be made by getting back to basics and ensuring best practices are followed across your site and web presence.

A company website is a living, breathing representation of the brand on the web. Over a site’s lifetime, content is added and taken away. Copy changes. Pages may be redirected. Landing pages come and go. Menus and navigation change.

Each of these changes over the site’s life (hopefully) served its purpose and helped the site become more productive for the company and helpful for customers. However, it can also leave the site disjointed, riddled with errors, and underperforming.

Ask TopRank® Online Marketing your questions about SEO, social media, blog marketing and online PR.  We’ll feature one question and answer each month.

This month, we answer a question we hear often: How do I create great content for boring products?

Great question, content creation is a struggle for many businesses. If you aren’t convinced your business is interesting to write about, you’re not alone! For this very reason, the first key element in the planning and creation of interesting, relevant content is a change in your mindset.

We often think about our key selling points and unique product features as the things we want consumers to know about our product. Are you listening to your audience to discover what it is they want to know?

Today’s online marketer certainly has their plate full in creating, optimizing and deploying content to meet the needs of an increasingly connected audience. Companies compete across platforms, formats and devices to attract, engage and convert prospects and customers. Marketers need the tools and skills for an integrated approach now more than ever.

Tuesday May 7th, TopRank Online Marketing CEO and Optimize author Lee Odden shares a marketing model to help organizations optimize the performance of their online marketing and PR programs. Odden will point to trends marketers and PR pros must be cognizant of in order to capitalize on the content marketing opportunity and present a new model for social content: attract, engage and convert.

Participants will be able to identify three major problems with most content marketing and social strategies, allowing them to move forward using proven best practices and a logical framework for success.

Did you know, TopRank Online Marketing started out as a public relations firm in 2001 called Misukanis & Rodgers? That’s right, we’ve evolved in many ways since then, but we’ve also been involved in many ways with the worlds of marketing and public relations – for a very long time.

It may have seemed an anomaly in 2001 to combine marketing tactics with media relations engagements, but today it is that convergence that is helping to define the future of modern digital communications roles.  We live in an age where brands and consumers are both publishers and participants in the always on and ever evolving web of information that drives business.

How effective is your online marketing agency relationship? A CMO Council study last year found that just 5% of marketers report longstanding relationships with their agencies and only 37% rate their relationships as relatively stable.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we enjoy longstanding relationships with clients and a better-than-average retention rate. We asked members of the TopRank team, some of whom have been with our agency since its earliest days, what advice they have for companies seeking a more productive, lucrative relationship with their agency. Working alongside our clients on a daily basis, they’ve learned that a number of factors contribute to the success of an online marketing campaign and that companies can influence their program’s success a great deal.

Finding the Right Online Marketing Agency for Your Business Needs

Evan Prokop, Associate Account Manager, recommends an in-depth interview process to determine which of the marketing agencies your company is considering is the best fit for your program. “Ask about their history of working with clients in your industry. It shouldn’t be a deal breaker if they don’t have extensive experience, as a good agency is adaptable, but it’s always nice to have some knowledge of your business environment at the beginning,” he said.

In addition, Prokop advises companies to ask potential agencies where they think online marketing is going. “Online marketing is one of the fastest evolving industries there is; a good agency will be constantly seeking to innovate and stay cutting edge,” he noted. Finally, be sure to ask what makes them different and better than the competition. They will be asking you this question as well, and should have a good answer themselves, said Prokop.

Relationships are key, according to Executive Director of Operations, Jolina Pettice. “When interviewing agencies, it’s important to consider philosophy, approach and working style. Each company (and agency) is different, but where there’s common ground there’s efficiency, results and ultimately fun to be had,” she pointed out.

Content is hot in any industry you look, so look no further for the best B2B content marketing advice than the Content2Conversion conference in New York.

Featuring an all-star lineup of B2B Marketing speakers including: Ardath Albee, Ann Handley, Joe Pulizzi, Michael Brenner, Rob Yoegel and senior marketing executives from Aberdeen Group, Adobe, Avaya, Compendium, Curata, Eloqua, Kapost and more means all bases will be covered.

TopRank CEO Lee Odden will be doing his part to contribute to the B2B content marketing brain trust by presenting on an integrated approach to search, social media and content. Essentially, how to optimize your inbound marketing to drive demand for products and services.

He’ll be sharing the Attract, Engage, Convert model for content marketing optimization that has been instrumental for numerous Fortune 1000 companies as clients of TopRank Online Marketing.

According to research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 9 out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing in their marketing mix. With increased adoption, competition has exploded as well and many marketers are looking for what’s next to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage.

To answer the question of “What’s the Future of Content for Marketers“, TopRank CEO Lee Odden will give an hour long presentation in Minneapolis, hosted by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association at Solera on Wednesday April 17.

Lee will present on what content really means, how content teams are structured and what technology and consumer trends are emerging. 

With over 15 years of digital marketing consulting experience with companies including BT Syntegra, HP, McKesson, Randstad, Marketo, Radian6 and many others – Lee will provide his perspectives on the future of content for marketers.

This is an excellent and frequently asked question. Your customers/clients may include dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unique individuals or other businesses. Beyond direct feedback, how do we get to know our customers better in order to meet their needs with digital content?

Persona development is a great first step. You may start with just three or four buyer personas and build out more as you gather additional data. These profiles help identify who the buyer is, what is important to them, why they are considering your product or service, which questions they need answered in order to influence their decision, and ultimately, what problem your company will solve for them.

We shared sample B2B buyer personas this month at Online Marketing Blog, including the Methodical, Spontaneous, and Humanistic customers. Building out these personas requires insights from your own company data, including site analytics, social sentiment analysis and analytics, purchase or shopping cart information, survey data and more. If you can get your hands on it, it can be used to shed light on your customers and how you can better suit their needs.

Catch Lee Odden’s Creative Content Marketing webinar Friday April 12, 2013.

This Friday, TopRank CEO and Optimize author Lee Odden leads a SmartInsights webinar, Get Better Results with Creative Content Marketing.

Companies understand that content is important. Yet although they’re spending more time and budget on content development, many businesses are unclear on the “why” and “how” critical to an effective content strategy.

Longtime blogger and digital marketing influencer Lee Odden will share best practices for creating high quality content over a long period of time, in order to teach participants a sustainable content marketing model. His presentation will share a practical framework for creative and efficient content creation that leverages a mix of evergreen, repurposed, curated and co-created content that attracts, engages and converts new business.

Lee Odden presents at Social Media Marketing World

On Tuesday April 9th, TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be presenting at the innaugural Social Media Marketing World conference with over 1,000 registered attendees.  On it’s first go, SMMW is already one of the largest social media conferences in the world.

As companies invest more marketing budgets into social media and blogging, many are still struggling to elevate their effectiveness. Social Media Marketing World has brought together some of the top social media thought leaders and brand practitioners in the world to help companies elevate their social media smarts.

Featured speakers include:

• Guy Kawasaki
• Mari Smith
• Chris Brogan
• Jay Baer
• Mitch Joel
• Sally Hogshead
• Amy Porterfield
• Dave Kerpen
• Michael Stelzner
• John Jantsch
• Viveka von Rosen
• Joe Pulizzi
• Mark Schaefer
• Marcus Sheridan
• Ekatarina Walter