When it comes to marketing, change is the name of the game. From content marketing to automation, learn more about the latest tactics and trends that had the biggest impact on the past year.
As expected, 2013 was another eventful year for B2B marketers. Automation platforms continued to evolve, content marketing jumped to the top of many marketers’ priority lists, and a myriad of other landscape-shifting trends and events changed the way we view marketing’s role in growing software companies.
Now, as we look forward to the New Year, the question is — what insight can you take away from the previous year and carry over to 2014? To help answer that question, here are the top 10 marketing-related posts from our site you read and shared most this year.
Producing content may be easier than ever, but does that mean every company should be turning on the hose? Not necessarily. In this post, online marketing expert Lee Odden revealed the key to determining the best publishing schedule for your content needs. Read more.
As a startup or expansion-stage company, you’re probably eager to scale your marketing. But before you push all of your chips in on automation, Startup Edition founder Ryan Hoover reveals why he thinks companies should stop obsessing over scalability and start getting real with their customers. Read more.
For all the buzz around (and obsession over) social media, marketing strategist Ian Brodie says he still believes a company’s email list — not the number of followers or fans it has — is still its most valuable marketing asset. Read more.
LinkedIn isn’t just a helpful tool for people searching for jobs. It can also allow B2B marketers to improve your company’s reputation, clearly convey your goals and culture, engage prospective buyers, and keep existing customers up-to-date. This guide walks marketers through a step-by-step process that will help them create and optimize a visually stunning LinkedIn Company Page. Read more.
Tracking metrics like unique visitors, bounce rate, and conversion are critical to content marketing success. But choosing the right key performance indicators to measure can be a challenge, writes OpenView Director of Content Strategy Kevin Cain. So, before you start freaking out about which KPIs are most important to track, Cain suggests slowing down and focusing on these five to start. Read more.
Ah, the classic debate: Who really owns your funnel — sales or marketing? In this post, B2B sales and marketing strategist Bob Apollo provided his own surprising take on that issue and delivered 3 simple steps to building a more customer-centric sales funnel. Read more.
Infographics are a red hot content marketing commodity, but that doesn’t mean that every infographic that’s created turns out to be a smashing success. Some, in fact, are little more than lame attempts to mask inferior data with fancy illustrations. This guide shows marketers — from start to finish — exactly what they need to do to create highly engaging data visualizations that capture their customers’ attention. Read more.
When it comes to your content marketing strategy, creating striking visual content is no longer a “nice to have”. In this guide, OpenView Managing Editor Jonathan Crowe explores the visual content revolution and offers easy how-to examples and advice for capturing and engaging your audience. Read more.
While SEO is still an important component of online marketing, it’s time B2B marketers stopped trying to slug it out with their competitors for a trickle of long-tail traffic. In this post, Content Marketing Institute Chief Strategist Robert Rose explains how you can crawl out of the trenches and get noticed by shifting your focus from search engines to telling your company’s unique story in the most compelling way possible. Read more.
In the spirit of the Academy Awards last February, we asked our readers to pick the year’s top B2B video content in three categories. Find out who went home with the hardware, and learn all the how-to basics you need to start rolling out Oscar-winning (or at least customer-coverting) B2B video content of your own. Read more.
Thank you for making these our 10 most popular sales posts of the year.
What were the trends that impacted your marketing program this past year? Was there another article or idea that stood out? Let us know in the comments section below!
<strong>Jonathan Crowe</strong> is Senior Content Manager at <a href="https://www.barkly.com/">Barkly</a>. He was previously the Managing Editor of OpenView Labs.
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Producing content may be easier than ever, but does that mean every company should be turning on the hose? Not necessarily. In this post, online marketing expert Lee Odden revealed the key to determining the best publishing schedule for your content needs. Read more.