Reflecting on 2015 & Gearing Up For Digital Marketing Innovation in 2016

This year brought many opportunities for innovation, creativity and growth for the team at TopRank Marketing.

On a personal note, I was beyond excited to re-join the team and dive head first into my new role as Director of Agency Marketing. In this role, part of my responsibilities include ensuring that our team provides creative, engaging, actionable and innovative content for our blog readers each week.

In 2015, our team published nearly 300 blog posts and amassed over 1.4 million unique pageviews for our blog content alone. Keeping the content engine running is an essential part of what we do at TopRank Marketing and I’m pleased to report the numbers above. Nearly a million of the pageviews above were generated from Organic Search which means that our strategy to optimize customers and search engines has led people to our content.

As part of our online community, I’d like to use this post to give you a glimpse into some highlights of 2015 for our team, as well as some exciting changes coming in 2016.

Executive Team Member Promotions

It’s always a great day when we are able to promote one of our own to a leadership position within the organization. The two women below have both shown exceptional drive, dedication and leadership to the team long before earning these executive promotions.

Jolina Pettice has been promoted from Director of Operations to the company’s Vice President. With 10 years of experience at TopRank Marketing, Pettice has performed a number of essential duties including managing Fortune 500 search, content and social media marketing programs for large enterprise organizations.

Alexis Hall was recently promoted from Senior Account Manager to Director of Client Accounts where she leads the account management team. Alexis began her career at TopRank Marketing as an Account Coordinator and she recently celebrated 5 years at the agency and oversees client programs for large software and healthcare companies.

Welcoming New Talent to TopRank Marketing

In addition to promoting current employees to leadership positions, we also added some fresh, creative and innovative talent to our roster. While we do have quite a few new team members start this year, here are some of our most recent additions to the TopRank Marketing Family:

Kevin Cotch joined TopRank Marketing’s SEO team as a SEO Analyst earlier this year. Kevin’s experience as well as his willingness to dive in and help solve complex technical SEO issues has made him a welcome addition to the team.

Another awesome addition to the SEO team was Julia Ramos as a SEO Copywriter. I will be the first to tell you that Julia is not your average copywriter. Her attention to detail, in-depth research and analytical brain have elevated the level of service that we are able to provide to all clients across the board.  

Knute Sands is one of our newest Account Manager’s and has a killer combination of account management and content experience. This makes him uniquely qualified to work with some of our biggest clients on their content marketing strategies and initiatives.

Last, but certainly not least was the addition of Caitlin Burgess as a Content Marketing Lead. Caitlin’s roots in traditional journalism and digital marketing have made her a content marketing machine!

While TopRank Marketing has already doubled its staff since 2013, they are always on the hunt for talented digital marketers. Open positions can be found on the career page of the website.

Building New Client Relationships in Banking & Telecom

TopRank Marketing’s reputation for delivering industry leading digital marketing services and achieving results has recently attracted multiple new clients including a leading fraud protection firm and banking services company with engagements focused on online advertising services and analytics. Additionally, a well-known IT and telecom company recently engaged the agency for content marketing services.

Our legacy clients and new clients have all taught us so much about how to provide value and help them solve problems through our digital marketing consulting and services. All of our clients continue to be a valuable resource and we are so thankful for the opportunity to work with and get to know each and every one of them.

Changing Locations But Not Values

The expansion of our business led us on a quest to find a new office space to better suit our growing needs. As of January 4th, we will be leaving the shores of lake minnetonka and moving to the 55 West Financial Center.

This new space will allow us to continue to develop our team of rockstar marketers, put us closer to local clients and encourage even more collaboration between teams.

If you’re interested, here is where you can find our new office:

55 West Financial Center
10405 6th Ave. N.
Suite 250
Minneapolis, MN 55441

Catching Up With TopRank Marketing President, Susan Misukanis

The heart and soul of our organization has been built by those that have spent time in the trenches building this company from the ground up. One of those people is our President and Co-Founder, Susan Misukanis. I was able to catch a few minutes with her and get some very open and honest reflections about TopRank Marketing’s past, as well as a glimpse into what our office move could mean for the organization.

Q: What are some of the things that you’re most proud of about TopRank Marketing?

A: All of TopRank Marketing’s Clients, small, medium and large who have supported us as we grew, taught us valuable lessons, and have given us the privilege of serving them over the past 15 years.

I’m also extremely proud of the the talented TopRank Marketing team members whose commitment to serving our clients is unmatched.

Q: What is one of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned in the digital marketing business?

A: One lesson we keep learning is how important it is to be committed to hiring the highest achievers and marketing talent who are truly focused getting the best results for our clients!

Q: If you could pick one thing to do over, what would it be?

A: I’m anticipating that we should have moved closer to Minneapolis sooner in order to attract talent who are not up for the drive to Lake Minnetonka. Thank you to all our team members who have enjoyed the daily drive around the lake to get to us!

Q: What are some expectations you have for our new office space?

A: I think that this move will help us attract and retain even more of those talented digital marketers that we are looking for to join our team. We will also have more flexibility with a new and larger space that allows team members to work in private or a collaborate in a team environment.

Wishing You A Happy, Healthy & Innovative New Year

Beyond our move to a new office, new team members and clients, we’re incredibly excited to be part of an industry that is constantly evolving and innovating at a rapid pace. The bar is constantly being raised and we look forward to providing you creative and compelling content in the new year, and continuing to expand our service offering for our amazing clients.

What are you looking forward to most in the new year?

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | Reflecting on 2015 & Gearing Up For Digital Marketing Innovation in 2016 | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post Reflecting on 2015 & Gearing Up For Digital Marketing Innovation in 2016 appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

How To Easily Curate Relevant Content

What's the single most important element of good social media engagement? Your content. With good content you can attract an audience with so much more ease. And at the end of the day, you end up with an excellent brand […]

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TopRank Marketing’s 2016 Influencer Marketing Predictions

This year, headlines throughout the marketing blogosphere proclaimed that influencer marketing is “the next big thing.”

At TopRank Marketing, we have been refining our influencer marketing strategy for nearly a decade. It’s our past, present, and next big thing. When done well, influencer marketing can boost brand credibility, provide valuable exposure for the brand and the influencer and create killer content your audience will love.

Now that influencer marketing has officially arrived, how will it evolve in 2016? We asked our in-house experts, and some of our favorite marketers outside the TopRank Marketing team, for their opinion. Here are the influencer marketing predictions for 2016.

Steve Rayson

Director, BuzzSumo
@steverayson

I think one opportunity is to build relationships with a small group of influencers (6-10) that have relatively few followers but high engagement rates. To do this find well shared content that is highly relevant to your area. Analyze who shared this content and filter those with high retweet rates (on average how many times their tweets are retweeted) but relatively few followers. Develop relationships by answering questions they ask on Twitter, sharing their content, commenting on their blogs, attending their webinars and meeting them in person if you can; and above all, ask how you can help them.

Lee Odden

CEO, TopRank Marketing
@leeodden

As consumers become increasingly numb to formal marketing messages and advertising, their trust in information from peers, social network connections and industry experts has increased.

A few interesting statistics about influencer marketing:

• 84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral. (LinkedIn)
• 92% of consumers rely on referrals from people they know above all else (TapInfluence)
• 81% of those surveyed considered influencer engagement to be effective or very effective for meeting their objectives (Augure)
• $6.85 for every $1 spent – This is the average media value earned by brands who implemented influencer marketing. (Burst Media / RhythmOne)

In 2016 I think we’ll see more brands expand their view of how to incorporate influencers as partners in content co-creation vs. simply as another promotion and advertising channel.

We’ll also see higher expectations of influencers themselves. Popularity is not influence and brands that use influencer marketing will expect more than mentions and social shares. Those influencers capable of affecting real business outcomes will become even more in demand and valuable.

To take advantage of the growing value of influencers, sophisticated marketers will begin to better distinguish between different kinds of influencers and the characteristics that make them the best match for marketing programs.

Influencer Marketing software will lead the way towards effectively identifying, qualifying, recruiting, engaging, managing and measuring influencer marketing performance. Companies that achieve higher levels of expertise with this kind of software will achieve a distinct competitive advantage in their respective industries.

Amanda Maksymiw

Senior Content Marketing Manager, Lattice Engines
@amandamaks

Companies just getting into influencer marketing must understand that there isn’t a silver bullet or trick to overnight success. It takes time to build valuable relationships with influencers that produce results. You need to engage on social media, comment on blog posts, leave book reviews, interact in person (if possible), etc. In 2016, companies will realize that it’s the time for a less is more approach. Instead of targeting a list of influencers that is too large to manage and relying on automated tactics, marketers will focus on a smaller group so they can focus on more personalized, less automated outreach to garner big wins.

Susan Misukanis

President, TopRank Marketing
@smisukanis

2016 will offer a prime opportunity for us marketers to move our strategies from smoldering ideas to bright and memorable initiatives. But only If we think and behave in the right way.

We’ve had clients ask us to “give them an influencer list” because penetrating influencer communities, they think, is the secret to an epic campaign.

In fact, an influencer with a solid, on topic and active community presents nothing more than an opportunity. Like a match looking at a log.

When a creative campaign ignites the influencer and community well, then meaningful participation can happen and opportunity is enhanced.

And when an influencer, their community and other stakeholders, are truly passionate about a toipic, the opportunity for a story to be passed from one social campfire to the next really heats up.

And so in 2016 we marketers will ideally learn that influencer marketing is more than “the right influencer”. It’s about relationships, community and common interest. Oh and let’s not forget a spark of creative.

To 2016. May your influencer campaigns burn as glowing examples for the rest of us to follow.

Amy Higgins

Director of Content Marketing, Deem
@amywhiggins

Many marketers today think of influencer marketing as a campaign, or a one-off. They co-create a series of deliverables with a limited number of influencers designed to bring about a particular result. To me, this is like coloring inside the lines. I predict that beginning in 2016 marketers will learn to color outside the lines of a campaign.

As a marketer, you’d never create a single campaign that focuses on your brand’s voice. Instead, you’ll weave your brand’s  voice into any and all content that you create. By utilising influencers throughout all of your marketing efforts, you can increase your reach and engagement. So then, why do marketers still compartmentalize influencers? By not weaving influencers into all of your marketing and coloring inside the lines of a campaign, you are missing a huge opportunity for your business. In 2016, let’s color outside the lines with influencer marketing!

What Are Your Influencer Marketing Predictions for 2016?

Influencer marketing enjoyed a surge of popularity in 2015, and the best practices are sure to evolve in the coming year. At TopRank, we will continue to explore new tools, platforms and strategies to keep learning and improving.

What are your company’s influencer marketing plans for 2016? Let us know in the comments.

Want to learn more about influencer marketing? Check out our website or contact us directly and let us know how we can help.

Disclosure: Deem is a TopRank Marketing client.

Header image via Shutterstock

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | TopRank Marketing’s 2016 Influencer Marketing Predictions | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post TopRank Marketing’s 2016 Influencer Marketing Predictions appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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How to get the most out of your Christmas sale on a budget on Adwords

How to get the most out of your Christmas sale on a budget on Adwords written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: Wikimedia

It’s no news that the holidays increases sales, however, one of the drawbacks of the holiday season is the increases of competition and marketers.

So we’ve put together a list of marketing tips that will help you get the most out of your Christmas sale and on a budget. We’ve focused our actions list of Search Marketing since it has a higher potential of the best ROI.

Choose your keywords carefully – make sure that your ad wish show only on searches that 100% of people who are searching are relevant to you, searches that might be relevant should not be on your list; don’t think of it as “losing a potential customer” but think of it as allocating your budget from people that might buy your product to people who will buy your product for sure.

A characteristic that the holiday season is known for is the increase in searches, so don’t worry about exhausting the searches inventory.

Tip: one-word keywords should probably not be on your list, as they are most likely too generic and fall into the “might buy” list.

Stay clear of “Broad” match type – as in the point above, you really need to keep your keyword list as tight and targeted as possible, you don’t want Google to show your ads on keywords that it thinks are relevant to you. Due to the limited budget we want total control over the keywords that your ads are shown on, and for that reason, Broad is not the match type for this activity.

Another big con of the broad match type is that you bid you placed on the target keyword is the bid that the system attributes to all the words it find relevant, which is another point of no control that we want to avoid.

Brush up on your negatives – Another act of refining your keyword list, and making sure that your ads will show on the most relevant searches, is the use of negative keywords. 

You can use Google’s keyword planner to find out common search patterns in your industry that aren’t relevant to you, and simply put them as negative keywords from the get go, don’t wait for them to get to you.

For example, if you aren’t offering any free item you don’t want to show your ads for people who are looking for your product for free. (Remember to stay clear of the “might buy” list).

Tip: negative keywords also have match types, if there you spot a word that represents an intention that doesn’t fit your activity, like free for example, put just that word as a negative keyword with the Phrase match type (it will look like this: “free” on the negative keyword list), this will make sure that no search with the word free will trigger your ads.

Use “Call Only” campaigns – if phone calls are relevant to your activity, create campaigns with the sub-type of “call only”, these campaigns are targeted only to devices that can make outgoing calls.

Clicks on the ads from this campaign will call your number and not direct to a landing page. A lot of business are call oriented and have a high sale rate over the phone. Make sure to use scheduling if you don’t want to receive calls during all hours of the day.

Radius Targeting – if your business is a local business and you want to show your ads only to people who are near it, in a specific radius you can do that through your campaign’s settings.

Go to Settings → in the “Locations” section click “Edit” → click on “Advanced Search” → in the top of the right box you’ll see a few tabs, the second one is “Radius targeting”.

Now simply enter the center point (usually your business address) and the radius, in miles or kilometers you want to target around it.

Ad extensions, the more the merrier – make sure to utilize every ad extension you can, these are very helpful to CTR, as position and the amount of information in your ads. Do not disregard them, put the same effort into writing your ad extensions (if it’s site links, call outs or any other extension) as in writing your ad. Create Christmas oriented ad extensions; you can simply stop them after the holiday.

Give your ads that Christmas spirit – make sure to write Christmas oriented ads, make sure to refer to the pains of holiday shopping with a solution, like long lines, cold weather etc., emphasize how you can solve the issues you can.

Tip: remember that “Xmas” is less characters than “Christmas” but have the same meaning.

Use the countdown feature in your ads – when writing an ad you can add a countdown to it, this feature is known for increasing CTR. The instructions in how to use the tool are super simple, when writing an ad simply type a curly braces (“{“) and the drop down menu will appear, simply choose the countdown from the menu and follow the instructions shown.

Give your site the Christmas cheer – paint your site in red and green colors, you can also change visual elements on your site, like your logo, to be a Christmas oriented with a Christmas tree or some Christmas bells. This shouldn’t take any time, and doesn’t have to be at a designer level, you can do this in any image editing software.

Oz Wintrob has online Marketing experience of over 9 years. Experiences in various marketing platforms like: Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Yahoo Japan, Baidu, Yandex and more. I’ve managed various B2C & B2B activities, for companies of different sizes, from small independent businesses to big public corporations.