5 Case Studies on How to Optimize B2B Influencer Engagement on LinkedIn

With over 700 million community members in 200+ countries and territories, LinkedIn is without question the place for businesses to do business. With 91% of marketing executives using LinkedIn as a content source (SocialPilot) it's easy to understand why 94% of B2B marketers using LinkedIn to distribute content (CMI). In fact, there's been a 50% year over year increase in content shared on the LinkedIn platform (LinkedIn). With many social network options, LinkedIn has proven to be an effective choice for B2B marketers. A study from HubSpot showed that traffic from LinkedIn generates the highest visitor to lead conversion rate, 277% higher than Facebook and Twitter. While there are robust opportunities to connect with potential customers on LinkedIn, the platform is busier than ever, making it hard to stand out. There are also challenges in terms of reduced organic visibility and the trend towards distrust of sales outreach and what brands publish directly. With so much information, many buyers are suffering what I call Content Attention Deficit. One of the most promising growth areas within the B2B marketing mix is working with influencers. In our research we found that 77% of marketers say their prospective customers rely on advice from industry experts. and 96% of marketers that engage influencers consider their program to be successful. Trusted experts that have the attention of customers can help B2B brands attract and engage potential customers in more meaningful ways. But what are the best ways to engage with B2B influencers on LinkedIn? How are B2B brands successfully working with influencers to achieve marketing goals using the LinkedIn platform? To help B2B marketers think about how they can better engage with influencers on LinkedIn, here are several examples of how TopRank Marketing and a few clients are doing just that:

1. Give the Gift of Recognition to Influencers

For small B2B brands and those of any size that do not have relationships with influencers, a good starting point to warm up the influencer community is to recognize them. When you come to a party bearing gifts, it makes an impression and with influencers, it's no different except instead of a bottle of spirits, you're giving the gift of recognition. For our 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, we followed our own best practices and identified 20 top B2B influencer marketing professionals working for B2B brands and published a list in the report and as a blog post. Sharing that list on LinkedIn while tagging each person along with a small infographic featuring the group provided relevant and credible recognition. The result was tens of thousands of views on LinkedIn, hundreds of reactions and over 50 comments. More importantly, the post helped generate goodwill among those mentioned, inspiring new connections, conversations and engagement opportunities.

2. Grow Credible Awareness of a Brand Solution

Mitel wanted to create awareness, credibility and consideration of their Remote Working Solutions and what better way to do that than by engaging remote work experts in conversations around topics that highlight the issues and solutions so many companies are considering in today's new normal. A variety of remote work influencers and content formats were used to accomplish program awareness including a livestream video broadcast on LinkedIn. To showcase the topic of remote work with credibility, several paid influencers were engaged to share their expertise along with a Mitel executive on a LinkedIn Live. With an audience of professionals, Linkedin was the perfect place to highlight remote work conversation and in a format that is increasingly important for B2B engagement  - live video. While there were multiple influencers and content formats involved with this program, the LivesStream on LinkedIn had the highest engagement of all, helping Mitel achieve meaningful their awareness, credibility and consideration goals.

3. Increase Brand Engagement with Authentic Stories

While LinkedIn is the most relevant platform for reaching business decision makers, reaching and connecting with both marketers and sales professionals has become increasingly difficult due to  information overload. LinkedIn also faced this challenge, even on their own platform.  In order to reach business decision makers in a meaningful way, LinkedIn Marketing and Sales Solutions set out to create a social influencer content campaign characterized by:

• Increasing engagement and help humanize LinkedIn as a brand by partnering with well respected industry experts to share real-life struggles, stories and obstacles with a focused audience. 
• Driving new audiences to targeted Showcase Pages via the influencer’s audiences (that were not already following or engaging with the LinkedIn brand).
• Continuing to nurture and grow relationships with sales and marketing influencers as part of an ongoing influencer program.
• Engaging the audience in-channel on the LinkedIn platform (versus sending to alternate content elsewhere).

Since much of B2B marketing is more mechanical than meaningful, LinkedIn decided to forego marketing and sales tips content and emphasize stories from respected influencers about experiences they've had in their careers. Influencers were asked to share:

• A defining moment in your career and how it shaped you as a marketer or sales professional.
• One thing NOT on your LinkedIn profile that people should about you?
• One rising star in your field that you’d like to recognize? What makes them amazing? 

By making the shift to a combination of professional and personal content, we were able to better engage the audience around their own professional opportunities and provide them a platform to engage directly with people that they respect.  With the goal to drive authentic engagement, on platform, between LinkedIn and their customers, the reach from influencers' brand mentions exceeded 54 million and there was a 1,000% increase in post engagements over the previous 12 months. This tactic was also part of an ongoing influencer marketing program that won the ANA B2 Marketing Award.  While it would be expected that LinkedIn working with a top B2B influencer marketing agency like TopRank Marketing and a premium group of influencers would achieve results like these, the overall story about the opportunity with B2B influencer marketing is a bit different. The State of B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report found that while 12X more marketers who run ongoing influencer engagement efforts are very successful compared to those who run periodic campaigns, only 19% of B2B marketers are running ongoing influencer programs.

4. Improve Reach of a Brand Webinar

Prophix software was looking for more more interesting ways to get the attention of LinkedIn followers of the brand to help promote an upcoming brand webinar about the 2020 CFO Benchmark Report. Since the amount of content being published on LinkedIn has risen 50% year over year, the competition for organic attention has too. Fortunately, LinkedIn offers an opportunity for members or brands to upload vertical PDF files to create a carousel of messages that can tell a story or communicate a series of connected messages very different than what the normal feed can. For the webinar in question, a key financial industry influencer, Jack McCullough of the CFO Leadership Council was engaged to collaborate on the report highlighted in the webinar and was also featured in the carousel promotion. The same 3rd party credibility effect that helped the report and webinar also provided validation to the LinkedIn post which had over 1,500 organic impressions and referred nearly 200 visitors to the registration page.

5. Connect Brand Executive with Influencers

Research has show that B2B buyers favorably view brands with senior executives that engage on social media. In an effort to connect with customers while also creating relationships with respected industry influencers, the CEO of HRS engages in content creation and sharing on social networks like LinkedIn. In this example, Tobias Ragge posted an article on his LinkedIn profile page featuring a group of travel and tech industry influencers to provide them with recognition in the context of topics important to the HRS brand and customers. By featuring relevant industry influencers in content from the CEO of the company, HRS was able to inspire meaningful engagement and goodwill with these respected voices as well as to build influence for the CEO as well. Before you get started with B2B influencer engagement on LinkedIn, it's essential that you have a documented influencer marketing strategy. For the most successful B2B influencer marketers, our research found that having a documented strategy (68%) is one of the key differentiators over less successful marketers (25%) so it's a very important step. Here are some basic questions to get you thinking about developing your own B2B influencer marketing plan:

• Topic - What topic do you want to be influential about?
• Influencers - Identify, and qualify relevant influencers
• Collect - Activate influencers for a project or program
• Co-Create - Collaborate on content: text, audio, video, interactive, live
• Publish - Will content live on LinkedIn, off or both?
• Promote - Promote via brand LinkedIn page, influencers, ads
• Optimize - Monitor tracking URLs, LinkedIn engagement, adjust

Of course if you are looking for assistance in understanding what role influencer marketing can play in your B2B marketing mix, be sure to reach out.

The post 5 Case Studies on How to Optimize B2B Influencer Engagement on LinkedIn appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Creating Relevance with Multivariate Testing and Digital Analytics

From optimizing the site experience to sending out a marketing email, the modern marketer should always be mindful of one important factor, relevance. The more relevant an experience is for the user, the more likely he or she will convert on a major KPI that will positively impact your business’ bottom line.  Will your website visitor find content relevant to them?  Will this email be delivered to your customer’s inbox at a relevant time?  Will your product offer be relevant to your customer?  Identifying barriers to conversion allows a marketer to create relevant opportunities.   

Creating relevant opportunities is especially important right now, with the ongoing pandemic causing major disruptions across industries.  One of the hardest hit industries is travel.  According to eMarketer, the travel industry is expected to experience a 44.7% loss in digital travel sales, a $93+ billion-dollar economic loss.

Digital travel sales aren’t forecasted to hit pre-pandemic levels until 2022.  With fewer people spending money, it’s crucial that every single customer experience is relevant.

How do you make each experience relevant? With the sudden increased reliance on digital channels to singlehandedly drive revenue and sales, one should look to invest in optimization tools that utilize A/B and multivariate testing as well as digital analytics.

A/B and multivariate testing

Which lead capture form is going to drive more submissions?  What’s the optimal length of a checkout funnel?  What design and content are most easily digestible?  These are all use cases that can be answered with personalization and testing capabilities.

Using customer data, you personalize each touchpoint along the customer journey as much as you can, making it as relevant and of value to your audience as possible. You test variants of your landing pages, sites, headlines, copy, and offers to see which audiences respond more to in order to revise and optimize each touchpoint. In this way, testing leads to business intelligence and actionable insights that help you improve the customer experience and show what’s relevant to your audience to inform what other revisions you make and projects you undertake.

Digital analytics

What is the bounce rate of the website?  Where’s the biggest drop off in the purchase funnel?  Which content is most downloaded?  These are some of the use cases that can be answered by digital analytics tools that provide insights into how users are behaving while visiting your site.

Such a tool allows you to harness real-time data and analytics to generate actionable customer intelligence. It gives you a picture of the overall health of your website, by showing how many visitors you’re getting, what pages they’re viewing, and what they’re downloading and clicking through. How long do they spend on the site?

These analytics show you where you can improve and what direction to move in to generate more customer interest. How testing and digital analytics can go together

Both testing and digital analytics provide valuable data with powerful, actionable insight for businesses. When combined, the value of these tools can increase exponentially in showing what customers are interested in, what they respond to, and how you can optimize accordingly.

For example, let’s say,

1. A user arrives to the website.

2. They browse the site and are ready to check out.

3. However, after finishing that first step of the funnel, the user drops out at the next step and abandons the cart.

4. From having looked at the data and analytics, you know this might be a weak point in the funnel, therefore, the actions of the user abandoning the cart triggers a window with a “Save/Offer” message to intrigue them enough to not drop off.

5. To achieve optimal results, you test all the steps that lead to the “Save/Offer” message to see what causes customers to abandon, how you keep them from dropping off, and/or keep them moving on through the funnel.

Optimizing your website doesn’t end with only testing and digital analytics. You can also combine those tools with an email marketing platform and a marketing automation platform so no missed conversion opportunities occur.

DEVGRU is Oracle’s preferred partner for Maxymiser and Infinity.  With over 25 years of industry experience, the team at DEVGRU has successfully created and managed optimization programs for Fortune 100 and 500 companies within numerous industries.  All our work, including development, strategy, analysis, design, copywriting, training and implementation, is proudly done here in the United States.  We look forward to working with you on optimizing your user’s experience.

To learn more about DEVGRU, contact us here.                                                                                                                                                             

To learn more about A/B and multivariate testing, check out Oracle Maxymiser.

For more information about digital analytics, check out Oracle Infinity.

 

 

 

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Understand Your Purpose and Goals for Content Marketing

On the Fly is our video series with small bites (two mins or less) of marketing and customer experience advice and training from experts given to you during the current disruption.

Content marketers, are you feeling like an “on-demand vending machine”? Are you struggling to keep up with all the asset demands from your team? You are not alone. Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer at the Content Advisory, says the two most common types of questions he gets on digital content strategy are about scalability and measurement. Both challenges are related though, he insists. You need justification through measurement to show that you need more resources.

Robert says that success with content marketing comes down to a documented real strategy. It’s about understanding the reality of a content strategy against the goals and purposes of your team. You should aim for a balanced operating model for content. Watch full video to learn what he means and for tips on how to do that:

 

Visit OnTheFly.Expert to see all episodes. 

 

What goes into a great content strategy? Find out by reading “The Key Ingredients for a Great Content Strategy.”

 

 

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How to Choose The Right SEO Agency

Today, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO agencies out there. 

And each one of them is good for something. 

Thus, your question shouldn’t be, how do I find the right SEO agency, but how do I choose an SEO agency that’s right for me?

I’m glad you made it here, as I’ll guide you through how to avoid choosing an SEO agency that’s right for something not relevant to growing your business. 

Deal? 

Well, then, keep reading. 

First things first, why do you need an SEO agency?

Know Your Goals and Desired Outcomes

Imagine you hurriedly booked a last-minute flight from New York to meet some business partners. Thankfully, the airplane you boarded flew fast with no delays. 

And you land safely at the airport.

On arrival, the announcer congratulates you for a safe journey and welcomes you to Beverly Hills in Texas. Meanwhile, your intended destination was Beverly Hills in California. 

You’ll regret the waste of your time, right?

Hiring SEO agencies is like boarding that airplane – each one could be great at flying your site’s organic ranking somewhere. Your first job before you start flying, therefore, is to ensure you choose and are on the right plane. 

Thus, to choose and onboard an SEO agency that’s right for you, you must:

• Know your business destination (your goals), and 
• What you want to achieve when you get there (your desired outcomes).

In SEO, where you’re going requires a different airplane (or agency). The main ones being: 

• SEO-optimized content marketing
• Voice SEO
• Link building,
• Local SEO, and 
• eCommerce SEO

And for outcomes? 

You may need to:

• Rank your entire website or specific keywords higher
• Get more qualified traffic and leads, or
• Drive sales directly from organic search. 

Your target business goals and outcomes determine what SEO strategies and tactics you’ll need. 

And because no SEO agency is a one-size-fits-all for all strategies, industry verticals, and company sizes, knowing these basics lays the foundation for who you’ll partner with. 

Let’s take some hypothetical examples. 

Example #1 

Pretend that your goal is to show up on Google’s 1st page when certain people use certain words to search for certain information relevant to your business. 

And the outcome? 

You want to attract this set of people, educate them with engaging content, and pull them into your sales funnels. 

In this case, you’ll need an agency with expertise in SEO-optimized content marketing. And you’ll need one with proven results in helping other companies achieve similar results: 

Example #2

Okay, let’s assume you have freelancers creating excellent content pieces for your site. But you realize Google isn’t ranking them for your target keywords. 

Instead, when people search, content pieces below the quality of what you’re creating keep showing up on the top pages while yours languishes on Google’s 17th page. 

This situation indicates your competitors probably have higher domain authorities or more backlinks pointing to their website and high-ranking content pieces. 

In this case, to increase your website’s domain authority, get relevant links pointing to your content, and boost ranking, you’ll need an SEO agency with expertise in link-building: 

As you saw in both examples above, it’s easier to know what type of SEO agency is worth considering when you’re definite about your goals and outcomes. 

Taking this first step to look at yourself in the mirror and know exactly what you need streamlines the selection process. 

It also ensures you only shortlist agencies with expertise and experience driving other businesses to your intended destination. 

But, it doesn’t end there. 

Even with only a few dozen agencies to consider, choosing one that’s right for you still demands you look out for characteristics that prove they walk the talk.

Doing this further helps you vet and choose an SEO agency that’s perfect for you.

6 Characteristics That Make a Great SEO Agency

Regardless of the specific SEO needs you have, you’ll still find dozens, if not hundreds of agencies, vying for your business. 

The search engine optimization service providers’ industry is valued over $65 billion. 

Thus, expect anyone with a laptop and internet access to make wild claims of being an SEO agency, as they yearn for a slice of the industry’s billions. 

There are characteristics great SEO agencies possess. And you’ll find these traits in all the best SEO companies.

I’ll list the fundamental ones below. 

Use them to vet an SEO agency from the list you shortlist before choosing to work with any.  

1. A Defined Process to Execute SEO Strategies

Excellent SEO execution follows a battle-tested process. 

As an SEO agency gains experience working with numerous clients, they outline their winning process to give potential customers a peek into how they deliver results. 

Thus, each company with practical SEO experience has its own process. And this makes it a characteristic of SEO agencies with proven results. 

For example, at Neil Patel Digital, our process follows eight unique steps: 

2. A Diverse Team of Specialists

The next characteristic to look out for before choosing an SEO agency is the team to put their process and recommendations to work. 

A lot of thought goes into SEO execution. 

From strategic ideation and leadership to account management and execution specialists, ask for the team who’ll work with you to achieve your goals. 

Again, experienced SEO agencies are proud to make their team public: 

3. An Impressive Client Portfolio

Results-generating SEO strategies are hard to manage from ideation to execution, but they also take time and commitment. 

Thus, as exceptional SEO agencies work with clients to achieve results, displaying their clientele has become a common characteristic. 

Doing this does two things. 

It shows you they’re experienced. And it helps your decision to choose, using the type of companies they’ve worked with as a benchmark: 

4. Real Customer Testimonials

If an SEO agency helped increase your website traffic, leading to more sales, you’d be open to giving them a testimonial, right?

In the same vein, when choosing an SEO agency, scan their website for what past customers say about them. 

A common characteristic you’ll find with the best SEO agencies is the proud display of what happy customers say about their service: 

5. Industry-specific Thought Leadership

Exceptional SEO agencies are always on the forefront of the latest trends, especially how it impacts rankings, traffic, and business in general. 

In most cases, you’ll find a top executive of the company sharing insights via blogs, social media, and research papers, which makes them maintain thought-leadership.

So, before you hire an SEO agency, check if they’re up to date and share recent trends about the SEO industry that help you keep pace with the market: 

6. A Crisp-clear Company Culture

An SEO company may have the unique expertise you seek and all the characteristics listed above. Yet, their company culture may not fit with yours.

The truth is, exceptional SEO agencies don’t take on toxic clients; neither would you like to work with people whose values you don’t agree with.  

To avoid this, top SEO companies have the characteristic of displaying their company culture, so potential customers can decide if working with them aligns with their culture:

How to Work With an SEO Agency

Most SEO agencies work as an extension of your in-house marketing team. 

Thus, there are steps to working with an SEO agency that’s right for you. These steps are essential, as they ensure your collaboration with them is successful.  

Let’s explore the major ones.

1. Prepare your in-house, front-facing team

Before you work with an SEO agency, get relevant teams in your company on the same page. Let them know why your company needs to hire SEO professionals and how working with them will impact your business. 

Also, select those who’ll work directly with the SEO agency to drive the results you seek. The people you choose would help to bridge the communication gap between your company and the agency.

Doing this ensures that there’s always someone to keep the SEO agency in sync with your company culture, goals for working with them, expectations, and timeline. 

2. Discovery session

Working with an SEO agency could be to rank higher for target keywords, generate more traffic, drive sales, or all three. 

But, no business case and needs are precisely the same. And SEO strategies that worked for company A may not work for yours. 

Thus, take the time to share everything about your business as it concerns SEO with an agency you choose to work with. Doing this helps them develop custom strategies and plans unique to achieving your goals. 

Exceptional SEO companies allow you to share this information with them via a discovery session: 

3. Research and Recommendations

After you share your business situation, needs, and goals with an SEO company, be on the lookout for what they do next. 

Top SEO agencies don’t jump into sending you quotes and invoices. 

They delve into research, using what you shared with them to gain the right context about your business situation. Doing this brings them on the same page with your company, target audience, business goals, and competition.

After this research, they usually share recommendations of what needs to be done to get maximum results. They can send this recommendation via a report sent over email or talk you through it over a phone call.

4. Contract with Deliverables

After your discovery call and follow-up conversations, expect to receive a contract with deliverables from an SEO agency, if working with you looks like a good fit.

It’s best to share this contract with relevant members on your team, especially those working directly with the agency. Ensure to go down to the nitty-gritty of the contract’s terms and conditions. 

Also, share it with your legal department to avoid signing an agreement that hurts or binds your company in the future. 

5. Onboarding, Project Scoping, and Management

To work with you, an SEO company would request access to some of your digital assets. 

Depending on your work scope, such access could include your website or blog passwords, your analytics tools login codes, selected in-house staff, etc. 

To kickstart a working relationship with your company, SEO agencies usually take you through a detailed onboarding process. 

So, you should expect one. 

Over this onboarding session, the scope of your project, delivery timelines, communication channels, and an understanding of how both parties manage your project is defined and communicated. 

How to Find The Right SEO Agency For You

So far, I’ve outlined the characteristics of exceptional SEO agencies and walked you through some fundamentals steps to working with one. 

But, as I established at the beginning of this guide, you don’t just need the right SEO agency, you need an SEO agency that’s right for you. 

How do you find one?

To help you, we put together a list of companies that we believe to be the best in the business.

Also, we skipped SEO agencies who can’t even rank their site organically. Finally, we looked away from digital marketing generalists who do everything under the sun for a quick buck.

The result?

What follows is our vetted list of the five best SEO companies of 2020 by the types of projects they’re exceptional at working on.

The 5 Top SEO Agencies

1. Neil Patel Digital – Best For SEO-optimized Content Marketing

At Neil Patel Digital, we’re great at SEO-optimized content marketing.

Our team of highly experienced SEO experts and content marketers brings decades of hands-on experience to the table. We believe brands can influence how their customers think through the creation of distribution of thoughtful, engaging content. 

And we put this belief to work by partnering with forward-thinking companies to develop SEO-focused content, performance-based digital marketing strategies and programs that get the attention it deserves. 

When you work with us, you’ll deliver content the right types of content to your target audience at the right time:

2. Voice SEO – Best For Voice Search

Voice SEO started as a small team of SEO experts. Initially, they focused on using their SEO skills to help businesses like them to grow online. 

Through dedication and close observation of the ever-changing SEO industry, Voice SEO realized the growing use of devices such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Echo, to query search engines. 

Seeing that 50% of all online searches in 2020 would be voice-based, a statistic in the upward trend, Voice SEO followed the highest standards in SEO to narrow its focus on helping companies with voice search engine optimization: 

3. ReachLocal- Best For Local SEO

When it comes to executing best-in-class local SEO strategies, ReachLocal needs no introduction. 

This SEO agency is responsible for generating over 201 million local leads for more than 19,000 clients across the globe. 

Not only are they the go-to company for practical and strategic local SEO executions, but ReachLocal’s experience also spans over 15 years, and they have offices in five continents:

4. FATJOE – Best For Backlinks Acquisition

FATJOE comes highly recommended for acquiring backlinks for SEO. Turn to this SEO agency if you need help generating high-value backlinks. 

And you can do this with the assurance that even other SEO agencies rely on them for the same. 

FATJOE was founded in 2012. Today, they’ve grown to become one of the world’s biggest outsourced link building agencies, and they serve more than 5,000 clients:

5. OuterBox – Best For eCommerce SEO

OuterBox is our pick for eCommerce SEO. 

They’re an SEO and performance marketing company focused on helping eCommerce brands drive growth through search strategy, design, and conversion rate optimization. 

Irrespective of which eCommerce platform your business is built on—Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Drupal, or others; OuterBox’s eCommerce search engine optimization strategies and tactics are effective and reliable: 

Conclusion: Be Patient with Your Chosen SEO Agency

Choosing and partnering with an SEO agency, even one that’s perfect for you, isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. 

It takes time before you’ll start seeing results. 

However, it is worth the wait because once things kick-off, SEO is like a flywheel that gets better by the day and works like a vicious cycle: 

So be patient. 

Only ensure you choose an SEO agency that’s right for you. And most notably, one with a diverse team of experienced experts who breathe SEO:

The post How to Choose The Right SEO Agency appeared first on Neil Patel.

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Replay: MarTech Live explores the many minds of marketing technologists

For our first session we invited perhaps the most influential marketing technologist in the space, Scott Brinker, founder of chiefmartec.com and VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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B2B Marketing News: B2B CMOs Plan 2021 Spending Rise, Influencer Marketing’s Pandemic Strength, & YouTube’s Top-Performing Ads

The Majority of B2B CMOs Expect to Increase Their Spending on A Variety of Digital Channels Next Year Nearly 69 percent of B2B marketing CMOs will increase digital advertising spending in 2021, including email and mobile marketing, paid search, website ads, organic SEO, and social media marketing, according to recently-released survey data from Gartner of interest to digital marketers. MarketingCharts US B2B Digital Advertising Thrives amid the Coronavirus as Traditional B2B Spend Plummets B2B firms will spend over $8 billion on digital advertising in 2020, a 22.6 percent increase from 2019's total, according to newly-released forecast data, also showing that 43 percent of U.S. B2B marketers said they plan to reallocate live event spending to content creation. eMarketer Engagement with sponsored influencer posts doubled during lockdowns Between March and July 2020 sponsored influencer posts saw a five-fold increase in interactions, reaching 57 million in July, according to recently-released report data from Shareablee. Business of Apps Enterprise CMO Survey: COVID-19's Impact on Budgets and Tactics 61 percent of enterprise CMOs said they created special customer communication during the pandemic, topping the list of actions taken by large global firms, with 47 percent noting that they deployed customer sentiment tools, while 42 percent developed scenarios for planning purposes, according to recently-released survey data. MarketingProfs Facebook launches a Shop tab in its app, just like Instagram Facebook has rolled out a global test of its shopping feature — Facebook Shop — occupying its own new tab in the platform's app, in a move aligning in-app purchasing features with those already present in its Instagram offering, the social media giant recently announced. The Verge In-App Bidding Gathers Steam, But Adoption Looks Nothing Like Header Bidding On The Web More digital advertisers who utilize mobile app ad buys are embracing real-time bidding programmatic-like auctions, according to MoPub, in a shift that could affect how marketers allocate spending. Ad Exchanger Email Falls Behind WhatsApp As Customer Request Channel: Study Small to medium size global businesses have seen rising use of digital communication channels during the pandemic, with use of WhatsApp rising some 76 percent, SMS text by 56 percent, and traditional email 10 percent, according to recently-released survey data of interest to online marketers. MediaPost Which YouTube TrueView for Action Direct-Response Ads Are Tops So Far in 2020? Google's YouTube platform has released an algorithmic list of its top-performing ads that utilize the video giant's TrueView for Action automated bidding system, YouTube recently announced. Adweek U.S. Advertising Falls 14% In July, Most Moderate Rate Of Erosion Since March The largest advertisers and digital media helped overall U.S. advertising spending tally its best month during July since the effects of the pandemic began, as April's decrease of 35 percent in ad spending had fallen to 14 percent in July — two of several items of interest to digital marketing in newly-released report data. MediaPost Mobile ad spend jumps 71% amid pandemic recovery Spending on mobile advertising soared some 71 percent globally during the second quarter compared to 2019, with rates in the U.S. even higher at 77 percent, and a global increase of 8 percent over first-quarter mobile ad spending, according to recently-released study data. Mobile Marketer ON THE LIGHTER SIDE: A lighthearted look at “business as usual” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist Wendy’s Spices Up Other Brands’ Twitter Profile Pictures — AdWeek TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) / TopRank Marketing — 2020 Finalists and Winners - Content Marketing Awards — Content Marketing Awards
• SAP — 3 Actionable Insights with… SAP global CMO Alicia Tillman — The Drum
• Anne Leuman — What’s Trending: Make B2B Content More Memorable — LinkedIn (client)
• TopRank Marketing — B2B Marketers Lend Their Support to Influencer Programs — New Horizons

Have you come across your own top marketing stories from the past week of news? Please let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading our weekly B2B marketing industry news, and we hope that you'll return next Friday and tune in for another array of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.

The post B2B Marketing News: B2B CMOs Plan 2021 Spending Rise, Influencer Marketing’s Pandemic Strength, & YouTube’s Top-Performing Ads appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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