TopRank Marketing

TopRank Marketing Marketing agency on a mission to ! 🚀 Working with top B2B brands on elevated experiences.

TopRank Marketing helps companies grow brand visibility, reach and revenue online. We provide an integrated approach to digital marketing that helps businesses become the best answer for what customers are looking for across owned, earned, paid and shared media. Trusted by Fortune 500 and Inc 1000 companies, our customer focused content marketing services include strategy, audits, implementation, management and ongoing performance optimization.

B2B influencer marketing programs that don't support the full customer journey are missed opportunities. But there's a s...
08/24/2026

B2B influencer marketing programs that don't support the full customer journey are missed opportunities. But there's a solution.

Our latest influencer marketing research found that B2B marketers with very effective influencer programs are more likely than others to activate influence during:

🔹 Evaluation: 62% vs. 44%
🔹 Decision: 63% vs. 48%
🔹 Post-sale: 46% vs. 25%

Extending influence across the full buyer journey means more than repurposing the same creator content at every stage. B2B brands need to intentionally align the right voices, topics and formats with what buyers need next:

🔹 Awareness: Recognized creators earn attention and establish credibility.
🔹 Engagement: Practitioners and subject matter experts turn insight into useful frameworks, research and guidance.
🔹 Conversion: Customers and internal experts provide the proof and differentiation buyers need to move forward.
🔹 Post-sale: Power users and customer advocates help drive adoption, expansion, renewal and advocacy.

When influence is mapped across the buyer journey, it goes beyond a campaign tactic to become a trust system-one that helps your brand become the best answer for buyers and the AI engines driving discovery.

Learn more in today's post https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/influencer-marketing-full-funnel-content/

Your analyst recognition may bring prestige with buyers who know your brand, but can AI see it? Are influencers talking ...
08/17/2026

Your analyst recognition may bring prestige with buyers who know your brand, but can AI see it? Are influencers talking about it?

For B2B brands investing heavily in Gartner, Forrester and other analyst recognition, earning the distinction is only part of the opportunity.

As buyers increasingly use AI to research categories, compare vendors and build shortlists, brands need to think about how that analyst authority travels beyond the report itself.

B2B influencers can help turn analyst recognition into a broader system of trusted, discoverable content and today's post by Lee Odden explains how:

- Start with the buying committee, not popularity: Find influencers whose credibility and audiences overlap with the executives, evaluators and practitioners you actually need to influence.

- Give different influencers different jobs: Category experts can interpret market shifts. Practitioners can validate real-world needs. Executive peers can add decision-level relevance. Creators can make complex ideas accessible.

- Connect influencers with your executives: Interviews, roundtables, reactions and co-created content combine external credibility with your executives' expertise while creating far more content to activate.

- Build an ecosystem around the analyst moment: Integrate influencer content with executive thought leadership, owned content, earned media, social, search/GEO, video, podcasts and paid amplification.

- Design for AI discovery: Analyst recognition is one trust signal. Influencers, executives, customers, media, reviews and useful owned content create additional credible sources that can help your brand become visible wherever buyers are looking.

- Build compliance into the strategy: Give influencers enough guidance to respect analyst licensing, citation and FTC requirements while preserving the authentic expertise that makes them influential.

- Measure beyond reach and engagement: Connect audience quality, share of voice, AI visibility and content engagement with engaged accounts, MQLs/SQLs, influenced opportunities, pipeline and revenue wherever attribution allows.

Don't treat analyst recognition as a single announcement. Use a system like Best Answer Marketing system to turn it into trust, visibility and measurable impact across the buyer journey.

Check out the full article:
https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/prestige-trap/

B2B content now has two audiences: buyers and AI. Stop wasting energy on two strategies and become the best answer for b...
08/10/2026

B2B content now has two audiences: buyers and AI. Stop wasting energy on two strategies and become the best answer for both.

Humans need proof they can defend internally. AI systems need evidence they can attribute and corroborate.

If you're tired of spending resources on different strategies, here's the good news: both respond to many of the same signals including:

• Original research and proprietary data
• Credible perspectives from industry experts, customers and executives
• Consistent claims supported across multiple trusted sources
• Content structured to be easily discovered, understood and cited

Our research with Ascend2 found that 93% of B2B marketers using original research say it effectively drives engagement and leads. And among B2B marketers who frequently collaborate with influencers, 72% rate their research-based content "very effective," compared with just 29% of everyone else.

The opportunity to succeed with both human and AI audiences is to build an evidence-based thought leadership platform optimized with influence that serves both.

In today's post, we outline how original research provides the proof. credible voices provide context and validation and multi-format, multi-channel publishing makes those insights findable wherever buyers and AI assistants are looking for answers.

Learn how research, influence and thought leadership can help your brand become the best answer for B2B buyers and AI answer engines alike:

https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/best-answer-buyers-ai/

Google's advice for better AI search visibility is clear: Create non-commodity content that's unique, expert-led and pro...
07/29/2026

Google's advice for better AI search visibility is clear: Create non-commodity content that's unique, expert-led and provides value beyond common knowledge.

And yet so much B2B content continues to be "boring to boring" thanks to AI generation, lack of resources and status quo.

At TopRank Marketing we think you'll agree that it's time to break free of boring B2B commodity content and time to lean in to what's unique, special and authentically helpful to your buyers.

To do that, the wizard of words, Theresa Dorsey Meis has put together an excellent guide where she covers:

✅ What makes content uniquely yours
✅ Are you competing with your own content?
✅ Signs your content is cannibalizing itself
✅ How to audit for overlap
✅ Why (and how) unique content stands out from AI slop
✅ Why so much AI content sounds the same
✅ What should be human-led (and what to leave to AI)
✅ Structure the work so it can be found and cited
✅ Quality is the new quantity

Check out the full post: Being the Best Answer in AI Search Requires Unique Content – Here’s How https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/unique-content-seo/

Most B2B brands are on board with influencer marketing. The question isn't do we or don't we, it's how to make it work?O...
07/22/2026

Most B2B brands are on board with influencer marketing. The question isn't do we or don't we, it's how to make it work?

Our latest research for 2026 has found 86% of B2B marketers already have influencer programs underway, while the remaining 14% plan to launch one within the next year.

At the same time, fewer than half rate their programs as very effective. The biggest roadblocks? Finding the right experts, measuring business impact, and building the relationships that make programs successful.

This is where many marketers hit a wall.

Influencer marketing isn't a software problem. It's a strategy and relationship problem.

The best B2B influencer and creator marketing programs aren't built simply by searching a marketplace for creators. They're built through years of trusted relationships, a deep understanding of your audience, and the ability to match the right voices to the right business outcomes.

That's where a specialist agency can create an advantage. For those B2B marketers that are considering getting help, there some important advice to get the most out of your investment and Nick Nelson shares them in today's post.

A few key takeaways:
• Why genuine influencer relationships outperform transactional creator sourcing.
• How to prepare your team before engaging an agency to accelerate results.
• Why relevance, credibility, and audience trust matter more than follower counts.
• How experienced agencies help brands move beyond one-off campaigns to scalable, measurable influence.

If your influencer program feels harder to scale than it should or you're spending more time trying to get creators to respond to your pitch than creating impact for your business, it might be time for a different approach.

Check out the full article: How to Best Work with a B2B Influencer Marketing Agency https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/work-with-b2b-influencer-marketing-agency/

70% of B2B marketers believe they are aligned, yet misaligned teams are 200% as likely to miss revenue targets (Mutiny)F...
07/20/2026

70% of B2B marketers believe they are aligned, yet misaligned teams are 200% as likely to miss revenue targets (Mutiny)

Failing GTM strategies are often blamed on the market or AI. But the reality is failure may lie with your executive team because they never actually agreed on where to grow.

The alignment most companies think they have on paper doesn't hold up in ex*****on, and as AI accelerates whatever system a business already has, that gap only gets more expensive.

On the latest episode of , host Lee Odden sits down with Sangram Vajre, CEO of GTM Partners, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of MOVE, and a pioneer behind account-based marketing, to dig in to why go-to-market, not marketing or sales alone, is the business.

Here are 5 key takeaways from their conversation:

🎯 Most companies don't have a marketing problem or a sales problem. They have a go-to-market clarity problem, and it's the CEO, not the CMO, who owns fixing it.

⚙️ "People do not rise to the level of their goals, they fall to the level of their systems." Sangram breaks down why a system beats another quarterly target every time.

💰 At 120% net revenue retention, you can double your revenue every 3.8 years without adding a single new customer. The growth most companies chase through acquisition is already sitting in their existing accounts.

📉 Data from G2 shows pausing brand investment for one quarter can cost four quarters of acquisition efficiency to win back. Brand isn't the opposite of demand, it's what makes demand cheaper. (We couldn't agree more)

📊 The B2B brands that scale predictably aren't the ones guessing at next year's number. Sangram shares the lesson he learned from Salesforce: the highest-performing businesses already know 80-90% of next year's revenue before the year starts, because they measure retention and expansion, not just new pipeline. (which is exactly why unified analytics is part of our BAM solution)

If you'd like to get some clarity on how to create better GTM alignment within your own B2B organization, this episode is a must.

Listen, watch, or read the full breakdown of this conversation on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the Beyond B2B Marketing podcast website. ttps://www.toprankmarketing.com/podcast/beyond-b2b-24-sangram-vajre/

Cannes Lions made it clear that creators are here. For many B2B brands, the untapped opportunity isn't creators, it's ex...
07/13/2026

Cannes Lions made it clear that creators are here. For many B2B brands, the untapped opportunity isn't creators, it's executive influence.

B2B buyers don't just evaluate companies, they evaluate the people leading them. In an AI-powered search landscape where expertise, credibility, and trust drive visibility, executive voices are much more important marketing assets.

To help you learn more about what building influence from within your B2B brand might look like, today's post by our CEO Lee Odden outlines:
• Research on why executive influence is becoming a competitive advantage in B2B from LinkedIn, G2, Forrester, Profound, Ascend2, and TopRank Marketing.
• How executive thought leadership and creator/influencer programs amplify each other
• 10 practical ways to build an executive influence strategy that scales
• How authentic executive content strengthens buyer trust across every stage of the journey

The brands that win attention in the kind of discovery environment we have now are not relying on corporate messaging alone. They're building the visibility, credibility and decision confidence capability of leaders whose expertise both buyers and AI choose.

Get all 10 executive influence tactics plus 3 B2B brand examples: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/b2b-executive-influence/

Roughly 50% of the content most frequently cited by leading AI platforms was published within the previous 13 weeks.That...
07/06/2026

Roughly 50% of the content most frequently cited by leading AI platforms was published within the previous 13 weeks.

That stat comes from Profound's analysis of more than 10 billion AI citations, and it should change how every B2B marketer thinks about how they approach content.

On the newest episode of , host Lee Odden talks with Trevor Pyle, Head of Marketing at Profound, about what it actually takes to earn visibility, trust, and accurate representation across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

The key takeaway: AI platforms form opinions about your brand. They summarize, compare, and editorialize before a buyer ever reaches your website.

As Trevor puts it:
“Visibility is important, but the more important thing is that useful augmentation, or that opinion that’s injected into the answer. That comes from being accurate, and then from that accuracy, what type of sentiment and judgment the answer forms.”

Lee and Trevor dig into:
🔹 Why AI-generated answers compress the buyer journey into a few conversational turns
🔹 Why original research and proprietary data outperform commodity content ("LLMs are trying to be authoritative and credible. They want to make sure everything they're providing is very fresh.")
🔹 How third-party mentions, reviews, and influencers shape the answers AI gives about you ("Your own domain is very important, but that's not always the answer you're trying to drive people to.")
🔹 The rise of the "marketing engineer" and how AI agents fit into the modern marketing org
🔹 Where to start: "Understand what AI is saying about your brand. That's the most important influencer in the world right now."

If you own SEO, content strategy, demand gen, or thought leadership for a B2B brand, this episode is a practical roadmap for a world where AI decides how your brand is understood, considered, and chosen for the short list.

Listen, watch or read a summary of the episode: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/podcast/beyond-b2b-23-trevor-pyle/

Is B2B brand blogs still relevant for AI search visibility? Here's what the research says:With AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Pe...
06/29/2026

Is B2B brand blogs still relevant for AI search visibility? Here's what the research says:

With AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI powered answer engines reducing clicks to websites, it's easy to assume blogging has lost its value.

The research tells a different story.

As was discussed in our recent podcast interview with Rand Fishkin, traffic is no longer the only measure of success. The B2B brands that get chosen in AI search are publishing the kind of credible, structured, expert content that AI systems can understand, trust, and cite.

Here are the facts based on research:

✅ 86% of Americans say they don't trust AI-generated information without clear attribution, reinforcing the importance of authoritative, citable content. (WordPress VIP / Talker Research)

✅ When Google displays an AI Overview, users click traditional search results only 8% of the time versus 15% when no AI summary appears. (Pew Research)

✅ Only 1% of users click the sources cited within AI Overviews, highlighting why marketers must measure visibility beyond website traffic. (Pew Research)

✅ Research shows AI-optimized content that incorporates credible citations, evidence, and clear structure can improve visibility in AI-generated responses by over 30%. (arxiv)

The question isn't whether blogging still matters for B2B brands. It's whether your business blog is creating the kind of original, trustworthy knowledge that AI systems want to reference.

To learn more about how, read today's post by Nick Nelson on TopRank's B2B Marketing Blog: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/blogging-ai-search/

According to research from SparkToro and Similarweb 68% of Google searches now end without a click.Only 27% of Google se...
06/24/2026

According to research from SparkToro and Similarweb 68% of Google searches now end without a click.

Only 27% of Google searches send visitors to the open web.

And according to Rand Fishkin, most marketers are still measuring success as if it's 2015.

On the latest episode of the podcast, host Lee Odden sat down with Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro and co-author with Amanda Natividad of the new book, Zero Click Marketing, to discuss what happens when AI search, social platforms, creators, communities, and answer engines fundamentally change how buyers discover information.

A few standout insights from the conversation:
📌 Traffic can go down while sales go up.
📌 Visibility matters more than clicks when discovery happens across AI, social, search, influencers, podcasts, and communities.
📌 Brand building remains one of the strongest drivers of long-term growth.
📌 You don't need to be everywhere. Focus deeply on the channels where your audience actually pays attention.
📌 Original research, authentic expertise, and unique perspectives become more valuable as AI generates more average content.
📌 AI visibility is not the same thing as business impact.

One of Rand's most important observations:
“You’ve got to get okay with the idea that your reach is now going to be far greater than it was, but your traffic is going to be way lower.”

For B2B marketers, that changes how we think about SEO, content, influencer marketing, audience intelligence, attribution, and what it means to become discoverable in an increasingly fragmented world.

Listen, Watch or Read the full episode to learn how leading B2B marketers can adapt to a future where buyers may never click but still make buying decisions: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/podcast/beyond-b2b-22-rand-fishkin/

Address

7701 Golden Valley Road #27227
Minneapolis, MN
55427

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+19524000190

Website

, ,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when TopRank Marketing posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to TopRank Marketing:

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Category