2013 was a successful year for KoMarketing. With an office relocation, developing a team of new hires, and speaking engagements across two continents and multiple cities, there was little downtime over the past year and 2014 promises even greater opportunities for our team.
The beginning of 2013 saw us performing significant program work for clients in Europe. Our continued client success allowed us to undertake new initiatives in the Asian market, specifically through Baidu search engine advertising. Today, we’re providing internet marketing solutions across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and we’re hoping to expand our presence in the new year.
But it all starts with our people, thought leadership, and contributions to the industry. All of our clients and prospects know the importance content plays in our B2B online marketing initiatives. This goes for our company’s marketing tactics as well. During the year 2013, we wrote. A lot. Here is a look at some of our top performing columns, blog posts, and content marketing assets of the past year.
Top Blog Posts on the KoMarketing Blog
The most exciting part about our 10 most popular posts and columns of 2013 (based on traffic metrics for blog content) is that they came from seven different KoMarketing team members. It’s great to look back at some of the really awesome content (we hope you agree!) that made our content marketing strategy a success this past year.
Our Top Third Party Columns
KoMarketing 2013 Presentations
Casie Gillette led the charge, presenting to audiences in San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Raleigh, and, most recently, Dallas. Steven Wells and Derek Edmond did their part as well. Steven presented on panels on behalf of the US Commercial Services Group in Seoul, South Korea and Raleigh, NC. Derek participated in a webinar over the summer with Log My Calls.
Here are a few of those presentations for review:
Top B2B Online Marketing News
To fully engage in an effective content marketing initiative, B2B marketers need to immerse themselves in their target audience’s industries. In fact, the newsroom mentality is becoming more pervasive in broader marketing circles, when it pertains to theme discovery and content development.
One of our more subtle goals of 2013 has been to not only write about the industries we’re in, but to also cover the latest news and information associated with the industries we’re in. Here are some of the top news stories that we covered in 2013.
What’s In Store for 2014?
As we look toward the new year, our tactical focus will remain largely the same as it was in 2013. Content is a fundamental aspect of all of our online marketing initiatives. Google+ and Google Authorship will become even more important focal points for B2B SEO. The role of SEO tagging best practices also takes on even greater emphasis, including on-page tagging, image tagging, media tagging, etc. Tagging is especially important when considering mobile device adoption and the evolving role of social media in our everyday behavior.
In addition to the tactics referenced above, here is a deeper look at 5 specific client initiatives we plan on tackling in the New Year:
SEO Performance Benchmarking in an Age of “Not Provided” Traffic
Google hit our industry over the proverbial head when they decided to encrypt all search engine queries, even for users who aren’t signed in to Google. This change rendered “not provided” keyword referrals close to 100% in web analytics reports and pretty much made B2B marketers’ ability to trace keyword to conversion non-existent in organic search.
Deeper analysis of site, brand, and page level performance, associated to organic search traffic, will become even more critical in the future. KoMarketing is fortunate to have already been moving in this direction, so while this change presented a roadblock for us, we’d already begun adapting the ways in which SEO performance could be measured.
Here are a few of our recommendations and further discussion on “not provided” SEO performance benchmarking:
Mobile SEO Best Practices
Image courtesy of eMarketer
More of our clients and prospects are seeing mobile site development as a priority in 2014. The percentage of visitors accessing their web content via mobile device is increasing rapidly each month and simply cannot be ignored.
We are already working with several clients on transitioning to a website experience across device types. Fortunately, search engines provide guidance to site owners on best practices to ensure/maintain search visibility across mobile and desktop browsers.
Here are a few reference links on mobile site development, including best practices outlined by KoMarketing Associates:
Expect a greater emphasis on the technical aspects of SEO best practices to continue to develop in the new year, as more B2B organizations seriously consider mobile device optimization.
Social Media Markup
Information is being created and exchanged at an ever increasing rate. Schema markup, Open Graph Tagging, and Twitter Cards are all vocabularies designed to help search engines and marketers more quickly identify and display key elements within web page architecture.
As discussed previously, this type of tagging will become more critical for B2B marketers seeking to distinguish their brand presence online, through social media, search engines, and mobile device usage.
We created a detailed write up of schema markup in this blog post. For Open Graph and Twitter Cards, Quicksprout has a comprehensive article for referencing the basics of these two social media tagging vocabularies as well.
LinkedIn Marketing
Image courtesy of Holger Schulze’s 2013 B2B Content Marketing Trends Report
For most B2B marketers, LinkedIn represents a significant source of quality traffic, albeit in small percentages. But, as SEO becomes more heavily reliant on establishing the right industry connections to build links, LinkedIn will become the most logical network for outreach.
Beyond SEO link building, LinkedIn company pages and profiles offer an opportunity to target audiences by industry, profession, and role. Here are two resources we wrote about LinkedIn over the past year. We’ll be doing more analysis and discovery of LinkedIn functionality in the new year.
Social Media Advertising
Image courtesy of aimClear
Social media advertising is increasingly becoming a mechanism for targeting audiences by interest, experience, and business need. We can acquire link visibility and social media awareness with small social advertising budgets tied to well done content marketing assets and information.
As organic reach is purposely diminished in popular social networking channels, paid advertising, an additional way to reach an audience, will become more important for B2B marketers.
Our colleagues at aimClear have been at the forefront of social media advertising tactics and successes. Here are two important posts of reference from their blog:
Final Thoughts
In short, 2014 is shaping up to be another busy year in search, social, and content. We’re excited to move forward and tackle new challenges and opportunities ahead.
What do you think? I would love to hear your feedback. Feel free to shoot me an email at any point or connect with us online to discuss on Google+, Twitter, or our B2B LinkedIn Group.
