Happy New Year! Today we all start the adventure anew, another year of family, friendships, experience, and of course (for readers of this blog)—digital marketing.
But before launching into new ideas, campaigns, strategies, and tactics for 2019, here’s a quick look back at the top 10 most-read posts on the Webbiquity blog in 2018. While the coming year will bring its own new developments and evolution, many of the themes here are likely to remain important and have fresh impacts over the coming 12 months.
Note that all of these were written within the past 12 months, but rather were the most read over that time frame.
1. The 12 Best Competitive Intelligence and Benchmarking Tools
Marketers can’t resist knowing what their competitors are up to, and how their own efforts compare. Understanding this, a number of smart vendors have developed marketing technology (tools) to help with evaluation. Here are a dozen of the best tools for comparing your brand’s performance to your top competitors in terms of web traffic, social media brand mentions, target keywords, online advertising, organic search visibility, and other factors.
2. The Top B2B Marketing Trends for 2018 – A Meta-Analysis
Written almost exactly a year ago, this post compiled and analyzed the predictions of more than 100 B2B marketing professionals as published in 10 highly-ranked posts during the last two months of 2017. How accurate were the predictions of this esteemed group? It’s an interesting review at this point.
3. The 10 Best Customer Service and Customer Engagement Platforms
With the increasing focus on optimizing the end-to-end customer experience, it’s little surprise this was one of the top posts here last year. It provides brief reviews (plus links to more detailed reviews) of an innovative new breed of tools for engagement and collaboration, including WordOutLoud (which enables vendors to create a private social network for their customers) and Engage, which calls itself a conversational commerce platform.
4. 6 Traits of Highly Effective Data Analysts
This guest post from Robert Murphy remains a favorite. What exactly are agencies and companies looking for in a data analyst? Here are half a dozen of the key characteristics needed for suceess as a technical marketing analyst in today’s data-driven marketing world.
5. The 26 Best All-in-One SEO Tool Suites
One approach to SEO tech is to assemble a collection of best of breed tools for functions like keyword research, rank tracking, and backlink monitoring. Another is to implement an all-in-one SEO tools suite, which covers all the bases in a single package. Which is best for your organization depends on a variety of factors, but all-in-one suites simplify management and integration.
6. The 29 Best Web Analytics Tools
Ideally, marketers will have a set of analytics tools to cover everything from detailed operational feedback to high-level results reporting. These 29 tools can help marketers understand web traffic and industry trends, sources of traffic, website visitor engagement and behavior, content performance, competitive insights, campaign results, social media metrics, conversion optimization, and more.
7. How to Build a B2B Marketing Team
Inspired by work with a number of startups, this posts looks at different staffing models and outlines one useful sequence for growing a B2B marketing team from the first hire through a dozen employees (which can scale well beyond the $30 million revenue level).
8. 47 Superb Social Media Marketing Stats and Facts
Of small business owners who use social media, 92% agree that “social media marketing is important for my business.” So it’s no surprise posts about social media marketing stats remain popular. Here’s a smaller but fresher set of social media facts and stats, with all new research coming soon.
9. 20 Tremendous Digital Marketing Stats and Facts
As with the post above, it’s not surprising a roundup of digital marketing stats would be popular, though a newer collection of collections is available, culminating with this post about 27 B2B marketing stats and facts last spring.
10. The 15 Best Screencasting and Online Presentation Tools
Rounding out the top 10 posts from 2018 is yet another from the series on content marketing technology tools—a series so popular that a revised and expanded version plus dozens of pages of new material is now available as an ebook on Amazon.com, The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Software: 750+ Tools to Help You Plan, Create, Distribute, and Measure Awesome Content. This post covered the top tools for grabbing static and animated screen images, and creating web presentations.
That’s a wrap! It will be interesting to see which posts maintain traction through 2019, and what new favorites emerge.