B2B Marketing Managers See Customer-Centricity as Path to Maximized Budgets
B2B marketing managers say that focusing on the needs of their organization’s customers and relying on data to make decisions are the top ways to maximize budgets, with 36 percent citing a shift to digital marketing from traditional marketing efforts, according to newly-published survey data. MarketingCharts

LinkedIn taps AI to make it easier for firms to find job candidates
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn (client) is preparing an array of new natural language AI capabilities that aim to streamline hiring and ad creation processes on the professional social platform, including job technology that goes behind traditional role titles, LinkedIn recently announced. Reuters

“When you focus on the skills that are required to do the job effectively, all of a sudden, you see there are tens of thousands of candidates out there. You can't just look at job titles.” — Ryan Roslansky CEO at Click To Tweet

WFA Finds Media Taking A Backseat In Setting AI Strategy
73 percent of global marketers have said that their organization’s marketing team is most often involved in setting AI strategy, with 71 percent pointing to legal teams, 48 percent insights teams, and 45 percent media teams — three of the findings contained in newly-released World Federation of Advertisers survey data. MediaPost

TikTok set to surpass Facebook in daily minutes by 2025—but ad spend hasn’t followed
Advertisers are expected to spend some five times more per person hour on Meta’s Facebook platform than on TikTok in the coming years, despite TikTok eventually eclipsing Facebook for the top spot when it comes to the amount of time spent on social platforms daily, according to recently-published forecast data. Insider Intelligence

The Public’s Perception of the Advertising and PR Industry Remains Poor
New Gallup data has shown that the advertising and public relations (PR) sectors have hit a new low when it comes to public perception, with 19 percent of U.S. adults viewing the sectors in a positive light, and a scant six percent perceiving them as very positive, with 40 percent holding either somewhat or very negative views of the industries. MarketingCharts

LinkedIn Expands the Display of Its Profile CTA Buttons to More Surfaces
LinkedIn has rolled out expanded visibility for its recently-added call-to-action profile buttons, which will appear in more areas on the platform including in feed posts and within search results, LinkedIn recently announced. Social Media Today

Microsoft CEO says tech giants battling for content to build AI
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella scrutinized the type of exclusive publisher partnerships put in place by the likes of search giant Google as obstacles to AI industry growth, during recent testimony in the landmark U.S. antitrust case trial against Google. Reuters

YouTube Launches New Subscriber Analytics to Assist in Content Planning
Google’s YouTube has added an array of new channel analytics features including more granular audience viewing data, more flexible sorting options, along with specific new and returning viewer information, YouTube recently announced, providing B2B marketers with new video viewing insight. Social Media Today

Social Media Marketers Seek to Quantify the Revenue Impact of Engagement Metrics
60 percent of social media marketers have said that they plan to focus on the revenue impact of social engagement through likes, comments, and shares, while 57 percent expect to focus on tracking the sales and conversions that come from social media efforts — two of numerous statistics of interest to B2B marketers contained in newly-publish survey data. MarketingCharts

Amid Twitter chaos, Mastodon grew donations 488% in 2022, reached 1.8M monthly active users
Open-source social media platform Mastodon has ridden on the wave of uncertainty surrounding Twitter — renamed X — to amass 5.8 million users and some 1.8 million active monthly users, with the non-profit having recorded a 488 percent rise in financial donations during 2022, according to newly-released Mastodon financial statement data. TechCrunch

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at “Change for the Sake of Change” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

The Marimba Virtuoso’s Desktop Planetarium — IEEE Spectrum

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

Lee Odden / TopRank Marketing — Feeling B2B with Wil Reynolds: A B2B Marketing Expert Interview — MarketingProfs
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions/Adobe — These B2B Innovation Award Winners Are Breathing New Life Into B2B Marketing — Adweek

FRIDAY FIVE B2B MARKETING FAVORITES TO FOLLOW:

AJ Wilcox
Pam Didner
Beverly Jackson
Carmen Collins 
Cassie Kozyrkov

Learn more about TopRank Marketing‘s mission to help elevate the B2B marketing industry.

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About the author

Lane R. Ellis has over 39 years’ experience working with and writing about the Internet. He writes for and manages all of the posts on the award-winning TopRank B2B Marketing Blog. Before joining the team here as Social Media and Content Marketing Manager, Lane spent more than a decade as Lead Editor for the prestigious conference firm Pubcon. When he's not writing about B2B marketing trends, Lane enjoys distance running (he's completed 11 marathons including two ultra-marathons so far), genealogical research, cross-country skate skiing, vegetarian cooking, and spending time with his wonderful wife Julie Ahasay and their cats Kukla, Twister, and Arlo in beautiful Duluth, Minnesota.