As the New Year rapidly approaches, it’s valuable for companies to take stock of the past year. It’s important to assess how your audiences engaged with your marketing content and topics. Following our own advice, we compiled a list of the topics we covered in 2022 to see what generated the most interest and greatest responses from our readers. Here’s what we learned from our topics.
Most Popular Topics in 2022
- 5 Reasons Getting Published Is Important. This is our guide to understanding the impact publishing articles can have on brands and individuals who want to demonstrate their expertise and establish their competitive advantage through thought leadership.
Why is this topic important? Establishing a brand presence across recognized, targeted channels helps brands break through the noise. Then, they can firmly position themselves as well-respected experts in their field.
- Using Internal Communications to Enhance Business Growth explores the vital types of communications that exist within a company’s internal network. This post explains why they’re crucial to corporate success and how to maximize internal messaging.
Why is this topic important? Internal communications foster transparency, collaboration and trust. This is especially true with the growth of hybrid and remote workplaces.
- Why It’s Important to Build Customer Relationships. This post offers a breakdown of the various roles marketing, sales and customer service play in establishing meaningful customer relationships.
Why is this topic important? Customers are always at the heart of any successful business. Understanding the roles each of these departments plays is essential to deepening relationships, fostering loyalty and ensuring customer retention, especially in challenging times.
- Reflections on a Decade: 10 Ways Business Has Changed. These reflections note the most influential shifts across business in the 10 years pre-pandemic, much of which was dominated by advancements in technology.
Why is this topic important? The trends we saw in 2019 were rapidly accelerated during the pandemic, instigating a wave of digital transformation. Adapting to these changes is critical to sustainability and scalability in business today and into the future.
- What Is a True Professional and Why Does Being One Matter? This blog features quotes from successful business leaders about the most important attributes of a business professional.
Why is this topic important? Professionalism is a set of characteristics, behaviors and values that fuels respect and success in any industry. We’ve since discussed the evolution of professionalism, but quotes from experts still motivate us and our readers.
- Is Your Marketing Plan Delivering the Results You Expected? This blog reveals the common missteps businesses make when creating a marketing plan (or operating without a plan). We also describe how to overcome them.
Why is this topic important? Developing a strategic and well-thought-out marketing plan is not a one-time event. It requires ongoing assessment, evaluation and adjustment. The questions we pose help keep businesses on track at every stage in the process.
- Push vs. Pull Media looks at the evolution of the common terms of “push” and “pull” in media and how they have changed. Interestingly, this blog is more than 10 years old. This is why we’ve since updated the content to reflect today’s digital transformation trends in a recent blog.
Why is this topic important? Today a push versus pull strategy can be called outbound versus inbound. It’s also referred to as direct versus indirect, and interruption versus permission. Understanding these dichotomies helps businesses determine the best ways to engage with their audiences.
- The Difference Between a Practice and a Business leverages the expertise of Matt Church’s book The Thought Leaders Practice. It provides questions to help differentiate between a business versus a practice. It also discusses why that matters to finances, marketing outreach, operations and longevity.
Why is this topic important? The nature of business has changed in recent years, including the emergence of more freelancing and individual practices. According to research estimates from the International Labor Organization, approximately 46.5 percent of the world’s workforce identifies as self-employed. This points toward the rise of practices versus businesses.
- 6 Marketing Obstacles and How to Tackle Them. This is the second blog in this list that focuses on marketing challenges and strategies for avoiding or overcoming them.
Why is this topic important? Roadblocks and challenges are inevitable. Awareness of marketing obstacles is the first step to conquering them. Armed with information, marketers can focus on solutions and invest the appropriate resources to improve any marketing initiative.
- How to Use Color Psychology to Influence B2B Buyers. This blog showcases the way colors impact emotions and how that plays a part in B2B marketing.
Why is this topic important? Color plays a critical role in brand image. Understanding the psychology behind it is valuable when considering audiences, especially when seeking engagement in a competitive, busy marketplace.
- Using Editorial Coverage to Build Your Brand explores how editorial coverage is defined today and why it’s important. It discusses harnessing the power of magazines, journals, newspapers and other sources to establish brand presence and thought leadership.
Why is this topic important? Editorial coverage is no easy task. This guide helps marketers understand the high-quality, timely, engaging, valuable and relevant content editors seek.
- The Top 9 Marketing Communications Projects lists the most prevalent content-driven marketing communications initiatives along with their purposes.
Why is this topic important? Content is still king for attracting and engaging customers and prospects. Yet, there’s much more to success than producing good content. It’s also important to create the right mix of projects or formats and use the right marketing channels that resonate with your audiences.
- 50 Marketing Terms You Need to Know is a comprehensive terminology guide for business leaders and marketing professionals to keep up to date with industry trends and associated jargon.
Why is this topic important? To communicate effectively, it’s vital to speak the same language as your peers and other industry professionals.
- The Importance of Practicing Business Ethics explores why ethical business practices are central to marketplace sustainability and how to foster a principle-driven business culture.
Why is this topic important? Transparency and empathy lead to trust in a brand. According to a report by Barclay’s Banking, 63 percent of customers want to see more ethical practices from companies, and employees value ethical business practices now more than ever.
A Balanced Path Toward Growth
Recent years have shown us the value of adaptability, the worth of resilience, the necessity of embracing change and the importance of lifelong learning in our personal and professional lives. When we look back on our most popular blogs, newsletters and topics of 2022, it’s clear our readers are still gleaning value from the tried and tested principles of sound marketing, content development and principled business practices amidst a rapidly changing marketplace. It’s important to balance these vital, enduring lessons and topics with the trends and technology of today. Then, when we apply them to our marketing strategy, we foster new paths toward growth.
