TopRank
Toprank is masterminded by Lee Odden. I first encountered Lee at Ion Search in Leeds back in April 2012. His talk “Optimise & Socialise For More Customers” was first class and the way he connected search and content to the user journey was fantastic. Toprank’s blog is similar – practical, logical and useable.
Branded3
Okay an obvious one. 3 seperate blogs aimed at 3 seperate areas of expertise; Blogstorm focusses on search marketing and SEO, B3Labs is aimed at design and development while #Socialised unsurprisingly covers social media.
Adweek
Possibly my favourite site of 2012. Its been my port of call to read about pretty much all the big ad releases and branded content throughout the year. The site’s reporting style makes it easy to read for me, top articles this year for me include the coverage of Oreo and AMC Theatres for their Twitter duel and also the Bodyform YouTube video, covered in their sub e-zine – Adfreak.
Brand Republic
This is the site I’ve read most consistently over the last ten years. I’ve named Brand Republic but any number of the sites they operate are really useful to keep up with all campaigns and major brands be it regional or sub brand specific. Other sites include; Campaign, Marketing, Media Week and PR Week.
The Drum
Again, this site is one that I’ve followed over the last decade and is perhaps the best of the bunch that focusses on the individuals rather than brands, such as the top 30 under 30.
Ad Age
Ad Age strikes me as a bit ‘starchy’ compared to other site but there is no one better for advertising news, plus I find it useful to keep tabs on what brands are doing the other side of the pond in the US.
Hubspot
Hubspot is possibly the best site for data capture and a shining example of B2B marketing itself. There are lots of how to guides and best practice PDF’s which are more readily available than some of the other sites out there.
Header image by MSVG via creative commons.
