B2B Marketer Pain Points, Performance, and Priorities for the Year Ahead: B2B Marketing Monitor
54 percent of B2B brands face difficulty connecting with customers on the emotional level needed to increase brand engagement, while only 22 percent of B2B enterprises say they excel when it comes to customer experience (CX) — two of several findings of interest to digital marketers in recently-released survey data. MarketingProfs

Micro Influencers Still À La Mode in 2021
From micro and macro to mega, non-paid, affiliate and celebrity, the influencer types that enterprise marketers prefer working with runs the gamut, however the overwhelming majority — some 90 percent — want to work with micro-influencers who have between five and 100,000 followers, up from 77 percent in 2020, according to newly-released study data. [Survey]MarketingCharts

ANA Releases ‘KPIs That Matter,’ Finds The Most Important Ones Aren’t Always The Most Used
Cost per mille (CPM), cost per click (CPC) and unique reach are the top three key performance indicators (KPIs) marketers use, while those found to be the most important include return on investment (ROI), exposed return on advertising spend (ROAS) and brand safety metrics, according to recently-released survey data from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). MediaPost

Post-IDFA Alliance finds iOS 14.5 triggered up to 21% growth in Android ad spending
Early figures have shown that between 63.5 and 83.2 percent of Apple mobile users have chosen not to be tracked for advertising, which has led to a 21 percent increase in ad spending for rival mobile operating system Android, according to recently-released mobile marketing report data. VentureBeat

Social Users Demand Relevance In Advertising, Study Finds
Some 59 percent of Twitter users say they remember those in-feed ads which are contextually relevant to the content surrounding them, with 46 percent preferring in-feed ads to open web alternatives — two of several findings of interest to online marketers in newly-released survey data. MediaPost

How the pandemic changed worldwide ad spending
Digital advertising will for the first time account for more than 60 percent of overall global ad spending, and is expected to court the 70 percent mark by 2025, according to recently-released forecast data, also showing 2021 ad spending that is predicted to be up 20.4 percent from 2020 levels. eMarketer

LinkedIn Shares New Insights Into Evolving Market Shifts as a Result of COVID-19
Some 70 percent of buyers want to continue to work remotely at least half of the time, while 67 percent of sales managers have encountered unforeseen difficulties maximizing remote team efficiency — two of numerous findings of interest to digital marketers in recently released report data. Social Media Today

Zoom announces all-in-one events platform
Zoom has announced a summer release of its Zoom Events virtual experiences platform, which will offer an array of features for ticketed virtual events, as the firm looks to serve the ongoing virtual event market. 80 percent of U.S. users said that they expect to have virtual experiences available even when in-person options are offered, according to Zoom survey data. MarTech

YouTube Previews Upcoming Improvements for YouTube Studio, Including Auto-Generated Title Suggestions
Google’s YouTube video platform has shared previews of forthcoming feature additions to its Creator Studio, including easier Google Drive integration, mobile publishing improvements, and multiple upload templates, the video firm recently announced. Social Media Today

Google Announces New Features for App Advertisers
Google has shared information about several new features aimed at mobile app advertisers, including in-app events from within Google Analytics, easier deep-linking, and new data-driven attribution (DDA) information, the search giant recently announced. Search Engine Journal

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at “the NFT bandwagon” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Prabhakar Raghavan Isn’t CEO of Google—He Just Runs the Place — Wired

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — What’s Trending: The New SEO and the Case for Content Marketing — LinkedIn
• LinkedIn — 4 ways B2B marketers can successfully combine brand and purpose — Ad Age
• Lee Odden — Pubcon Masters Group Workshops and Trainings Florida 2021 — Pubcon

Have you come across your own top B2B marketing story from the past week of industry news? Please let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for taking the time to join us for the TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope that you’ll return again next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.