Madison Marketing Group Blog

It's undeniable that Facebook is a necessary and important part of any digital marketing campaign. With over 2.3 billion users from countries the world over, the potential reach that Facebook gives businesses is irresistible. But there are certain things your firm can do with your Facebook page that will earn the trust of your fans and that will increase visibility and engagement among them.

First, make sure your accounting or financial firm has a business page instead of a personal profile. There are quite a few differences between the two types of pages that will either help or hurt your firm's reputation.

Also, when creating your page, be sure to fill out all the important information about your business, like address, hours, and contact info. Consider what keywords you should be trying to rank for and include them in your business' bio. It's likely that you'll want to rank for "accountant", "financial firm", "accounting firm", and "(your city or local area)".

A few weeks ago, our site was experiencing record-setting levels of traffic. After a few moments of blissfully (and ignorantly) thinking our sound inbound strategy had set off some sort of viral content extravaganza we realized the real reason for the traffic. Almost all of it was coming from a single blog post or, more specifically, a single image within that blog post.

We'd recently written a blog post covering how to generate inbound leads and strengthen brand recognition. The post contained an image of a person-like figure pondering next to a large question mark. When we inserted the image, we used the alternate text “man with blue question mark.” It turns out this last step, adding alternate text to the image, was what drove all the traffic—more than 5,500 views in 10 days, as you can see in the MMG.com traffic report below.

"So, what do you do?"

"Well … you see ... it’s a rather complex industry … I do a lot; we have several clients…"

"Oh, I see..." (No, I don't.)

This post was originally published in 2013, but was updated in 2017 for relevancy.

Back when we developed this digital marketing lead generation process infographic in 2013, I believe we wanted to use it as a sales tool, but decided to publish it to the blog anyway.

Although four years have passed since then, it's hard to believe how relevant this process is to digital marketing success (though I'll admit it's not properly organized).

Digital lead generation doesn't happen without hard work. It takes focus in five key areas:

With all the buzz around social media lately, more small-to-medium sized businesses are feeling pressure to keep up with the latest best practices as it gets more complicated to market a business via social media platforms.

If you don’t have a full understanding of what it takes to properly plan, create, and execute an outstanding social media marketing strategy, keeping your social media marketing in-house can be a missed opportunity to use these high-engagement platforms for lead generation.

This post explores what's needed to set up and maintain a successful social media strategy in-house along with what you can expect when partnering with an agency.

Copywriting is difficult.

Maybe not difficult like digging trenches or performing surgery is difficult, but difficult like singing or pole vaulting is difficult – it looks effortless, until you try it for yourself.

As a digital marketing agency, copywriting is at the heart of everything we do. Websites, PPC advertising, social media marketing, online lead nurturing – in addition to great design, the success of each tactic is made possible by great copywriting.

There’s a very specific type of copywriting that has consistently proven itself to be very difficult to execute regardless of the client’s industry…

Taglines.

Taglines find themselves in a strange position within our evolving digital marketing industry. They’ve expanded their reach to the myriad digital collateral we work with daily. The highly actionable copy of landing pages, calls to action, even blog post titles are essentially taglines adapted to new media.

That's why we've compiled a short list of 3 Guiding Principles For Writing Great Taglines.

A call-to-action is the copy or graphic used to entice and persuade a website visitor to take a certain action. Well-designed calls to action can dramatically increase conversion rates.

This post examines a few best practices for creating a call-to-action that is sure to get noticed and earn clicks from your visitors.

Hiring a digital marketing agency shouldn't be a stressful process.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of illegitimate "SEO experts" and "SEO agencies" out there that promise to deliver results and come up short. If you've ever been burned in the past, you're probably wary of hiring another firm to help market your business.

Keeping up with current digital marketing trends can be an all-consuming job that marketing managers or business owners simply don't have the time or experience for, which leads to the need to partner with a trustworthy and performance-backed agency.

With all of the marketing and sales tactics in play, how can you figure out which agency to trust with your business? Read on for four strategies you can use while evaluating an agency to determine if they're a good fit for your business.

Quick question: If you were about to play a game of darts with a friend — and let’s just say for the sake of argument there’s some money riding on this — would you pause to put on a blindfold before throwing the first dart?

If your business sells products online, you likely have a lot of expired content and therefore a handful of 404'd pages. This can be troublesome, as 404 pages have the potential to turn visitors away from your site. A viewer who gets a 404 error when perusing your content may be encouraged to close the tab or leave your site altogether.

The traditional 404 error also damages your site's SEO potential. Google and other search engines have limits on the amount of pages they can crawl on a given site. If you have pages that redirect to a 404, you're wasting your crawl allowance.

Thankfully, Stephanie Chang at Moz put together a detailed guide on how to effectively deal with expired content. While the guide is worth checking out, I've summarized three options for dealing with expired content below:

Whenever I see a a site or tweet promising thousands of free followers at a low, low cost, a lot of questions run through my mind.

How do these companies make any money? How could anyone possibly think purchasing Facebook Likes or Twitter followers is a good idea? What value do these people think they're getting? Do they know it's a scam?

I just don't get it. Buying followers can do a whole lot of bad things, but only one (kind of) good thing: making a number on your profile page higher than it was before. In most cases, that's all your paying for: a different number. And the bad things? Here we go ...