Madison Marketing Group Blog

Marketers, like everyone, were blindsided by the pandemic. New research from LinkedIn suggests that B2Bs in particular were more likely than B2Cs to have had their marketing budgets reduced while simultaneously facing more pressure to invest in short-term tactical marketing.

Throughout the pandemic, businesses confined to a mostly online existence funneled more resources into their web presence to keep marketing momentum going. B2Bs accustomed to spending thousands on trade shows, conferences, and other in-person channels have shifted that spend to online channels to keep pipelines full.

A lot can change in a few years. Maybe your company rolled out new products. Maybe it shifted its focus on particular services — or finds itself serving different customers. No matter what’s changed, your marketing strategy needs to evolve accordingly. An important part of that evolution may be updating your buyer personas.

What are B2B marketing KPIs?

As a B2B marketer, you know that your job contributes to the bottom line. The best B2B marketing campaigns generate qualified leads that can eventually be handed off to sales. Leads convert into customers, which result in sales revenue and profit.

You’re in the middle of planning content. If you’re already overwhelmed with keywords, topics, and content ideas, analyzing your competitors’ content might seem like one more tedious process.

However, researching your competitors is an opportunity to uncover their strengths and weaknesses and identify topics they either haven’t written about or haven’t written about well. With this juicy intel, you can seize open opportunities and beat competitors out of search positions by arming the audience with more or better information.

Here’s how to do it:

Should your business focus on acquiring leads through an SEM strategy or focus its efforts on improving SEO for lead generation?

For B2B lead generation, the answer isn't always cut and dry. To get to the bottom of what will be the most effective strategy for your business, you'll want to evaluate the pros and cons of both SEM and SEO against your business goals and the search landscape you're trying to break into.

Read on to explore both strategies and why it may be beneficial for your B2B company to put both into practice.

Data-driven design for B2B websites

If you’re a marketer conducting research in advance of an upcoming website build, you may have heard the terms data-driven design, data-informed design, UX design, and user-centered design batted around. For the uninitiated, this can be a bit confusing.

Pillar pages are a great tool to organize and plan future content as well as improve SEO and the user experience of your site by giving both searchers and Google what they want.

Thinking about writing a pillar page for the first time and don’t know where to start? Here, we’ll walk you through the process of making 10x content pillars, from laying a foundation of research to launching your page.

Quality content is the backbone in any inbound digital marketing strategy.

But "content" has come to refer to so much, that it pretty much just means "stuff." Stuff you put on your webpages, stuff that makes up blog posts, and stuff you post on social media.

It's a broad term that can apply to almost anything (website copy, downloadable whitepapers, ad copy, etc.), yet each type of content has its own unique set of features and best practices that necessitate its own creative process.

While creating a full content library covering various topics is still important to generate search traffic, today we're going to focus on creating a gated piece of content, sometimes referred to as premium content or a lead magnet.

Pillar pages have become a popular content format and the subject of experimentation and discussion among content marketers. Maybe your colleagues have talked about them. Maybe you’ve been tasked with writing one. Or maybe you’ve come across articles discussing their virtues and where they fit into your marketing mix.

But pinning down a satisfying definition of exactly what a pillar page is—in a way that's genuinely helpful for creating one—can be tough to find. There's tons on perspectives floating around the web.

So at the risk of adding more noise to an already loud conversation, we've kept it short and simple.

Read on for a functional definition of a modern pillar pages and learn how the concept has expanded to included several varieties of pillar pages.

In 2020, when 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find a local business, and visitors judge your site based on aesthetics in just .05 seconds, it’s critical that franchises have a high-functioning website that attracts and engages visitors.

Here, we’ll explore 10 essential practices to help your franchise website hook visitors on the first page they visit. We’ll also explain how to ensure a convenient user experience and use SEO best practices to reach more potential customers. Lastly, we’ll discuss what to look for in a vendor if you need a partner to help you.