What B2B Pros Need To Know After Canadian Marketing’s Big Night

Not only did our Canadian cousins celebrate their Thanksgiving recently (on the second Monday in October, just like every other year), but they also had the annual Canadian Marketing Association Awards! We’re always on the lookout for ways to do digital marketing better. One of the best ways to find new ways of doing things, or better ways of doing things we already do, is to look at what the winners of peer-selected awards like the CMAs do. Let’s take a look at the winners and see what we can learn.

What Are The CMA Awards?

Every year, the members of the CMA submit their picks for the best marketing efforts among the member organizations. The selected judges are all experts in their fields and are divided into a series of increasingly intense scrutiny from different groups of judges. Learn more about the judging process on the CMA awards website.

The CMA seeks to shape the future of marketing in Canada by promoting talented marketers, and the CMA awards are the perfect showcase. But wait, you might be wondering what the CMA is!

What Is The Canadian Marketing Association?

The CMA is “the voice of the marketing profession in Canada.” Since 1967, the CMA serves more than 400 corporate, not-for-profit, public, and post-secondary members, including Canada’s biggest brands like Check out their member directory for the full list.

What Is The CMA LinkedIn B2B Marketing Award?

While the nominees in every category might pique your interest, we’re going to focus on the tips we can get from the three winners of the LinkedIn B2B Marketing Award (an award that was sponsored by LinkedIn but encompasses all kinds of B2B marketing).

Gold Winner: EY’s Women Fast Forward Program

Link: EY’s Women Fast Forward Program

With the help of their marketing partners, EY amplified the voices of women and allies to inspire Canadian businesses to take action and drive meaningful progress towards gender equality.

From EY’s website: “At EY, we choose to challenge that gender equality is not a problem to solve, rather gender equality is the solution to business and society’s most complex challenges. The disproportionate impact #COVID19 of women in the Canadian workforce threatens to not only undo recent gender equity progress, but jeopardize future progress as well. How can we drive gender equality further, faster?”

DOM’s Take, from Nikki Powley, Director of Operations: “The EY Building a Better Working World – Woman. Fast Forward campaign is built to make an impact for women in the workforce and build a brighter future for young girls. This campaign was essential to drive awareness in Canadian businesses of gender equality and the impact of COVID-19 to working women. EY received a well-earned gold for the strategies presented. To launch even further, EY should continue to generate content that can be shared around the globe and turn ideas into action.”

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Silver Winner: Mackenzie Investments ETF Campaign

Link: Mackenzie Investments ETF Campaign

Mackenzie Investments provides a number of different types of ETF (exchange-traded fund). They developed a campaign to educate Canadian investors on the benefits of their “ETFs Made For Canadians by Canadians.”

From the Mackenzie Investments website: “As a Canadian-owned, global asset management firm we’ve been helping Canadian advisors deliver the best advice and investment solutions for over 50 years.  In a competitive ETF environment, our commitment has always been in Canada and to Canadians. When it comes to ETFs, our beliefs always remain at the core at what we do, supporting the Canadian financial industry, the advisors in it and investors who benefit from it. We provide a Canadian-domiciled suite of ETFs, engineered in Canada for the Canadian investor.”

DOM’s Take, from Senior Digital Marketing Strategist Jonathan Bentz: “Mackenzie’s messaging in their ETF campaign – ‘ETFs Made for Canadians by Canadians’ – may not be better exemplified in any digital marketing tactic than by reviewing their backlink profile. Over 50% of the domains linking to their main ETF page on their Canadian site come from a domain that also ends in the Canadian ccTLD (.ca). While so much of the financial market is focused on decentralizing and globalizing portfolios, this localized approach has earned them a 38% increase in ETF keyword terms on the first page of Google Canada over the last year. This was a smart campaign move to differentiate them that will result in long term visibility for their ETF products in Canada.”

A Bank Rebranded.
See How We Helped Them Double Conversions.

Bronze Winner: BMO’s Road to Recovery

Link: BMO’s Road to Recovery

Businesses are heavily focused on what life after COVID looks like. BMO asked a collection of experts what that return to semi-normalcy might look like for Canadian businesses in their Road to Recovery series.

From BMO’s website: “Businesses are turning their focus from weathering the COVID-19 pandemic back to growth. To help, we created a new content series of virtual events with experts in a number of different areas. 2020 has been nothing short of unpredictable, but it’s taught us a lot about ourselves and our organizations alike. Join us for a series of virtual events, where we unpack how 2020 has essentially changed the way we live and work forever. During each event we’ll compare pre-2020, what we’ve learned throughout 2020 and where these leaders think 2021 will take us. We’ll reflect on seven broad topics, to help you prepare for and successfully establish a future-ready organization.”

DOM’s Take, from Billy Wright, Digital Marketing Strategist: “I found the BMO Road To Recovery campaign fascinating as it helped provide insight into how businesses in Canada are realigning and reshaping the way they work following the pandemic. I think there are some missed opportunities for optimization here from an SEO and user experience perspective, however, specifically with on-page content and markup. I think applying the best standards for SEO can really help boost visibility for campaigns like this – especially when there are many businesses trying to promote how they deal with The New Normal at this time.”

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What these winners show us is that, regardless of industry, we all have a responsibility to shepherd the continued excellence of the clients we serve. More importantly perhaps than that is our responsibility to our audiences to provide them with salient information, useful products, and sensible solutions. We’re all using the same internet, after all.