Business ruler

5 Key points for your business website

Business tips from Smart Cow

You should very much look at your online business in the same way you look at a physical presence for a business.

As much as a physical shop needs a good foundation and architectural designs, a website needs also to be built with a good foundation and structure.

You can pick up or create a website in no time these days and it will probably look nice and appear to do the job that you want. But as with almost everything in this world you get what you pay for. If a website or a stall is sold at a bargain price that is probably a reason for it. The real store may be in the wrong location, may not be set up properly, have never been marketed and therefore has poor trading. Just the same with the website, if you do not invest in the initial infrastructure the site, although looking nice, will not be found by potential customers searching for your services.

Here’s five key points that a business owner must be aware of when commissioning reviewing your business website. The list could have gone on and on but these are some of the key points you should be aware.

If you’re unsure on any of these, contact your current web developer or give us a call at Smart Cow Marketing on a 020 3137 1826 alternatively email at saymoo@smart-cow.com.

Below are our top five tips with links to the Association articles provide more detail to help you and your business.

1. Sitemaps (Why your website needs a Site map) give the search engines an understanding of the layout of your site to make it easy for them to give web browsers and understanding of where to find your content.

2. url structure (Why the URL name and structure is important to the success of your site) give the search engines the best chance possible to help out your business by naming pages correctly and structuring the site accordingly.

3. Bot accessibility (What is bot accessibility and how It affect how your site is seen by the search engines) make sure that none of your hard effort goes to waste and search engines can find the content within your site and that it is not hidden from view.

4. Unique Content (Why you have to have unique website content and what happens if you don’t) always make sure your content is unique and relevant to your target audience by copying and using other people’s content is not true to the values of your business and will be marked harshly by the search engines. Your clients must see you as a true expert in your field.

5. Server response code (what are server response codes and why are they important) what happens when wrong in your site? Make sure that errors are managed appropriately so that even if a visitor has a bad experience it can be recovered easily.

Don’t forget to visit the full articles of each one of these top tips and we would love to hear your comments of the top tips needed when building a website.

Happy online marketing from all of Smart Cow.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and developmentSEOPay Per Click (PPC)social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Creating personas

We have talked before when starting an online marketing campaign about the importance of creating a buyer persona. This provides you or your marketing team with a representation of who your target audience is. This is based on either data you have acquired or through creating a fictitious character of your ideal client(s).

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to and so can make the campaigns more personal and realistic as opposed to just using marketing jargon that is inappropriate and not targeted. Just as much as you will use different language in talking to friends and relatives, business partners, people in authority, new clients, existing clients etc. You will need to adapt your marketing campaign appropriately.

You may feel that you get the majority of your business by going through personal assistance (gatekeepers) rather than going direct to the managing director, therefore you should think about their goals and motivators and words your marketing campaign appropriately.

Goals

For your fictional persona identify a couple of goals they may have personally such as growing the business, getting a promotion, looking good in front of the boss.

Challenges

Now imagine what challenges they may present you that your product or service may be able to assist them with, also looking at the challenges such as budget and timescales. With these identified you can then create a list of ways that you may be able to help your potential client.

Where possible, collect real quotes from clients that most resemble this made up persona that relates to your product and service which helps build a conversation in your own mind is how best to promote your services to them. Look at what their common objections may be and write these down, capturing these now will allow you to present a case that compels them to use your product.

Marketing message

Once you have built this personality and can picture them in your mind you’re ready to build your marketing message. Just a few words of what you can do to help your potential client.

Elevator pitch

Then expand on this and create the so-called elevator pitch. Create one or two sentences that would sell your services to client as if you were stuck in an elevator from the first to the 10th floor and this is your only opportunity to sell yourself to them. By the time you get to the 10th floor they must have enough information to say yes.

Summary

Create a persona, or many personas to bring to life your potential clients. As awkward as this may seem the first couple of times it is key to ensure that you have a personal message that will be warmly accepted as opposed to a cold marketing message that will be ignored.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and developmentSEOPay Per Click (PPC)social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

WOman with phone and laptop

Community Purchasing Power – helping your community

Smart Cow Marketing is a sales and marketing company based in South London.

Welcome to community purchasing power into the Smart Cow family. We were recently approached by a fellow web development company (Paramount digital marketing) to look into an inquiry they had, which has led us to delivering a new website for Community Purchasing Power.

What is CPP

Community Purchasing Power (CPP) is the brain child of Joss and Kate Bolton. Like most families they were feeling the squeeze and were looking at ways to reduce costs.

So, they felt that they could provide a more social responsible service to providing lower cost utilities through the power of group purchasing.

What did we do?

Well, it was a real pleasure working with the Bolton’s on this website as they have a good clear vision of what they wanted and a sound business model.

After going through several different options for the design we decided the current white and green reflected the business the best. We also spent a lot of effort in building a clean animation in HTML5 on the front page with various faces flying in from all angles (we will talk about HTML5 later).

Other features

Central to this website is the ability to capture details and take this to the utility providers to gain the bulk discount, which we duly delivered as well as blog and newsletter options. Also delivered is the social media channels of Facebook and twitter.

Our work is coming to a close here and now the hard work of promoting the business follows. So, good luck to CCP as the better it works the better off we will all be.

P.S. Out of interest one of the first parts of the brief was “no cartoons” so we tried to stick to this, however managed to present one option with the cartoon figure you see. This was really liked and a 180 degree change on having a cartoon figure and we think it works really well. Just another point to say how great it is when people are so open minded to new ideas.

We hope that this article is of use, feel free to forward it to whoever may find it useful.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you are looking to develop your business and gain more cliental, get in touch with our digital marketing team for a free consultation where we review your challenges and help you execute your goals.

Website letters

Hilary Judge – Chartered Management Accountant in Croydon

New Website for HilaryJudge.co.uk

Smart Cow Marketing, the Croydon based web development and online marketing company.

We are proud to announce the we have delivered a new website to a very lovely client Hilary Judge.

Requirements

Hilary came to Smart Cow Marketing after attending one of our seminars on online marketing.
She runs a successful accountancy firm and has a real personal touch with their clients. However, until now did not have a web presence.
Hilary came to Smart Cow to discuss what she wanted and what we could deliver.

Getting noticed

Obviously, you would like a website to be noticed and there is a lot of competition online for services such as accountancy in the Croydon area.
We applied locality related SEO well as starting the process to get Google places set up.

But most of all, through pictures provided by Hillary we ensured that we kept the local feel.

A nice touch

To add to the website and make it a bit special we created a HTML5 animated banner at the top of the page. I’m sure that you will agree that it looks great. More about the benefits of using HTML5 to come in later blogs

We hope that this article is of use, feel free to forward it to whoever may find it useful. Please also visit the hilaryjudge website and if you need any accounting services please pay them a visit.