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Inbound marketing should be at the cornerstone of any business that has an online presence. This is where you can build your reputation and authority by placing content and building links into your site.

Gone are the days where having a website alone would be good enough for your business no matter how small. Search engines such as Google are always working to provide the best content for their search results. So, if you look at it logically and imagine yourself as a search engine how high would you rank your site against your competitors?

Does your site have useful and informative content that directly relates to your products and services and will make you stand out from your competitors? If your site is regularly updated with content the search engines will recognise this and will reward you accordingly with a high-ranking.

This is of course based on the content being relevant original and interesting. The search engine algorithms such as Panda, a highly intelligent tool, and can tell how spammy your content may be. If you overload it with keywords this will be noticed, also if the content is poorly written without authority this too will be noticed. The search engines are able to tell whether or not you use industry related terminology in your content so sites can rank highly even if the keywords are not often used the related and relevant ones are.

The other way to see if the content is relevant and has authority is how well it has been received by readers. Visitors view the page and then bounce straight back out it will be noticed and recorded by the search engines and markdown appropriately. However, if a page is visited and then promoted through social media channels or links from their own blogs this will be seen as a sign of authority and will be ranked accordingly.

In summary, never try to trick the search engines, just be true to yourself and your business and post good relevant content on the Internet. If you try to trick the search engines then sooner or later you will be found out and pay for it.

Use your personality and your expertise to promote your business and you will reap the rewards.

Inbound marketing agency in Surrey

For more inbound marketing tips, browse our website or contact us today.

We hope you found this useful and if you want to leave a comment please do.

As previously addressed in the Smart Cow blog we’ve mentioned there are two main types of online marketing. These are inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Starting first with outbound marketing this is seen as the more conventional way to market. Through the more traditional ways of paid adverts and email marketing, this reflects very much old school marketing prior to the Internet, where people would place ads in magazines and drop leaflets through letter boxes.

These are really useful if you have a new product, new website or are in a very competitive market and currently are unable to get good organic results for your keywords. Outbound marketing can be targeted by precisely to your potential clients through data that you or your media channel has acquired. You may have an email list for your email campaign or you may rely on demographic information collected by social media channels to manage your pay per click campaigns.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a much better long-term strategy to promote your business. As we all get very savvy about magazine adverts, and leaflets posted through our front door the same is said for some email campaigns and online advertising. Most of us these days are very media savvy and can quite easily filter out unwanted marketing material. Reflecting back into the real world, a lot of what you will buy will be through recommendation, whether this is a product or service if one of your friends has recommended it you are quite likely to do the same. This is where inbound marketing holds the key, if you have people promoting your products through you to their social media channels, online blogs, forums or any other method you are more likely to pay attention and if you had seen an advert embedded in a website.

But to build this trust and authority that will get many people to recommend you, your services or products takes a lot of time to invest. Think of being original and using your own personality within your content you place on the web as well as making sure it is appropriate for your target personas you have created.

Summary

Look at where your business is now online and where you would like it to go plan your marketing campaign now. If you’d like more help and advice on how to do this do get in touch, we would be more than happy to help.

As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we specialise in digital marketing for accountants as well as providing digital marketing services and web design for local businesses within Croydon.

All the very best from the cowshed we hope you found this useful.

The view of most businesses is that they require an online presence which obviously we would agree is essential to any business success. Without doubt the basis of your online marketing should revolve around your website, as opposed to any of your other online channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

As popular as these social media channels are you will not have the control and ownership as you do for your own website, these should be used more as channels of promoting your business for which your website is your online shop window. Looking at how fickle we have been with some of these social media channels it is highly recommended to have your website as your main online presence.

With that established we must look at how to market your business online, of which there are many, many different channels that can be used these days. To know which is most appropriate for your business will be key to your online business success.

Below are a list of tasks that you need to bear in mind when creating your online marketing campaign, for which we will be going into more detail in future blogs.

Creating a persona

First things first, who are you marketing to? One of the best ways to understand this is to create a marketing persona. This is a character based on your target market. This is often also based on your current best clients. Once you’ve created a persona it makes it much easier to understand how to market to them, what language to use and what online marketing channels would be best.

Search engine optimisation

Before starting the campaign also make sure that your own website is optimised for search engines. There are many tools available to run against your site to see where improvements can be made to your site is more effective. We found sitebeam a great tool, although also many free options and plug-ins you can have for your browsers.

Site structure

Just as you would expect to go into a supermarket and have all the rules labelled as to what products are selling you need to make sure that your website is structured to make it easier as possible for your visitors to find what they’re looking for. This makes a much better experience for your visitors and also lowers the bounce rate which will negatively affect your site. Is worth investing in getting your site reviewed through impartial channels.

Keywords

It is worth making sure you know which keywords are appropriate to your business. If you are a shoe shop you may think you would like to optimise for the word shoe (which is not entirely correct) there are many types of shoe, many styles and great amount of competition for that keyword. The more specific you are with your keyword better in the long term searches will be. If you think about it from a personal point of view if you were to look for shoes online you probably would not typing just “shoe” you might type in something like where can I find a “quality brown leather shoe in Croydon”. Now using Google’s keyword analyser and see what competition there is for your keywords.

Creating a strategy

You are now in a position where you can start your online marketing, the two main areas split, marketing is whether it is inbound or outbound marketing. Inbound marketing is where your site is optimised sufficiently that users come to you. This in the long term is the most cost-effective approach and best for your business, but take some investment in time to get established. Inbound marketing uses tools such as link building, social media marketing, posting on blogs and forums to attract visitors to your site as well as give your site ranking authority within the search engines.

Outbound marketing is where you directly promote your business to potential visitors to channels such as email marketing or pay per click advertising (such as Google AdWords). This is a great short-term strategy but as soon as the emails stop or the adverts are withdrawn your online marketing campaign also stops.

We will be discussing more in further blogs about each of these topics in greater detail. However, if you want to comment please do not hesitate to contribute or get in touch.

Happy online marketing from Smart Cow.

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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 development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.