Name: Smart Cow Marketing
Price range: $$$

Business need to knows about inbound and outbound marketing

06/14/202104/10/2013 by scmarketing

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.

Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Creating personas

07/13/202104/10/2013 by scmarketing

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

How to plan an online marketing campaign

07/13/202104/07/2013 by scmarketing

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.

Please follow our updates in the cowshed by subscribing to our newsletter https://smartcowmarketing.com

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.

Top five predictions from Smart Cow Marketing

07/13/202101/09/2013 by scmarketing

Welcome to 2013! With the knowledge that changes are happening at an ever-increasing rate it is very difficult to predict what will happen in the next 12 months, however here are our views on the significant changes ahead in 2013 from an online marketing point of view.

1. Google+ will start to increase its percentage of the social media market. However, this will mainly be for businesses as the individual will continue to use Facebook and twitter is the main social media. Google+ we’ll be increasingly more powerful as it will have a higher ranking within the sites SEO and so online marketing companies such as smart cow will continue to recommend for businesses have a Google plus presents.

2. Google will continue to show its dominance as the number one search engine. This sounds like what an obvious choice however there is so much competition online that we see that this will not always be the case. With different ways of searching and different operating systems we can see that the Google will lose its power but not in the immediate future. We see new search from Facebook and the rise of Windows 8 phones will impact on Google eventually.

3. Mobile sites will become more and more important to businesses. Now that mobile products now overtake the desktop as the main ways to connect to the Internet businesses will need to ensure that their sites on mobile enabled. This can be either by a mobile site or through a responsive skin to the existing site. Either way businesses we’ll have to be paying more attention to the mobile market.

4. Google AdWords will become more and more mainstream for businesses. The AdWords entry level will become much easier for the introduction of keywords free adverts. However, to get a truly world performing AdWords campaign businesses will need to rely more and more on online marketing companies. As the complexity and the competition will be just as tough as organic search engine optimisation.

5. Local search will take place of the high street. With the recession still taking a grip, businesses will rely more and more on a local presence, the easiest way of being found in the local search is through Google local. This also relies very closely to the Google+ pages one enabling people to provide for the use of your business online increasing the chances of you been pounds in a search.

We’ll return at the end of the year to see how these predictions have gone and what lies ahead for 2014 for which we are already excited as we’re waiting the release of all Google and windows classes integration augmented reality into your everyday life.

Let us know your thoughts on these predictions are and if you have any predictions of your own. And come back soon.

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.