Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Creating personas

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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.

inbound marketing

How to plan an online marketing campaign

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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.

Light bulb futuristic

Top five predictions from Smart Cow Marketing

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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.

Christmas decorations

Well it’s a merry Christmas from Smart Cow Marketing

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Well it’s a very merry Christmas from us at Smart Cow Marketing.  And what a year it has been, we launched Smart Cow Marketing in February this year.  Despite a few bumps on the road it has been an excellent time.

We have got some great new clients and really appreciate your support, we offer a proud of products and services we have delivered over the year and especially likely to the team at we mean business in Croydon in November.

Now and then

2012

So, as well as starting Smart Cow Marketing, we have also formed new partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Constant Contact and mojoPortal to name but a few.

We also enhanced our technology skills added some exciting new features to our websites as well as integrating with online stores.

2013

And on to next year we have got some exciting times ahead of us. With new developments from Google AdWords and the rapid increase of social marketing we will certainly have had time cut out for ourselves. But we’re really looking forward to the challenges ahead as well as delivering some great websites.

Predictions?

So, as long as the world does not end on the 21st of December as predicted by the myan prophecy, we are looking forward to some exciting new developments. Google AdWords is developing at such a fast pace making it easier and simpler to manage your own AdWords campaign, however we are always here to help with a more detailed and advanced campaigns.

Video in websites will become more and more frequent and businesses will have to learn to be even more savvy with presenting in front of the camera.  With the bandwidth ever increasing and different mobile technologies coming to the a front the life of online marketing has never been so exciting.

But most of all we wish you all had a merry Christmas and a prosperous 2013.

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