Content Marketing

Content strategy is the ultimate winner in digital marketing

A digital marketing campaign relies on a number of elements, but it’s content that’s key above and beyond anything else – and for good reason!

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a term that is used to describe the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the aim of attracting and retaining your target audience.

Posting new, high-quality content regularly will help you build brand awareness while engaging with your target audience. It can help to drive action such as social shares, downloads or PPC clicks.

For long term success you need to get a content marketing plan together. You then need to understand your target audience as well as when, where and how often they consume information.

In this article, we outline a few tips on developing a content marketing plan for your business.

1. Understand your target audience

In order to create successful content marketing, it is necessary to understand your target audience. You need to know their needs, interests and behaviours in order to develop the type of content that will engage them.

By understanding your target audience, you can also better understand what type of content will be most effective in reaching them.

Start by creating a buyer persona, which is a profile of your typical customer. This will help you focus on the right topics and tone for your content marketing efforts.

2. A content marketing plan that gels

If you’re like most business owners, you probably think of content marketing as a way to generate leads and drive sales. And while that’s certainly a key goal, it’s not the only one. A successful content marketing plan should be holistic, taking into account all aspects of your business as well as the digital marketing channels that you use.  

Whether email marketing, social media, Pay Per Click advertising and video, whatever channels you use, your potential new customers will consume your content online in a way that suits them, therefore all your content needs to be aligned.  

A content marketing plan can ensure that everything meets your brand guidelines, helping to raise brand awareness this builds confidence with your target audience as they want to feel familiarity with your brand. 

3. How to approach creating engaging content

Any successful content marketing strategy must be built on a solid foundation of research. By understanding your audience and what kinds of content they respond to, you can create material that is both informative and engaging. Once you have a content marketing plan in place, here are some top tips for creating engaging content: 

  • Keep it fresh – make sure your content is up-to-date and relevant to your audience. Regularly publishing new material will keep people coming back for more. This is where your content marketing plan will help you. 
  • Make it visual – incorporating images and videos into your content will make it more eye-catching and engaging. 
  • Be concise – get to the point and make your content easy to digest. 
  • Use strong headlines – a well-written headline can be the difference between someone clicking on your article or scrolling past it. Make sure your headlines are attention-grabbing and accurately reflect the content of your article. 

4. How content marketing gets your business seen online

The digital world provides vast opportunities for businesses to reach a large number of people at a relatively low cost. Moreover, effective content marketing can help to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, making it more likely that your website will appear higher up in search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, content marketing can be an extremely powerful tool for getting your business seen online. 

Digital marketing Croydon

There are many different types of content that can be used for content marketing purposes, but it is important to ensure that whatever you produce is valuable and relevant for your target audience. By doing the necessary research to understand what kinds of content they respond to, you can create material that is both informative and engaging.  

However, writing great content isn’t enough – you also need to make sure it gets seen by the right people. That’s where Smart Cow marketing comes in. We are experts at helping businesses like yours reach a larger audience and grow their business with effective digital marketing strategies.  

So, if you’re looking for help taking your content marketing strategy to the next level, contact us today and let us show you what we can do! 

You may also be interested in this article: The secret to content marketing 

Website Analytics

Check how well your website is converting visitors into customers

Having a website is vital in today’s digital world. But simply having a website is not enough – it’s important to make sure that your website is effective in converting visitors into customers.

To improve website conversion rates, businesses need to understand why visitors are leaving without taking action such as completing a purchase, downloading a form or booking an appointment/consultation. There are a number of reasons this might happen, including confusing navigation, hidden costs, and a lack of brand awareness – therefore trust.

Ways to improve your website performance

There are a few key ways to measure how well your website is performing. First, look at your website’s bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors who leave after only viewing one page. If your bounce rate is high, that’s a sign that people are leaving your site without taking any action.

Take a closer look at your conversion rate, or the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your site (such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter). A low conversion rate means you’re losing out on potential customers.

There are a few simple steps you can take to improve your website’s conversion rate.

  1. First, make sure your site is easy to navigate and visually appealing. A well-designed website will make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Add links in that help direct people to other relevant pages.
  2. Ensure that your call-to-actions are clear and prominent.
  3. Make sure you’re providing valuable content that will incentivise people to stay on your site and take action. A blog or news page allows you to add unique, regular and relevant content to your website, this also helps with onsite Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), helping to improve positions in search engine results pages (SERPs)

Drive traffic to your website

Once you’ve reviewed your website and implemented changes, perhaps it’s also time to apply some digital marketing tactics to help drive traffic to your website in the first place.

This is where relevant social channels with links back to your website can help.

A good quality Google ads campaign (known as Pay Per Click or PPC advertising) can also help drive targeted clicks to your website.

Make sure you have completed your Google My Business page with up to date contact details. You can also add content, products, offers, images here as well as ask people to leave reviews.

Don’t forget the digital marketing stalwart that is email marketing. If you have built a database already then start to send regular emails to your list with tips, advice and latest offers. Remember to add links back to your website, again to encourage web visitors to increase traffic and therefore conversion rates.

Improve your website for quality leads

By paying attention to both the website design and the conversion process, businesses can create a website that efficiently turns visitors into customers.

If you want to improve your website’s conversion rate, we can help. Our team of web design experts in Croydon are available for consultation and will work with you to identify the areas of your website that need improvement. 

We have experience in a variety of sectors and can offer tailored web design advice that is specific to your needs. Contact us today to get started!

Email Marketing

5 Ways to Boost Web Traffic with Email Marketing

There’s a myriad of marketing tactics to reach your audience all with their own levels of speciality, and the list is ever evolving. However, one of the more traditional digital marketing methods, email marketing, is quite often forgotten, yet it offers an effective way of increasing your website traffic.

With around 4 billion email marketing users daily, it still offers a great way to reach your target audience and encourage links back to your website which is ideal for your long-term search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

We’ve created an infographic containing five great ways email marketing can help to boost traffic to your website.

Boost Traffic With Email Marketing

Our tips for your next email marketing campaign

Targeting your emails towards people that have already shown interest in your business drives quality leads to your website. Quality leads also mean that this can help to reduce your bounce rate – the percentage of visitors that leave your site without taking action – because they are already interested in your products and services.

Visitors spending more time browsing your website signals to Google that your site is relevant and helps increase your search engine ranking.

However, you do need to make sure that your website landing page is clear, easy to navigate and relevant to the information you had in your email, otherwise you may lose this quality contact.

Personalisation

Personalised subject lines improve email open rates by 26%.

Segmenting your target audience can help ensure that your content is personalised for the appropriate audience.

This strategy increases the chances of driving traffic to your website.

Social media

Add “Share” tags to your emails so that your email recipients can cross-promote your website content. This method can work to improve both website traffic and customer relationships.
It also helps if you add incentives e.g., “Follow us on Twitter to be in with a chance of winning…”

Reviews

Reviews help legitimise your business. Email post-purchase requesting reviews while your product/service is still fresh in their mind. Add a link to the review site to make things easier.

These positive reviews will help your SEO strategy to improve your results in search engine rankings.

Call to action

Your website is the centre of your digital world, everything you do should lead back to it. So, it’s important that you always include a bold Call To Action (CTA) that encourages people to visit your website.

Not only does this help improve website optimisation, it also increases the chances of a sale or enquiry.

Email Marketing Agency

If you feel you need support in getting your email marketing campaign started, get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss how we can support you.

Emojis

Emojis – More than just a smiley face

To celebrate World Emoji Day we thought we’d take a little look at the history to date and how they can help with your marketing campaigns.

Emojis born

Emojis have barely been around for twenty years and they’re continually coming up with a whole load of new ones!

The first ever emoji was created by an employee at NTT DoCoMo back in 1999 – he made 180 different faces that were used on mobile phones throughout Japan before anyone else caught onto this.

It wasn’t until 2010 though where these cute characters became international phenomenon after being incorporated into Unicode standard so everyone could use them outside their country.

Since then, there has been thousands upon thousands of these little icons added including Zodiac signs, sport equipment, places as well many more unique features that make each one special. As we speak there are over 3,300 total characters available.

Drive engagement

Emojis are more than just a smiley face. Emojis have been proven time and again that they can help boost engagement levels by increasing click through rates (CTR), open rates, or even conversion stats!

They can help drive engagement on all types of digital media—email and social networks alike! One survey found that including emojis in your subject lines increases open rates by 9%. It may be because they make messages seem informal and more personal.

Emojis are the best way to add personality and fun into any business message. Emojis allow your text to be more than just words on a page. They convey what you’re trying to say in an exciting way when text alone just doesn’t do the trick! They give your brand a little extra something that’ll intrigue or persuade someone to take action and click through, buy a product or download a guide.

However, if you are using these little icons for your own marketing, employ them wisely through email campaigns or social media strategies. As we always say, one size does not fit all.

Emojis to improve engagement

HubSpot has a fantastic overview of what emojis are most popular and the best for boosting engagement and Click-though. Take a closer look at HubSpot’s list here.

To create this list HubSpot studied over 19million HubSpot published posts across social. Even HubSpot admits that they have no idea why these emojis worked. A lot of the time it’s about trial and error and working out what is best for your very unique target audience. Anything you do is about keeping it relevant for them as what’s good for one business can be totally irrelevant to another.

Emojis to Boost Engagement

  1. 🙆(Person Gesturing OK Emoji)
  2. 🍒(Cherries Emoji)
  3. 🐠(Tropical Fish Emoji)
  4. 💃(Woman Dancing Emoji)
  5. 🌤(Sun Behind Small Cloud Emoji)

Emojis to Encourage Click-Through

  1. 🐙(Octopus Emoji)
  2. 🐴(Horse Face Emoji)
  3. 👖(Jeans Emoji)
  4. 🍒(Cherries Emoji)
  5. 🚂(Locomotive Emoji)

Digital marketing agency

If you need support with your digital marketing, why not book a time with us to chat about your requirements further.