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Tips for image and video creation

08/19/202212/02/2021 by scmarketing

Having a consistent look and feel for images or video you produce provides the perfect solution for a digital marketing campaign. You can repurpose imagery across channels from website through to social media channels and email marketing campaigns. It helps to build your brand identity and therefore awareness and importantly trust.

With 62% of B2B marketers rating video as an effective content marketing tactic, here’s some top tips for optimising your images for your website and social media.

Website design

Imagery helps create an engaging website. Images can break up the text on a page maintaining interest and importantly helping to keep a visitor on your website for longer.

Social media

Maintain consistency with your website and create a header image to be used across all social channels, this is certainly relevant for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. However, resize them for the respective channel. Here’s a summary of image sizes for the popular social channels:

Facebook
- Profile picture – 180 x 180 pixels
- Cover photo image – 820 x 312 pixels
- Social post image – 1,200 x 630 pixels
Twitter
- Profile picture – 400 x 400 pixels
- Header image – 1,500 x 500 pixels
- Social post image – 440 x 220 pixels
LinkedIn
- Company logo – 300 x 300 pixels
- Cover image – 1536 x 768 pixels
- Shared image – 1104 x 736 pixels
Instagram
- Profile picture – 110×110 pixels
- Photos – 1,080 x 1,080 pixels

Best to use all in either jpeg or PNG file format.

Video

Smart phone technology allows you to create short and snappy videos that are ideal for sharing on social and placing on your website.

We find that doing face to camera at events is a nice informal way to chat to your audience. Keep it simple, it’s what you’re saying that’s important. If you attend a regular networking event and feel your audience would benefit from joining themselves, then tell them why they should attend. Give stats on the number of people who attend, how many businesses are signed up to the group and give an overview of what to expect from the event. All this done in a short face to camera video that can be easily uploaded to social media.

If you create a YouTube channel you can add all your videos here and use it to share links.

Content to post

If you have blogs create short videos focussing on key elements as part of your script to help bring these to life on your web page and social media channel.

You could also create unique images utilising quotes from a case study to help create stand out on social media which can help encourage people to click the link and read the full story.

Ultimately the goal is to attract people to your website and images help create standout.

Be aware of copyright

Do not use images from Google for any marketing campaign. Images come with copyright and you will not have permission to use them if you take them from anywhere online. Either take pictures or video yourself. Or, use a reputable stock library to source these from such as Adobe, Shutterstock or Envato.

Digital marketing strategy

If you need a hand with imagery and video content, we can help you factor these into your overall marketing strategy from ideas and script creation through to video production and editing.

Digital marketing must-haves for 2022

08/19/202211/23/2021 by scmarketing

Now is a great time to take a look at some of the digital marketing trends that you can tap into to help your business be seen online.

Create and manage your database to greatness

So, a database may not be a marketing trend as such, but it is a key asset for your marketing strategy. If you haven’t already got a database, consider this vital for ongoing personalised communication.

There’s a number of tools that can help with gathering data in an organised way that allows you to manage creating your email marketing database moving forward.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can help such as Hubspot. However, you need to capture people’s details in the first place so it’s important to have tools such as a pop-up box on your website so that you can ask for web visitors email address in return for receiving something such as a regular newsletter.

Think about what may entice people to part with their email address such as creating some interesting one-off campaigns for quality content such as an ebook with sector insight relevant to your target audience, or industry specific templates or discount codes.

Video

We’ve said it before, and we’ll most certainly say it again – make sure you incorporate video as part of your marketing plan. The pandemic made sure that video was vital for communication. But even more so for stand out when you are marketing to cut through the noise and be visible on social media.

Once you have web visitors, videos are known to increase engagement which keeps people on your website for longer.

Word of mouth

Let your customers become part of your marketing. Whilst the traditional view of the marketing funnel sees the customer at the end, if you change mindset and envisage a circle with the customer at the centre, then this becomes a very exciting proposition.

Keeping the customer central to all that you do will help them become brand advocates and help to promote your service through word of mouth sharing to their networks on social media.

Improving content

Fresh and regular quality content is so important for search engine optimisation (SEO), but you may sometimes feel overwhelmed at the thought of having to write blogs each week and constant social media or monthly e-newsletters. So, firstly think quality rather than quantity.

Then look back at all the content you have produced over the years. You’ll find that on your website you can look back at historic blogs and repurpose them with up-to-date statistics, new keywords or links to articles.

Not only that but taking existing content and repurposing it for a new podcast, webinar, or blog post can be an efficient way to keep your website relevant in search engines.

Digital marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice relating to local SEO services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals for the year ahead.

The importance of video content

08/19/202211/10/2021 by scmarketing

Video content can provide a great deal of value in your overall business strategy and it’s worth considering how best to incorporate it into your wider marketing plan.

For businesses, it makes sense to take advantage of this trend and create videos for your customers or clients. If you, don’t have much experience with digital marketing, no worries! This post has some tips on how to get started with creating video content and some helpful pointers on making videos work for you.

Why video content is important

With almost nine out of ten people wanting to see more videos from brands, this makes for a strong case for utilising video in your marketing strategy in the year ahead.

Video content should be treated just like any written blog, Google ad or social media post. It’s a key part of your overall digital marketing strategy and should provide information of relevance to your target audience, position you as a thought leader and help to generate leads to your website.

With so much noise online, video helps to create stand out from your competitors. It’s a well-known fact that having imagery on your social media feed or website can help engagement.

Explainer videos have been extremely popular, with the majority of people (94%) watching explainer videos to learn more about products, with 84% swayed to make a purchase.

These stats highlight a huge benefit to utilising video in your marketing plan.

Types of videos you can make for your blog

It’s all very well saying you should utilise video but where do you start with what to create?

As you would with any blog you’re writing, think about your target audience and what you can say that will help them overcome any challenges. What are your customers pain points and how your products or services help them.

So, initially work through your products and services and think about creating a product explainer video whilst remembering to highlight how you can make their life easier.

Effective content is always about keeping things simple. Here’s a few areas you can cover in videos:

Product focussed videos – what are the USPs of your products
Educational/Tutorial
Interview with a key client
Testimonials
A walk through your office / footage of products on shelves
Create a live video on social media
About you & your business – how did you set up your business? Bring your brand to life showcasing your story

You can create a simple video with your smartphone these days. Most importantly it’s about being natural if you opt to put yourself in front of the camera. You can also do a simple presentation style video with graphics, captions and a voiceover which, when edited together, you can create a simple and factual video.

Digital marketing Croydon

Video has quickly become one of the most effective ways to reach your target demographic.

It’s also a great way to show off what makes you different from other companies in your sector.

If you’re not doing it already, now is the time for video marketing! Whether you want funny or informative content, video provides an opportunity for SEO optimisation and engagement with customers that can’t be found anywhere else online. We can help you get started by providing consultation services – contact us today!

3 tips for content marketing

01/30/202311/02/2021 by scmarketing

Content forms part of your inbound marketing strategy and plays a key role in helping your business be seen online.

Whether it’s a blog, social media post, email marketing or Google Adwords campaign, here we’ve compiled our tips for creating great content marketing.

Know your target audience

We always talk about the importance of knowing your target audience before starting any inbound marketing campaign. The only way you can create quality content is understanding who you are actually writing for.

It’s a good idea to take a step back and really take stock to understand the customer you want to attract. Knowing this means you can tailor content marketing to their needs and general interests.

Research your competitors and see how they are positioning their content to help you in your process. Then have a think about the person themselves and ask yourself some questions about their characteristics:

Age
Gender
Location
Lifestyle

We recommend creating an online persona of your target audience so that you can refer back to this when creating content in the future.

Take a look at our blog on creating an online persona to help.

Regular and relevant content

Your content should be shared regularly and be relevant to your target audience. This will help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

Part of creating relevant content is ensuring you have keywords and phrases that will help your website rise in search rankings.

Be insightful and make sure content is unique so that you can grab attention.

Always have a call to action

At the end of a social media post or email always include a call to action to encourage click throughs to your website.

A call to action may be about encouraging a reader to ‘call’, ‘book a consultation’, ‘download an ebook’ or ‘use a discount code’. This all helps with ongoing engagement and nurturing customers and prospects.

Digital marketing Croydon

If you need a hand with creating content for your marketing get in touch with the Smart Cow Marketing team, a digital marketing agency in Croydon.