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Lead generation tips

08/19/202205/10/2021 by scmarketing

Your website should be the main focus of all your digital marketing strategies. Everything you do online should lead back to your website and to the services or products you offer.

This not only improves your ranking in search engine results pages, it also supports your lead generation strategy. This is vital to consider when looking to grow your business and in gaining high quality leads.

What works for your business may be different to another, but we have rounded together a few tips to help your lead generation campaign.

Website landing pages

Firstly, a word about your website design. Whilst wanting to encourage website visitors, the aim is to keep them on your website as long as possible. So, make sure that your landing page is relevant to the links that people will be clicking on. So whether you distribute email marketing or social media posts, your landing page needs to be relevant to the offer that has interested the website visitor in the first place which is an effective way of capturing leads.

A good landing page will include a clear headline and brief description of the offer (see our blog on creating compelling offers for more on this topic). You should have a relevant image and perhaps a bullet point summary.

What’s vital though is the inclusion of a form for your website visitor to complete. This will capture the information to convert your web visitors into leads.

Your content on the landing page should be consistent to the details of the call-to-action that people clicked on in the first place. Ideally your headlines should be the same.

Get your social on!

Utilise social media as much as you can but also be cautious as not all channels may be relevant to your business and target audience.

Create snappy engaging content with links back to your website. This helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) as the link is from a reputable source, as well as generating leads.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Just utilise snippets of content from your latest blog for a social media post with URL links to ‘Find out More’.

Gather quality data

Just because a website visitor does not choose your services or buy your products straight away, does not meant they never will. The fact they are on your website in the first place means thy are interested and so are a warm lead for future offers or insightful information.

So, set up a pop-up box on your website to ‘sign-up’ to the latest news. This means you can obtain their email address and be able to send future email marketing news and offers.

Keep testing

Keep tabs of what works and what does not. There is no point putting time and effort into something which does not reap rewards.

Check out more of our resources below which cover social media, email campaigns, and lead generation in more detail!

Digital Marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency, we specialise in helping Croydon business owners with a range of solutions to help improve online presence and generate leads.

Whether it’s website development, SEO services including content marketing, organic social media management, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google ads or email marketing, talk to us about your business needs and we’ll create a focussed online marketing campaign for you.

Resources for lead generation

Email marketing best practice tips

08/19/202204/30/2021 by scmarketing

As part of your ongoing marketing strategy, it’s so important to continually update your target audience with informative messages about your products and services. This helps build brand awareness, encourages prospects to engage and improves customer retention.

This is where email marketing can be so effective. Email communication acts as advertising for your virtual shop window.

To help you make the most of your email communication, here’s three tips when considering email marketing as part of your ongoing digital marketing strategy.

1. Talk to your target audience

When you write your emails think about your target audience. Its’s good to think that you are sending your email to one person so you can make content really personal and relevant.

Understanding challenges of your audience and providing solutions to this in the content you email out will help with engagement and position you as a thought leader in your field.

Our blog on creating an online persona can help you create content targeted to your audience.

Remember to offer useful tips and advice, industry insight as well as highlight any relevant offers you are providing that may help their business.

2. Data cleansing

COVID-19 will certainly have impacted your email distribution list. You may have noticed a higher bounce rate then perhaps you have done previously. This will be due to businesses changing staff, furloughed staff and unfortunately companies having to reduce employees.

Monitor the bounce rate and update your list. It’s better to have a smaller, targeted email list with qualified and quality contacts than a large list of emails that don’t reach a recipient.

Make sure that your emails are GDPR compliant. Ensure that you have a clear unsubscribe option. If you have an email sign-up pop-up box on your website to gather data then ensure that you are transparent in that you are using their email address for your e-newsletter updates.

We can help you with adding this call-to-action to your website if you’re interested in growing your email distribution list.

3. Be consistent

As part of you content marketing plan factor in a weekly or monthly e-newsletter. Whatever you think you can manage to ensure that you keep consistency. If you send a monthly round up of news, then send this during the first working day of every month.

People will start to look out for your news round-ups and they will be familiar with your email template design.

For your design make sure that you have clear calls-to-action for people to click to ‘read more’ or ‘download our ebook’. Make sure that you send the recipient to a clear and concise landing page on your website to help reduce bounce rate.

Email marketing Croydon

Get in touch with us at Smart Cow to discuss how you can incorporate email marketing into your overall digital marketing campaign, tailored to your audience.

As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we offer digital marketing for accountants and other local businesses.

Why you should create an online persona

08/19/202204/23/2021 by scmarketing

We often talk about online personas to help you with your digital marketing strategy. An online persona is based around your target audience. This fictitious character acts as a reminder of who you are talking to when you are marketing. Therefore, it helps you define key messages that really resonate with your prospects and help you retain customers.

Understanding your target audience is essential to increase your opportunities to sell your products or services. From our experience, creating an online persona is vital to run a successful digital marketing campaign.

Who is your target audience?

If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting your products and services to reach. Ask yourself some questions such as:

Who does your company identify with? Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
Who are your long-standing customers?
Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
Are the businesses you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?
Are the individuals purchasing your products a particular age?
Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?

Steps to create an online persona

If you’re a small business, setting up a persona is something you can do yourself with a few simple steps. Equally, you can also work with your digital marketing agency to help create a character of your ideal customer. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with your agency or colleagues will get that character swiftly into shape.

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to as part of your lead generation strategy to gain qualified leads. It helps to personalise campaigns and be targeted.

You need to consider a number of areas such as the character’s goals or challenges. If you start with their job role and then imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Questions to ask to help you build your persona include:

What’s the person’s age?
Where do they live?
What’s their job role and sector they work in?
Imagine their goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion.
Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these.

Once you have this character created you should get a clearer idea of how your services or product can help them. Think about the solution you are offering them with your product or service and create a few buzzwords and one or two sentences around this solution you have to their problem or needs. This can then become one of your key messages in marketing.

Create a visual of your persona

We create a simple one slide PowerPoint visual once we have gathered all the facts about our persona.

Create bullet points that answer all your questions that offer a solution to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages within your content marketing for ongoing digital marketing campaigns.

Finalise the visual with a clear box out which defines:

How you help them
The overarching marketing message of how your business helps them
Your one-line elevator pitch

The reason we create this simple visual is that it’s then easy to share with sales and marketing colleagues; business development teams; design or digital marketing agencies. This helps you to maintain brand awareness and consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.

Digital marketing Croydon

So, with these few simple steps you can begin to get a feel for what makes your target audience tick, and what digital channels you would use to reap the best sales results and return on investment.

Get in touch with us at Smart Cow to discuss how a digital marketing campaign, tailored to your audience, can help your business.

SEO – Improving online presence

08/19/202204/13/2021 by scmarketing

So, you have a great website with easy accessibility, engaging content, and aesthetically speaking is pleasing on the eye. That is amazing, but it all means nothing if your website cannot be found.

But worry not, this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help. With 2 billion other websites out there, we have combined some frequently asked questions to help you and your website navigate SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of increasing traffic to your website through improving its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

How does SEO work?

People will rarely type in the name of a specific website, instead they search for keywords associated with what they are after.

For example, perhaps someone is after an accountancy based in Croydon, they might type ‘accountancy Croydon’, perhaps they are more specific and are after a tax accountant they might search ‘tax accountant in Croydon’.

If your website contains these keywords throughout its content and will help improve your position in the search engine results pages.

So, SEO is as easy a putting a few keywords on some pages?

Not quite. Keywords are important but SEO looks at a variety of factors:

Priority is given to original and consistent content
Relevant content for target audience
The quality of links; links both to other relevant pages on your website, or links to external websites
The use of images for optimisation

What will work for my business?

All businesses are different, they all have different target audiences, niches and specialities. Strategies which work for one business may not work for another.

SEO is a long-term strategy. At Smart Cow Marketing we provide a free consultation to review your website and suggest what digital marketing strategies will work for you.