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Is your website user experience up to scratch?

05/27/202109/10/2020 by scmarketing

The user experience (UX) plays a fundamental role in the success for any business’s online digital marketing strategy. The reason being is that if your UX is not up to scratch then you can easily lose a prospect who has just clicked on your website having found you in search.

With your website at the centre of your digital world, the user experience is vital to the business growth strategy of the firm. You need to keep your prospects on your website as long as possible to increase the chance of a sale or further engagement with you.

Make updates to your website

It’s worth always checking back on your website for a little refresh and update where necessary. Let’s face it when your website was designed and built you may have expanded the services you offer and be looking to add more interactive elements than you had previously. Therefore, taking a step back and looking with a fresh eye will help you see where gaps need to be plugged.

47% of website visitors view the products/services pages before any other sections of a website. With this in mind, take a look at one of your core product or services web pages and really question whether it does what it says on the tin.

Are you giving visitors to your web page enough information?
Are you giving top tips that they can take away that will help them grow their business?
Have you added internal links to aid navigation on your website further?
Have you included clear call to actions?

These are just some of the key questions to ask yourself to help update your website. But don’t forget the design – how does the website look? Is it time to update your images or add more? Be ruthless, as that’s what your potential customers will be doing! They could be telling their colleagues and friends about the website experience is.

Digital marketing plan

With competition rife, being critical about your website will help you in the long run. Add a website review to your core digital marketing plan to ensure that you regularly set time in the calendar to take a look over your site and make any necessary changes to content or design.

You’ll find this is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) purposes too as regular updates with fresh content and relevant keywords are noted by search engines.

Website landing pages

With many customers now looking to conduct paid advertising such as with Google Adwords, the UX is also an intrinsic part of the success of a PPC campaign. Having a great landing page relevant to the ad makes for a much smoother customer journey. A lead wants just one click to find out exactly what they want.

Over half (51%) of people believe thorough contact information is the most important item missing from many company websites. So, don’t let this be missing when your lead clicks your ad!

Web design Croydon

We’re web developers in Croydon working with clients across Croydon and South London. We can provide a Free Website Review. The knowledge gained from this can guide on any website updates that may be required to help improve your online presence and turn enquiries into customers.

Whether you want a new website designed and developed or just need a refresh, we can guide on the best strategy for optimisation. We can create WordPress web design and content managed system so that you can be in control of your site once it is complete.

Inbound marketing writing content on laptop

Why more businesses are turning to inbound marketing

06/14/202109/07/2020 by scmarketing

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that more and more businesses are turning to for qualified leads. Here we look at why and how inbound marketing can help your business become a lead generation magnet.

Inbound marketing is targeted

Using inbound marketing as part of a business growth strategy ensures a much more targeted campaign which hits prospects and qualified leads at the right time. Whether that’s through your email inbox, social media feed or search engines. As such inbound marketing is about engaging and growing brand awareness and trust with qualified leads – a person who could become a customer.

Inbound marketing is less intrusive than the traditional marketing approach or outbound marketing which is based more around activities such as cold calling, telemarketing or perhaps taking an exhibition stand at a trade show. As technology gets superior, so to do the methods of how we can shield ourselves from receiving unwanted calls or emails.

Inspire and engage your target audience

Inbound marketing is all about creating inspirational content that will attract customers to your business. It’s about creating solutions to problems that your target audience is facing and providing relevant information that will be of interest. This gives you the opportunity to engage further.

That’s why we’re seeing a shift to inbound marketing tactics as businesses see the benefits of this more sensitive and tailored approach.

People sign up to newsletters and follow businesses on social media therefore they are already saying that they want to hear more. This is why it’s vital to keep content relevant so that you can continue to engage.

Why spend an exhaustive amount of time speaking to people who are uninterested in your products or services, when you could spend time building on awareness of your brand through blog content, social media and targeted email marketing campaigns.

Ongoing engagement with your audience in a way that they want to hear from you shows you are interested in them. This constant drip feed of relevant content helps position you as a thought leader and makes for a personalised experience. It shows that you understand their business needs and in turns helps you to generate more qualified leads.

Lead nurturing and lead conversion

Creating regular, quality content for your target audience is part of lead nurturing which is essential as a sales journey is very rarely a one-stop shop. These potential clients and your existing customers will all be aware of your competition, researched your services and looked at online reviews long before they start speaking to you. Therefore, your continuous content marketing with targeted, tailored messaging will place you as an authority in your field placing you in front of your ideal clients and so helping towards lead conversion.

Inbound marketing agency Croydon

Talk to us about becoming a lead generation magnet and using an inbound marketing strategy to gain qualified leads. As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we work with a wide range of local companies including professional services firms including accountancy firms providing inbound marketing for accountants.

Book a free consultation to chat with our digital marketing team and we can create a tailored plan in line with your business development needs.

Why use paid advertising?

05/17/202109/03/2020 by scmarketing

As part of an inbound marketing strategy for an accounting firm once a target audience has been established and agreed for marketing purposes a content marketing strategy would be created. This would usually include activity search as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media management and email marketing. Utilising the resources at your fingertips to reach potential and existing clients in an organic way.

So, why would an accounting firm need to conduct paid for advertising and when? Quite simply, paid for advertising is a great way to reach your target audience and swiftly. If you need a boost in search engine results pages (serps) or want to specifically target an audience segment then Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) can help your firm be found and to stand out in local search results against your competitors.

But you want a campaign to be cost-effective so how can you get the best Return on Investment (ROI)?

Be targeted

Put simply, be targeted. One of the great things about digital marketing is that you can target your campaigns about products or services to your specific audience. In contrast to billboard advertising, you can make sure that just your target audience see your ads. Just think of all the information you may have shared online about your age, gender, interests and location, all this and more can be used to market to specific people.

Website landing page

Ensure that your website landing page for your PPC campaign is relevant. When a prospect types a search query, while your ad may be relevant to them and they click on the ad, your landing page needs to be clear. If the page doesn’t have useful or relevant content, service details, price indication or a quick way to contact you to ask questions then you will lose the lead.

Let analysis create the ads

Keep an eye on the stats when you start a PPC campaign such as with Google Ads. For each PPC ad campaign Google provides recommendations for tailoring your initial ads even further.

So, check the keywords you want to be found for as well as those pesky negative words that aren’t relevant to your ad such as ‘jobs’ as you want potential clients – you’re not offering a job position. Then tailor your ad copy accordingly based on previous successes, new keywords and ongoing competitor research.

Google Ads quick tips

As a go to search engine, having a Google ad appear amongst the top results in search is a huge bonus especially if your website is new and you are at the beginning of your SEO strategy.

For your Google ad search campaigns, create more than one expanded text ad so that the best ad can be found.

Create responsive search ads as well as text ads. You create a list of different headlines and descriptions and the Google technology does its thing by combining the best combination of title and text into the ad based on which is the best performing.

Structured snippets allow prospects to see a preview of your services. This helps with standout on the search page.

Google display ads also offer a way to reach a wide number of people. These ads show across over 2 million sites, videos or apps – part of a Google Display Network. So ads will appear based on online activity.

Read more in our blog where organic misses pay per click can hit.

Remarketing

While we predominantly concentrated on PPC with Google Adwords in this blog, you may be interested to read about the benefits of remarketing.

Have you ever seen those ads that follow you around the internet after you searched for something online and it shows up on another site a few days later. This is remarketing and it’s a useful digital advertising tactic.

Sales very rarely result from a smooth journey from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and remarketing helps you guide people along the journey.

Read about the benefits of remarketing.

Google AdWords certified

Each year at Smart Cow Marketing we ensure that we are Google AdWords certified. This is probably one of the most important certifications there is with regards to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and in particular Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. It is an important credential for marketers and one that is not lightly awarded. Receiving a Google AdWords certification means that Smart Cow Marketing continues to be recognised as being Adwords experts in Croydon.

PPC agency Croydon

We’re a digital marketing agency with a specialism in marketing for accounting firms and local businesses in Croydon. With many marketing tactics whether organic or PPC advertising, we can help guide you. We can provide a tailored proposal for your business needs. Book a free consultation.

3 steps for website improvement

06/01/202109/01/2020 by scmarketing

While you may find that you fixate on the website design initially, you must always consider the look of your site alongside the overall user experience at design and development stage.

When working with a web designer take a collaborative approach, have your ideas for the website appearance, but be open to tips about website structure and navigation that will come from years of experience.

Here we provide three areas of focus that will help you create a winning website whether it’s a new site or you’re embarking on updating your current website.

1. Understand your website user

Your web content needs to be of interest to your target audience. A website today is not just about nice pictures and text, it’s much more than a brochure site. It’s a place where you want to send all web traffic, whether from links on social posts, online advertising or guest blogs. So, you need engaging content to keep visitors on your website. You can only do this by understanding the challenges and demands that your clients and prospects are facing to ensure that your content gives them answers to their questions.

Whether you’re selling products or services, help them to find information and pricing simply. We understand that in some sectors, such as accounting, it may not be a one size fits all approach to pricing as services are tailored to each client. However, a call to action offering a free consultation to discuss requirements can be helpful. But, where you can list baseline prices such as ‘starting from’, this can help push that initial engagement.

Your content marketing strategy should include regular writing for your website for a blog/news page. We work a lot with professional services firms such as accountants and this is such a key area to always contribute to as it helps with website optimisation your position in organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

Video content towards the top of the page is also an engaging way to keep a visitor on your site. But again, the content is key and needs to be focussed to your audience.

Read our blog about creating an online persona for your business as this will help you with tailoring content specifically for your audience.

2. Ease of navigation

Once you get people to your website, it needs to be a smooth journey for them to move from page to page. Having a website that is easy to navigate will help people stay on your website for longer and give more chance of a sale.

Have a look at your website and check the menu and homepage, are you covering the questions that your target audience will ask? Is it easy for them to find contact details and get in touch with you? Is your menu offering the right options and is it clear?

Ensure you have bold call to actions and white space that can lead the visitor simply around the page – avoid too much clutter.

If you’ve written a blog add in internal links to relevant pages that can help further guide a visitor to other pages of interest.

3. Be mobile responsive

Globally 52% of web traffic comes from a mobile. This will only increase as the world conducts more transactions online and uses search on their mobile. If your website isn’t already mobile friendly, then now is the time to look for a new website design. If you are already mobile friendly, then always check how updates look on your mobile. As you constantly add blogs, new call to actions of pop up boxes, taking a quick look to that it functions correctly will help the user experience and prevent people from moving quickly from your website.

Website designer Croydon

Smart Cow is a web design company in Croydon . We build bespoke websites for accountants and local businesses which are search engine optimised. We offer a free website audit which can highlight areas that need improvement and guide you on what to update.

We also provide a suite of digital marketing services including social media management, PPC, email marketing and ongoing SEO. Book a free consultation to discuss our website design services and online marketing.