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Key to success – focus on one thing

08/05/2020 by scmarketing

In a recent interview with the BBC the co-founder of LinkedIn gives insight into the secret to success for start-ups – “focus on one thing”.

Allen Blue said: “Focus your team. Your team can be tremendously creative and innovative, but only if you define the problem they’re trying to solve as narrowly as possible.”

This is invaluable advice for companies wanting to grow their business. It’s important to harness the expertise of the whole team when brainstorming. By constantly looking at ways to solve a problem you will bank other ideas that will help your firm in the long run. So, be open to suggestions but all the time remember that keeping focus on what you are trying to achieve will help you reach a solution faster and improve efficiency.

Solving problems is also about growing your network, which is what LinkedIn is all about and why it came about. This business social media platform is a great way to debate, share and solve solutions. Whether that’s to engage with people you meet at networking events or through the myriad of groups available on LinkedIn. Or perhaps you want to use it to share your tips and advice as part of your marketing strategy to improve your SEO, LinkedIn increases your network and therefore your expertise as you have a knowledge base at your fingertips.

Social media for your business

If you haven’t already explored LinkedIn for your business, perhaps now is the time.

There’s over 700 million LinkedIn members so it’s a significant social platform to tap into and a great way to continue conversation with a new business lead by asking if you can connect on LinkedIn.

But when you are on this social platform and you’re completing your profile or sharing posts, just remember Allen’s advice to focus on one thing. This is a great reminder to target your marketing communication to your audience for successful brand awareness of your products and services.

Watch the full interview with Allen Blue on the BBC.

Digital marketing mix

We’re a digital marketing agency based in London and Croydon. If you need support for your online marketing plan, encompassing your social media strategy, then book a free consultation with us.

The aim is for your business to become a lead generation magnet which is why we recommend a mix and match approach to digital marketing. Following a review of your current marketing activity we’ll look at ways to improve SEO to help you rise in search engine rankings, work on your content marketing for your website and social media as well as implement any paid search as and when deemed necessary.

Social media resources

The secret of a successful inbound marketing strategy

07/31/2020 by scmarketing

At the centre of any successful inbound marketing strategy will be a true understanding of your target audience. Knowing what your prospects challenges and needs are will help you steer communication to them. Tailored content provides your target customer with the knowledge they need to improve their business or their daily lives. So, how do you go about ensuring that your marketing communications are targeted to your audience?

Understand your customer

Understanding your target audience is crucial to increasing opportunities to attract, engage and convert your leads. How can you write content for your inbound marketing campaign if you are unsure who you are writing too? It’s important to remember that when you write content you need to make it personal. A great way to do this is to think that you are writing to an individual. It’s not just a blog on a page to fill space, it’s about formulating a way of approaching your content that will enhance the user experience and build brand awareness

To help tailor your content to your target customer, create an online persona. This is vital to run a successful inbound digital marketing campaign.

Creating an online persona of your target audience and using it as a reference for when you write content. Whether that’s for your website, social media, email marketing, or any online marketing communication, it provides you with a guide so that content is relevant, language consistent and it will aid your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

How to create a profile of your target audience

Create an imaginary profile of your target audience. So, think of your ideal customer and start to build information around them.

Do a little research to get a feel for the demographics of your prospects including their job roles. You can do this with the communications tools already at your disposal such as looking at your social network insights pages – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have very interesting data-driven statistics at your disposal.

Then look at creating a profile. We usually opt for a one-page design with short and punchy detail. So, here’s some key steps to bring your persona to life.

Create a profile description of your target audience – start off with a name, age.
What are your persona’s key identifiers?
Consider your character’s goals.
Imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these. All the time thinking how your product or service will help them.
Add in a line highlighting common objections that you may hear from your target persona. This will also help you write content that resolves their problems.

At this stage you will already start to see a character form. In our personas we always like to include a quote from the person to bring the character to life.

How do you help your target audience?

The final aspect of your persona is adding in your key marketing message, this should be something you want to get across in all communication. Then add a few points on how you will help your potential customer. This helps you really focus your marketing messages as these are key points that your customer wants to hear about as you will be helping solve their problems.

Increase leads for your business

A persona is one of the first things to create as part of your marketing strategy. If you think it’s time to revisit your marketing plan so that it supports your business in becoming a magnet to good qualified leads, we can help build that inbound marketing strategy for you.

Where an inbound marketing agency in London and Croydon, if you need help with your inbound digital marketing planning, book a free consultation with us.

Benefits of social media for business

11/08/202107/28/2020 by scmarketing

With constant change being the norm right now, businesses have a lot on their plate. Simply running your business from day to day, managing finances and keeping up to speed with government schemes to help out will certainly be taken up your time. That’s where marketing sometimes slips down the agenda, but it is a key activity to keep up so that you maintain your presence in the marketplace.

It’s worth remembering that social media is a way for you to reach your audience and build brand awareness. We know that time is of the essence and that you don’t want it impacting on your day. So, we’ve gathered together some top tips on what to do to refresh your social media profile and then some tips for 5-minute daily tasks to keep your presence out there.

Your profile

It may seem obvious but is your social media profile up to date and have you completed all sections available to you? Always makes sure you have your website address, email, telephone number visible. On many social channels such as Facebook you can add in your opening times.

Perhaps it’s also time to refresh the company bio. If you wrote it a while ago, does it still reflect the company you are today? Keep it simple and get across what you do.

If you’re revisiting social media for the first time in a while, then now is a good time to review whether you are on the right channels. You may already be on Facebook and Instagram but what about a LinkedIn company profile? Including this activity in your social media strategy will help you concentrate your efforts moving forward.

Conduct a little research with your customers to find out what channels are most popular and research which social media channels your competitors use.

Content marketing

With social media you are talking directly to your target audience so make sure that what you post is relevant to them. Ultimately, it’s about posting your own content. If you write blog posts for your website, then use this content in bite size chunks across a number of social posts. Re-purposing your content is a great time saver. But again, if you don’t have time right now then here’s some tips on some ways to start posting and encouraging engagement with your audience:

Re-sharing (retweet) articles of interest or social posts. Add a comment to it to place your own thoughts on the topic so you can be seen as a thought leader.
Is it a national or international day of interest relevant to your business and your audience? Adding the relevant hashtags will help extend reach.
Talk about company milestones.
Do you have any new products or services to talk about? And, remind people about what you do offer.
Run a special offer.
Tips, stats, insight – all great sources of information.

Whatever social platform or platforms your business is on you need to keep on sharing content on a regular basis to remind people about your business. Here’s our tips on daily activity to help keep your feed populated with interesting and varied types of content. It’s about letting your followers know you are thinking of them.

A one-off action is to create lists of favourite news feeds that you know always share interesting articles for your audience. Once you’ve done this, then each day dip into the lists and see if there is anything to share.
Check notifications, have you been mentioned, or any posts highlighted? This is another quick way to see if there is anything interesting to share. It’s also a time to make sure whether there is any comments you need to respond to.
A daily social media post about your services/products.
If you are involved in any virtual events or participating in the Eat Out To Help Out initiative then talk about it.

Marketing automation

For a small business, it can be difficult to manage with everything else you have to juggle. So, marketing automation tools such as Hubspot can help you manage when you send social media messages with its social media scheduling capability. It means you can spend a bulk of time scheduling a month of social posts in advance.

We’re a social media marketing agency and can help you formulate a social media campaign as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

‘Eat out to help out’ marketing tips for Croydon establishments

12/27/202407/23/2020 by scmarketing

From 3 August, the government’s Eat Out To help Out scheme will get underway. Restaurants, bars, pubs cafes – an establishment that provides an eat on site offer for diners – will be able to sign up to take part in the scheme. It means that on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday up until 31 August, diners can benefit from up to 50% off when eating or drinking soft drinks in participating places.

So, Croydon restaurants have you signed up to the scheme? If not, here’s the link to the details of what to do: Register your establishment for the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme.

But, once you are signed up, it’s important to spread the word. The government has promotional items you can utilise here.

At the moment, it may be less about passing trade as many people will be making plans first before going out. Therefore, while traditional marketing like signage in your restaurant window is important, we’ve got a few more online marketing tips you can implement swiftly to help spread your reach.

If you’ve not been doing much social media up until now, then now is the time to ramp up your presence with your social network.

Make sure you’re taking some fantastic shots of your amazing dishes and share on your social channels. Instagram and Facebook are great for foodie places. With Instagram it’s all about the look and there’s nothing more appealing than a plate of tasty food.

Make sure you tell people in your posts that you are part of the scheme. Give them an insight into your menu, anything new, your most popular dishes and your specials. Be descriptive with your post though. While a good image does say a thousand words, there’s no point posting a picture of a burger on your ‘specials’ menu that day which gives no indication of what’s in it. While you want engagement with people, try and make it a little easier for them to understand what’s in the picture in the first instance. This will help prevent you answering unnecessary questions – which can be time consuming and if not replied to in a timely manner could affect how people perceive you.

Re-confirm your opening times and update your profile with any new details.

Extend reach of your post by adding hashtags. Here’s some general Croydon foodie hashtags you might want to consider as well as some standard ones you should always think about:

#Croydon #EastCroydonCool #Croydonbar #Croydonpub #Croydonrestaurants #Croydonfoodies #Croydonfood #Croydonrestaurantquarter #Instafood #lovefood #foodstagram #foodpic #foodie

Note: don’t forget to hashtag what your food is! So, if it’s burgers or pasta – well, I think you get the picture!

What’s the story?

Don’t forget to utilise the Story function on Instagram and Facebook. This is another way to be seen by your followers as it stands out at the top of the feed.

Encourage diners to share their visit on social media and take pictures of food. If you’re on social media have your social handle visible in your restaurant and tell diners about it.

When someone shares a post and tags you in, you can use the little arrow function just below the image. This allows you to share this to your stories and you can thank the customer for their visit.

To create a story from scratch just click on ‘your story’ upload an image, then use the text function ‘Aa’ and write a brief message. For this campaign you could say ‘Eat Out to Help Out. Book Now.’ Or perhaps describe what mouthwatering food is in your image.

Or a simple way to create a story is once you have added a post to your Instagram feed, just click that arrow below your post and you can share to you story.

You can also search for the Eat Out to Help Out gif to liven up your story post. When you’re in story mode just click the square face and explore.

Website updates

If you have a website, make sure that all your contact details and menus are up to date.

On the homepage make an update to say that you are part of the scheme and encourage people to make a booking with a bold call to action button.

If you have a blog, make sure you add content to that and do so regularly. This really helps with search engine optimisation and your business being found in search engines. Fresh content is great for ongoing organic rankings.

Google My Business

Do you have a Google My Business page? If not, get one set up – it’s free! If you do have a page already then make sure all details are up to date. The last thing you want is an incorrect telephone number.

You can also add offers and updates to this page. So, tell people you are part of the discount scheme.

Remember to add imagery to your business page, this is a great resource for restaurants to showcase their dishes.

Remind diners to leave a review. Testimonials are a great way to encourage potential and returning customers.

Our blog, ‘have you told search engines you exist’ has tips about setting up your Google My Business page.

Email marketing

If you have an email distribution list, then now is a great time to start an email marketing campaign and distribute to potential customers on your database. Remember to be clear in your message, include a call to action to book now and ensure you have contact details visible.

Look at our blog on what to check before you send your next email marketing campaign – this has a checklist of what to run through before you send your email including you have a visible unsubscribe link. You must make sure you are GDPR compliant.

Digital marketing Croydon

We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon. We know the stomping ground and we’re here to support you. We’ve got some additional marketing resources you might want to take a look at which cover the different types of digital platforms and online advertising to help you form a digital marketing plan.