Create online personas for targeted sales

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Take time to understand your audience

Understanding your target audience is essential to increasing your opportunities to sell and subsequently bagging that sale. From our experience, creating an online persona is vital to run a successful digital marketing campaign.

According to research from Dun & Bradstreet, 57% of marketers admitted lack of target audience understanding was their biggest hurdle in B2B marketing. With this in mind, we would urge clients to work closely with their agency so that they fully understand the target customer and therefore create the ideal online buyer persona.

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 marketing agency to help create a character of your ideal customer. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with your agency will get that character swiftly into shape.

  • Consider your character’s goals or challenges.
  • 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.

What solution are you offering?

Once you have this character created you should get a clearer idea of how your services or product can help them – what solution are you offering them? Create a few buzzwords and one or two sentences around this solution you have to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages in marketing campaigns.

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

Get in touch with us to discuss how a digital marketing campaign to optimise your website with tailored content to your audience can help your business rise in search rankings.

Increase sales with Google AdWords

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Only 19 percent of small businesses use Google AdWords to reach potential customers*, but with 64.6% of people clicking on the ads when searching online**, it clearly makes business sense to utilise Google AdWords as a way of increasing sales.

Tips to make the most of your budget

While these stats indicate the importance of making your website visible to search, AdWords can sometimes be difficult to get right. If you’ve tried using AdWords before, you may have found that it didn’t work as well as you thought. Perhaps it felt like you were throwing money down the drain. Here’s a few tips that may help you get the most for your Google AdWords budget.

1. Select the right keywords and use very specific long tail keywords. Comprising three or four words, the long tail keywords are relevant to what people want to buy. The phrasing is targeted and very specific.

2. Keep your keywords local. If you have a nail salon, then adding in the location will mean it will be relevant for people looking for a nearby beauty place.

3. Be wary of pop-ups. While essential to your website to gain invaluable customer data, if you’re using Google AdWords, pop-ups are not allowed on the page you direct people to.

Free £75 Google AdWords offer

These are just a few tips to help you tailor your Google AdWords. While it can be somewhat complicated, as a certified Google Partner we’re here to help small businesses with the advice you need. And, if you’re a new customer to Smart Cow, we can offer you £75 worth of free AdWords to set you on your way. All we need to do is set up your account for a one-off fee. You then have the option of utilising the £75 yourself or if you would like us to manage this aspect for a set period, we can do that too.

Google Ads agency Croydon

So what are you waiting for? If you’re looking to conduct a Pay Per Click marketing campaign, give us a call today on 020 3137 1826 and find out more about the benefits of Google AdWords to your small business.

Source: *G2 Crowd third quarterly research report ‘Crowd Views’ via TechCo; **Wordstream, 2016

Free email trial for small businesses

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Keep in Constant Contact through email marketing

With reports indicating that email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter*, considering email as part of your marketing campaign is essential to growth.

As a certified partner of Constant Contact we can help you branch out into email marketing and offer you a free trial so you can see the benefits to your business first-hand.

Using an email service provider means they’ve done the legal work for you. For example, you always need an unsubscribe option when you mail your database. If not, you could potentially be listed as spam.

And remember, those networking events that you attend, you do so for a reason. Pop those business card details into an excel spreadsheet and these can easily be transferred to the Constant Contact system.

When you send emails through a service provider such as Constant Contact, you’ll have access in-depth data about open and click through rates as well as social media tools and capability to conduct online surveys.

Email marketing agency Croydon

Get in touch and ask about our 60-day free Constant Contact trial. Call on 020 3137 1826 or email saymoo@smart-cow.com to find out more.

*Source: McKinsey 

Instagram top tips for small businesses

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With over 400million users*, Instagram is an influential app to engage with your customers and get your message out there. There’s so much to understand about this clever social network but knowing that there’s 80 million photos uploaded each day to Instagram**, here’s our top tips for getting that perfect image to gain interest and attract new followers.

Top tips for Instagram photos

1. Firstly, you need to use a great shot that really makes you stand out in a crowded market place.

2. Make sure the lighting is good. If the image is too dark it won’t gain as much traction because this is an image led feed.

3. Does your image need a filter? Before you post it, think about using the filters available and look at the many tools under edit. These can really enhance your image and make it pop.

4. Think about adding movement to your feed. Utilising an app such as Boomerang is a simple yet effective way to do this – it’s great for a teaser campaign for example a snapshot of a box opening with a new product inside. Or, create short snappy videos on a smart phone – perfect if you’re attending an event and you want to showcase where you’re exhibiting. These can then be edited into several videos post event and used again and again.

5. You can now select the ‘multiple’ function which means you can upload 10 images at once. This is great if you want to show a montage of new products or dishes on your menu.

6. Remember that your business profile is just that! Images should be relevant to what you do. Avoid posting your holiday snaps unless there’s something related that you think your audience will be interested in.

Spread the word with good images and relevant hashtags

More and more consumers are using images whenever they post, even if it is just an emoji – a picture can say a thousand words. Therefore, utilising the social media channels to spread the word of your business is key but what is crucial is that your images are eye-catching.

You then need to tailor your written message to your target audience with a snappy caption and relevant hashtags. Hashtags are really important on Instagram. They can help spread your reach much wider as people who don’t follow you will seek out specific phrases in search of the subject matter they are interested in.

Social Media marketing agency

If you’re a business starting out on social media and you need further advice on creating the right campaign for your specific needs then email us at saymoo@smart-cow.com or call on 020 3137 1826 to find out more.

Source: *via Digital Trends; **via Marketing Week

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