Name: Smart Cow Marketing
Price range: $$$

Webinar: Grow your business through online lead generation

06/21/202105/14/2020 by scmarketing

We’re delighted to be taking part in the London Business Resilience Webinar Series on Wednesday 20 May, 12.45-1.30pm.

Simon Cripps, owner of Smart Cow, will be sharing insight into how to grow your business through online lead generation.

Simon will cover:

Why online lead generation is so important
What to do to attract the right type of enquiry
How to convert your online leads to clients

What’s key to your lead generation strategy is the different digital marketing channels that you can utilise to help start the lead generation process. But, it’s vital to provide your target audience with helpful tips, insight, a course or a template that will help with their business. Using a mix of activity as part of your inbound marketing strategy is generally the best route to take and can include blogs, social media marketing, email marketing or pay per click ads.

Register for the webinar

Register to attend the webinar on Wednesday 20 May to get some effective lead generation tips. These interactive webinars are hosted by the London Chamber of Commerce & Industry (LCCI) and designed to support your business and employees as we navigate the coronavirus crisis.

Inbound marketing agency in Surrey

As an inbound marketing agency, we would look at your business, understand your objectives to then tailor an inbound marketing campaign for your firm encompassing the tactics that are right for your goals.

Why not contact us for a FREE consultation? If you’re looking to grow your business, talk us through your current position, where you would like to be, your target audience and objectives and we can work on a proposal for you.

Lights, camera, action! Using video for business

05/26/202204/15/2020 by scmarketing

With lots of people now working from home, many of us are getting to grips with video conferencing to hold our regular update meetings. But not only that, video is a great way to spread the word of your products and services, a tactic often used in digital marketing campaigns.

Video is great for content marketing and sharing on social media, but don’t just take our word for it, just look at some of these staggering statistics:

Well, it certainly makes sense to be in the mix when you see how popular video is.

So, if you’re embarking on creating some short video tips for your clients and prospects or perhaps you’re looking to host a webinar, here’s our top tips for working on video.

Tips for your delivery on camera

Look at the lens.
Keep hands away from your face.
Don’t fidget – Don’t hold anything (if possible) as you’ll have a tendency to fidget with it.
Avoid looking at notes when you’re talking. It doesn’t need to be word perfect. You want it to come across as natural.
Smile or make sure your face is animated. Be expressive, much more than normal.
Keep the message concise.
Speak slowly. This helps make the piece authoritative, easier to understand and easier to edit.
Practice, practice, practice.
Above all – be natural.

Tips for video set up

Appearance: Check your appearance, hair, collar, background should be as clear as possible.
Lighting: Nice soft light to the face, also a light to the wall behind works well, if possible.
Sound: Make sure there is as minimal background sound as possible. Reduce the hum of your PC, fans, air conditioning, switch of the ringtone of mobiles, and your messages on PC/Laptop etc.
Check your sound recording is good.

Relevant content for Search Engine Optimisation

It’s not about posting any video, it’s important that your video content is also targeted to your audience, with a relevant script, tagline and a clear call to action for increased engagement.

If you haven’t already, then develop keywords and phrases for your business. This is simply about what key term you would like to be found for when people search online. The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by search engines and improves your search engine optimisation (SEO). This is relevant to video, not just written content. You can add captions to videos so that people don’t have to switch volume on.

We’d recommend having accounts on channels such as Vidyard, Vimeo and YouTube. This all helps with your rankings in search. Think about the name of your video file and its title when you upload to the video channels as it should contain keywords. On YouTube you can add an SRT file to enable you to add subtitles and closed captions rather than burn them onto the video file. This can help with SEO within the YouTube channel. Don’t forget this is another search engine.

Video for your website

It’s not just about sharing your videos on social media and adding to video channels such as YouTube. Remember that you should be adding the video to your website. Ideally you want to push social media posts back to your website to view the video. Remember that placing the video higher up the page is much better for engagement with website visitors.

Smart Cow is a digital marketing agency in Croydon. If you’d like a free website review to look at how your website is performing in search to find out how an SEO campaign can help local search results, complete our form and we’ll take a look for you.

Resources

Blog as part of content marketing strategy

Why blog?

07/19/202104/07/2020 by scmarketing

We work with a wide range of clients including those within the accounting sector. Often when we meet to discuss initial marketing proposals, a blog is far from the agenda. People are under the misconception that blogging is for… ‘bloggers’. There’s this misconception that a blog is about polished lifestyles and food! In this blog we aim to set the record straight and give small business owners more insight into the purpose behind a blog.

Whilst your content is essential to attract your target audience, blogs are essentially about your blog fitting into your marketing strategy in particular, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Now is a good time to review your business website. If you don’t already have a blog page, then these points will help you to understand the purpose of the page and its importance in helping your website rise in search rankings. If you already have a blog, then there’s some tips for content that could help your overall digital marketing plan.

A blog forms part of your content marketing

A blog is an important page on your website to provide tips, advice, guides, and offers. All your content is aimed at supporting your target audience as well as positioning you as a thought leader in your sector.

But that’s not all. Content that you post on your blog helps to keep your website fresh, frequently. The strategic inclusion of keywords – phrases that you want to be found for in search – will help search engines find you. And, because you are posting content regularly it helps search engines see that you are ab authority in your field.

Red more about optimising your content with keywords in our blog; What SEO agencies should offer London firms.

See, there’s a little more to it than fancy coffee pics!

Content marketing plan

Create a content marketing plan to help you schedule when you will write a blog and on what topic.

To help your creativity, initially think of key dates in the year that you can use as a hook. If you’re an accounting firm, then list out key dates for tax return deadlines within the year; the Budget and so forth. Also include exhibitions you may be attending or charitable events you are involved with so that your audience gets an all-round look at your firm. This will help you schedule timely reminder blogs for your audience.

Use news articles as a hook – often referred to as a news jack. Or if there’s some research just published of relevance to your target audience you could write a comment piece on it and why your prospective customers or existing clients should take note. A word of warning on this though, always make sure to reference any source in full and add backlinks to the original article or report.

Internal and external website links

Backlinks are all about helping your website increase its domain authority and appearance in search. Blogs are a great way to add backlinks to your website. You can add links back to key ‘pillar’ pages within your website as well as adding links to external websites. Not only that, the aim is to have backlinks reciprocated.

The more you write, the more thought leadership authority you accrue with search engines, this will help you be sought for backlinks too. Now this is a long-term SEO strategy as it takes time to build up a catalogue of good quality content and a lot of work to seek out opportunities that you could provide comment on with external sites.

So, your quick wins are that once you’ve checked your own website has relevant links to other pages on your website is to check any websites that you already have a mention on and whether they have a backlink to you. For example, are you a member of an industry association, speaker or exhibitor at an event or formed a partnership with a supplier? Do these sites have the correct website mentions in place and importantly a hyperlink back to your accountancy website?

Google My Business

Always make sure you have completed your Google My Business page. Continue to update it with your latest blogs. This also adds another backlink to your website. Plus, it tells this dominant search engine first-hand all about your business which helps you be found by prospects as well as provide ongoing support to your current client base.

Read more on the benefits of completing your Google My Business page in our blog – have you told search engines you exist?

Titles and keywords

And now for the website backend tech SEO. Make sure you always complete the H1 / H2 header tags as well as meta title and alt tags when you upload your blog.

If you partner with a website designer and developer, then they will be able to guide you on this. If you’ve not updated your website in a long time and have a Content Managed System (CMS) such as WordPress, you should be able to look at the backend and complete these yourself.

Equally if you wanted a Free Website Review, which will highlight areas that can be updated such as missing header tags or meta titles, then get in touch with us and we can run this report for you.

Our blog 9 tips for optimising your website has some further tips on SEO for inbound marketing.

Smart Cow Marketing is a digital marketing agency providing services for a range of clients including marketing for accountants.

Top tips for calls to action

04/15/202004/06/2020 by scmarketing

Calls-to-action (CTA) help drive people to your offers. If your CTAs aren’t effective at capturing people’s attention and persuading them to click, then it makes the offer useless.

CTAs can be used on product pages (non-landing pages), in display ads, email, social media and anywhere you can market your offer. But not all CTAs are created equal. In a world where every brand is fighting for attention, it’s critical that prospects choose your offer over your competitors.

CTA’s are a key part of your content marketing strategy and overall marketing plan. Here are some tips to creating effective marketing CTAs that get the clicks.

Call to action where the eye can see

Calls-to-action do best “above the fold” – the space where your web page is viewable to the user without having to scroll down. According to heat map analysis, anything “below the fold” will only be viewed by 50% of people – your potential customers – who visit your page. Doubling impressions on your CTAs can significantly increase your lead count.

Be clear

Be clear and specific in your call to actions about what you want a visitor to do. Don’t be clever. If you’re giving away a free guide, say “Download our FREE guide to…” and explain the title of the guide. If you’re hosting a free webinar, say “Register for our FREE webinar on…” so that people registering will be your target market and therefore quality leads.

Your topics should clearly convey a compelling benefit of downloading or registering to join the webinar. This elevates your call to action from the standard “Download Now” or “Get a Free Article” as the full description helps to make your CTA’s much more specific.

Use contrast to make CTA stand out

A call-to-action is meant to stand out, so if your CTA blends in too much with your website design, no one will notice it. You want as many visitors to land on that call-to-action as possible, so use contrasting colours to make the CTA stand out, and more importantly, use design to make it clear it is a clickable call-to-action.

Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page

This tip might seem minor, but it’s incredible how often businesses miss this opportunity. For a successful marketing campaign, calls-to-action are meant to send visitors to a dedicated landing page where they receive a specific offer such as the download of a guide or a template.

Do not use CTAs to drive people to your homepage. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), still send them to a targeted landing page that is relevant to what they are looking for. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

Promote offers on product pages

CTAs shouldn’t be one size fits all. If your company offers various products or services, you may want to consider creating a different offer for each of them. Then you can place CTAs linking to each offer on the website pages that are most relevant to that offer.

Thank-you pages

Even if someone completes a form on your website (thus they’ve converted as a lead), don’t stop there. Increasing engagement is a top priority for marketers so that prospects turn into loyal fans therefore targeted and personalises marketing communication is essential to maintain engagement. Once someone reaches a “thank you page,” the page that a visitor arrives on after completing a form, use that space as an opportunity to promote more offers and helpful content for your target audience.

These tips are taken from our detailed ebook – 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips.

Find out more about marketing your business.