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What is lead generation marketing?

05/29/202004/03/2020 by scmarketing

A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. As a lead, you’d hear from a business or organisation with which you’ve already opened communication from, instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased your contact information.

The lead generation process starts with a visitor discovering your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, Ad or social media page.

That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) taking them through to a landing page on your website that’s designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.

What’s key to your lead generation marketing is the different channels that you can utilise to help start the lead generation process. Remember the information you provide is about providing your target audience – your ideal customers – with helpful tips, insight, a course or a template that will help with their business. Here’s an overview of what inbound marketing includes to help with lead generation.

Content Marketing

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to offer visitors useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. At the bottom of a post, in the hero image, or even on the side panel. The more interested a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your CTA and move onto your landing page with specific instructions to ‘download an ebook’; ‘book a course’; ‘sign up to a newsletter’.

Blog

The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Zoom video conferencing, then you can write a blog post to accompany that with background as to the benefits and step by step points.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call to-action in your caption.

Email marketing

Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy.

Ads and Remarketing

The sole purpose of a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad such as Google Adwords is to get people to take action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is clear. Read more about the benefits of PPC.

Creating a marketing plan can help you run a coordinated campaign. Our Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing has loads more details for effective lead generation, download our free ebook.

Read more about inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Ebooks

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Using social media for inbound marketing

Maintain presence through social media

03/30/202003/26/2020 by scmarketing

As we start to adjust to our new ‘normal’ working from home, having meetings via video and keeping in doors to stave off coronavirus, now is a good time to take stock of your current social channels for your business and how it fits into your overall marketing strategy and search engine results. Make the most of your channels and continue to maintain presence over the next few months.

In this blog, we’ll give you a few tips to help you with your social media presence as well as ideas for making your content more targeted.

Who are you marketing too?

It’s important to be targeted. You need to know and understand your audience. Now could be a good time to take a look at who your core customer is and really understand their needs as business owners. Once you’ve defined your audience, use this insight as the basis for creating a persona for them, read more about setting this up.

By having the details of the persona to hand when you write social media posts, or any content for that matter, this will help you provide answers to their questions and help them overcome their challenges. Ultimately you want to build trust with your audience.

Content marketing

Build a social media strategy and tailor your social media posts to the platform, its users and your target audience – your potential clients. A chatty tone for Facebook or Instagram will differ to the messages you want to get across on LinkedIn.

Whichever social network, remember to be a thought leader to your audience. You can do this by providing tips, advice and comments that your target audience will be interested to hear about and would want to share themselves.

Right now, writing blogs, email marketing, or creating ad campaigns about the government’s coronavirus advice for businesses and access to grants is a great way for accounting firms to keep in touch with their clients to help give some reassurance to large and small businesses alike at this unprecedented time.

It’s important to get the right tone of voice for the social platform you’re using. But, that’s the beauty of taking the time to research and create a persona. Now you know the right messages for your target audience.

Avoid sales on social

Ironically in order to drive sales you have to refrain from using textbook sales techniques on social media platforms. This is meant to be a social environment and people are generally not there to be sold to. Especially at this time, businesses are looking for advice, tips and how to guides to help them get through the challenging times.

Have a think about what tips you can offer your target audience and create a blog and a few image led social posts centred around your helpful tips.

Due to these unprecedented times, it’s less about lead generation and more about being helpful and supportive with your content marketing. Think of how you can support local businesses at this difficult time.

Review your social media channels

Social media management for your company is key, however it is important to note there’s clear answer as to what the right social media platform for your business is to reach out to your client base. It’s worth remembering that one size does not fit all. Take the time to review what platforms are right for your business, brand and the prospective clients you want to reach out to.

By maintaining presence through social media and new blogs on your website can help in the long term with your website ranking in search results.

For support on social media communications and other marketing services please schedule a free consultation with Smart Cow Marketing which is a social media agency in Croydon

Social media marketing resources:

What is an inbound marketing agency?

05/29/202003/05/2020 by scmarketing

An inbound marketing agency is focused on lead generation to attract quality clients from qualified leads interested in your products and services.

Ultimately you want this traffic to lead to sales. However, as you probably already know the sales journey is rarely a smooth one stop shop as there will be many touch points required to help build brand awareness and trust.

So, thinking about how you can add context to your marketing activity that’s relevant to your audience is key to success.

Creating your inbound strategy

The sales landscape today is all about supporting the buyers’ journey in making the right purchase. They don’t want their time wasted, as much as you.

We recommend that you take time to understand who you are selling to. Think of your target audience and create an imaginary persona of your ideal customer.

Then, hone your messaging in line with answering the challenges that your target audience is facing. Empathise with their requirements and personalise your content.

It’s all about appealing to your relevant prospects to reach those quality leads interested in your services.

Armed with this knowledge and research into your target audience, your tone of voice should be consistent.

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing to help you create your marketing strategy.

What does inbound marketing include?

There’s a number of inbound marketing tactics that an agency will draw on to create a strategy to generate traffic for your business. Here’s an overview digital marketing tools what can be covered.

Start your inbound marketing strategy

Your website is at the core of your business, it’s your shop window. So, a review of your current site and applying marketing methodology would be the first step to take.

Take us up on our FREE website review offer to give you insight into any possible updates you may need to make to help with Search Engine Optimisation.

Have you completed your Google My Business page? It’s free to do and is the ultimate directory to be on providing quality links back to your website.

Content marketing is also key as you need to be positioned as a thought leader in your field. So, think of adding a blog to your website or more up to date posts as this provides great new content for a website. This is another tactic to help search engines find you.

As a digital 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? 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.

Ebook resources

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing

It’s not just about social media

01/30/202303/03/2020 by scmarketing

We have a lot of clients getting in touch with us asking for help with promoting a product or service via social media. Quite often this is asked without any knowledge of any other marketing options that may be more relevant.

It’s no wonder that clients and prospects contact us asking about doing something on social media when this is what they see every day. You’re emailed by Facebook to let you know of one of you ‘Friends’ birthdays? You read news websites with articles using social media channels as their source. And, it’s been drilled into us that the life of a social media influencer is something to aspire to.

Of course, social media absolutely has it’s place within a marketing strategy. It allows you to engage with people and businesses. It helps build trust in your brand. It also provides all important quality links back to your website.

But, we wanted to help set the record straight about some of the top digital marketing options available to you which you can benefit from in conjunction with social media or standalone.

Lead generation

Ultimately, marketing is about getting quality clients from qualified leads. With 3.5 billion Google searches made each day (Live Stats), there’s no doubt that having an online presence is vital for a business. But where do you start?

Inbound marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy needs to support your business in being a magnet to good qualified leads. So, before jumping into any social media campaign we would recommend reviewing your current inbound marketing strategy as well as the activity that you are already doing such as email distribution to your database or attending events and networking. Then you can develop a strategy that will truly nurture leads.

To really help hone your campaign so it is targeted we recommend creating ‘personas’ specific to your target audience.

Think about how you want your content to sound and create a tone of voice document so that all staff and any digital marketing agency can be aligned with messaging.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system may also be an option for consideration for ensuring ongoing, timely engagement with leads and clients.

Optimised website

Before thinking of all the other digital marketing tactics, you need to think of the hub for all your digital marketing activity – your website! It should be the centre of your online world.

Think of it like a shop. You have everything in it. It’s signposted, has sales offers in the window. Has walkways that guide you through the store with a strategic wayfinding path. But you need people to find you first!

That’s where you need to make sure your website is optimised. Often referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), there are a few quick wins you can implement like making sure the meta descriptions and alt tags are completed. But the most important thing is about fresh and informative content relevant to your audience. This is why people have a blog or news page. A weekly blog including relevant keywords that you wish to be found for will help you in the organic search rankings.

Read our blog: 9 tips for optimising your website – for more SEO options.

Pay per click

If you came to us wanting to promote your latest product or services to encourage sales, social media alone will not get results.

To help your website be found and therefore your products and services, you can create well targeted campaigns with a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign to give you a boost in search. The most popular is through Google AdWords. Although you can also conduct ads through social media such as Facebook. You can target specific geographical areas and demographics that fit your target audience.

Learn more with our 8 tips for PPC campaigns.

Remarketing

Remarketing is another way of getting you found online. Ads can show when clients are searching for your business on Google which really reinforces your brand message.

The more users see an ad, the more trust is built overtime through brand awareness. While the CTR (click through rate) generally declines over time, the people who do click are more likely to convert.

Read our blog: Understanding how remarketing can grow your business.

Email marketing

With 73 percent of millennials preferring communications from businesses to come via email (HubSpot), it makes sense to consider this as a potential marketing option alongside other digital tactics.

Once your template is set up, it’s easy to add content by repurposing what you’ve already created for your blog. It helps to reinforce your messaging, get the news out there and guides people to your website.

More insight with 11 tips on setting up and running email campaigns.

Become a lead magnet

So, as you can see it’s not all about social media marketing. This is just a little taster of some of the other digital marketing tactics out there all designed to help you generate quality leads for your business.

Get in touch with us to discuss what the best digital marketing options are for your business and we can tailor an inbound marketing campaign for you.