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Tips for writing engaging blogs

08/19/202208/03/2021 by scmarketing

You need to make an impression when someone reaches your website as the goal is to keep a visitor on your site exploring your products and services.

So, here’s a few tips to help with writing content that will resonate and engage with your target audience and help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

Topics of interest

Relevant content for your target audience is important for any marketing activity especially your blogs. Make sure that the topics you choose to write about are of interest to your audience. The aim is to add value to help people solve a very specific problem with tips and advice.

Write blogs that answer their questions. The goal is to optimise that post to appear in related searches by including keywords.

Offer industry insight rather than being product focussed so that you are positioned as a thought leader in your field.

It’s not just your clients and prospects that will benefit from this insight, search engines love unique, fresh and relevant content.

But remember to keep content clear and to the point.

Case studies

Cover topics which highlight your expertise. A case study is a great way to illustrate this with quotes direct from your client to add detail to how you solved their challenges.

You can always interview your case study via Zoom and then this could then be edited (with their permission of course) to create a video led case study. Video is another great way to bring your blog to life.

Create an offer to download

Offering a free template to download or an ebook provides an attractive offer. Plus, it enables you to add a form so you can capture email addresses of those interested in your offers.

Regular SEO

Without regular, new and relevant content your website is less engaging. Your target audience is less likely to stay on your website or revisit in the future.

Make sure that you complete a few actions on the backend when you start to upload blogs such as add a meta description, image alt tag and H1 headings for starters. Get into that routine and you’re really helping with ongoing search engine optimisation. Read more about SEO and why you should consider it here.

Free website review

Why not take advantage of our FREE website review to get it well and truly optimised. Then you can simply concentrate on adding regular blogs to your website to keep it engaging and help to generate leads.

SEO agency Croydon

If you would like to discuss SEO services incorporating content marketing as part of a wider long term digital marketing strategy for your business then book a consultation with us.

We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon, get in touch and let us help you improve your online presence with a review of your web design and current SEO strategies including keyword research.

Can video help with SEO?

08/19/202207/21/2021 by scmarketing

By now we’re sure that you’ve encountered video content and whether you’ve embraced it fully for your business or not, now is the time to really think about using it as part of your content marketing to help optimise your website further.

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 long term Search Engine Optimisation or SEO within the YouTube channel.

Creating video content

Create relevant content for your brand.

Whilst you can create corporate videos working with companies that can create scripts, take footage and edit interviews, you can also make videos efficiently, simply and at no extra cost all on your mobile phone. You can take great product shots and footage at events to showcase your business.

If you are shooting the video yourself it is useful to write a script so that you incorporate your keywords which are important for SEO. Memorise it as best you can and then speak naturally to the camera offering your clients and prospects tips and advice.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel either. Repurpose content from your blogs and make short and snappy videos to bring your blog web page and social media posts to life.

Our blog on using video for business has top tips on setting up videos and what to consider along with some useful dos and don’ts.

You don’t need to have a video of yourself but for small businesses adding a face to your brand is a great way for making marketing more personal and letting customers know that there’s a person dealing with orders and enquiries.

SEO company Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice on relevant Local SEO Services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals and how a tailored SEO campaign can help your marketing strategy.

We can walk through ideas for video and the potential of using it for your business.

Why you should create an online persona

08/19/202204/23/2021 by scmarketing

We often talk about online personas to help you with your digital marketing strategy. An online persona is based around your target audience. This fictitious character acts as a reminder of who you are talking to when you are marketing. Therefore, it helps you define key messages that really resonate with your prospects and help you retain customers.

Understanding your target audience is essential to increase your opportunities to sell your products or services. From our experience, creating an online persona is vital to run a successful digital marketing campaign.

Who is your target audience?

If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting your products and services to reach. Ask yourself some questions such as:

Who does your company identify with? Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
Who are your long-standing customers?
Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
Are the businesses you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?
Are the individuals purchasing your products a particular age?
Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?

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

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to as part of your lead generation strategy to gain qualified leads. It helps to personalise campaigns and be targeted.

You need to consider a number of areas such as the character’s goals or challenges. If you 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. Questions to ask to help you build your persona include:

What’s the person’s age?
Where do they live?
What’s their job role and sector they work in?
Imagine their goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion.
Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these.

Once you have this character created you should get a clearer idea of how your services or product can help them. Think about the solution you are offering them with your product or service and create a few buzzwords and one or two sentences around this solution you have to their problem or needs. This can then become one of your key messages in marketing.

Create a visual of your persona

We create a simple one slide PowerPoint visual once we have gathered all the facts about our persona.

Create bullet points that answer all your questions that offer a solution to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages within your content marketing for ongoing digital marketing campaigns.

Finalise the visual with a clear box out which defines:

How you help them
The overarching marketing message of how your business helps them
Your one-line elevator pitch

The reason we create this simple visual is that it’s then easy to share with sales and marketing colleagues; business development teams; design or digital marketing agencies. This helps you to maintain brand awareness and consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.

Digital marketing Croydon

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

Get in touch with us at Smart Cow to discuss how a digital marketing campaign, tailored to your audience, can help your business.

Tips to maintain online presence

08/19/202204/09/2021 by scmarketing

With the end of the third lockdown, our local High Streets will start to welcome more people as shops, beauty and hospitality (with outside space!) are opening.

It will certainly be different for a while, as we all find our feet again after such time away from family, friends and colleagues. But what’s key is that our local businesses will be opening their doors again to welcome people through their open doors.

What has changed is that many businesses realise the importance of online presence with many creating websites to sell products and services as well as utilising social media and email marketing.

If you’re still finding your feet with building your online presence, here’s a few marketing tips to help you maintain and build online visibility.

Develop your content marketing plan

Wow your customers and prospects with your knowledge and expertise to help increase brand awareness and position you as a thought leader.

A great way to make news timely is by tapping into international days of relevance to your business. Create a calendar and then each month check to see what blogs you can write or social media posts you can share tapping into that day.

This fresh content added to your website also helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) which helps improve your ranking in search engine results pages. Whilst SEO is a long-term strategy, a regular blog with keywords (those words and phrases you want to be found for in search engines) will help in the long run.

We recommend that you compile a content marketing plan adding key dates so you know when you can write a blog post about a particular topic or product to send out timely communication.

This ongoing sharing of information helps to build trust with your customers and potential clients. If you’re offering advice that is helping, then you have more chance of getting a call for a consultation.

Regular and new content on your website with keywords that you want to be found for forms part of a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Including this in your plan will really help give your website a boost in search results pages.

Do you know your target audience?

Over this period have you may have discovered that you’ve been working in one or two sectors of industry more than others? Or perhaps you have had more enquiries about a certain service or product.

Now is the time to review these frequent enquiries and really understand who your target audience is. This will help so much with engagement and attracting quality leads because you can tailor your marketing communication specifically to their concerns. This positions you as the thought leaders in your area of expertise.

Here’s our advice on creating up an online persona (an imaginary person that is your typical target audience).

Are you listed on Google My Business?

If you have already discovered the virtues of Google My Business that’s great. If not then now is the time to make sure that your business is listed on it.

We’ve got a few videos from how to set up your Google My Business page through to getting reviews. So, whatever level of Google My Business you’re at we have a video to help beginners through to GMB old timers. Take a look at the Google My Business videos here.

Digital marketing Croydon

We are digital marketing agency in Croydon. Why not take advantage of our free website audit so you can understand whether you need to make any updates to your website so that it is optimised for lead generation.