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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.

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

9 tips to create email campaigns that convert

06/14/202103/04/2020 by scmarketing

With active email accounts expected to hit 5.6 billion (Source: Statista 2019 via Hubspot), email marketing offers a great inbound marketing option. Here’s our top tips for creating a successful email marketing campaign.

Good quality data

Make sure you have good quality data. Segment your list, clean it and don’t be upset when people unsubscribe. You don’t want to be sending someone emails that they feel are spam. You want to make every email count which means that those left on your subscriber list are relevant. Segmenting a list makes it targeted. Recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns (Source: MailChimp, 2017 via Hubspot)

Be compliant

You must always have an unsubscribe option in your email as well as a link to your privacy policy. If people are not interested, then by making it easy to unsubscribe, you’ve cleared someone from your list that wasn’t going to engage further. Remember, you need to be GDPR compliant, so transparency is important.

Make content snappy

Don’t forget the point of your email. With hundreds or emails received by people daily – what’s the purpose of yours and why should the recipient read it, how will you make yours an effective email? Knowing the key challenges of your target audience will not only help you create content that answers their questions but also will help you to personalise your email.

Call to action

Make it obvious what you want the recipient to do. Download a case study or report? Answer a short poll? Follow you on social media? Have a link to your blog posts? What the call to action is will vary from the types of email you send out. There are many actions that you can add but make it easy for your reader to know what to do.

Website landing page

Make sure links in your email work and are going to the correct page on your website to avoid bounces. You may need to create a specific landing page or update content to be relevant to your email campaign.

Images

Make sure your email template is easy to navigate but most of all you have enough pictures or video to make it eye-catching and attractive to look at.

Be mobile responsive

With 46% of emails opened on a mobile, it makes sense to ensure your emails are responsive for all devices.

AvB test

Always test the subject line of your email. Test some of the distribution list initially with a split of subject lines and then with the most successful open rates, send out the remainder using that title.

Analyse your results

Make a note of what works and what doesn’t. Campaign monitoring is important so avoid copying old formats which don’t get clicks, be innovative and creative.

We hope this provides you with the help you need to embark on your email marketing campaign. If you need support on this, then do contact us, a email marketing agency and digital marketing agency in London, and we can chat through your marketing requirements.

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.