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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.

Man working on laptop using marketing automation

Why Smart Cow became a HubSpot agency

05/06/202102/21/2020 by scmarketing

We know that a sales journey is very rarely a one-stop shop. Your customers and prospects will have visited your competition’s website, researched your services and looked at online reviews long before they start speaking to you. As a result, you need to stand out from the competition and become a lead generation magnet.

This is why we became a HubSpot agency in London. We understand that the day to day running of your business will take up your time. So, we partnered with HubSpot so that we could provide our clients with the latest in Automated Marketing Software to help with your marketing strategy and help free up time.

What does HubSpot software offer?

HubSpot software allows you to track activity and leads from your inbound marketing such as social media, website or email marketing campaigns, and other forms of content marketing you use.

You can organise and nurture relationships to help you convert a prospect to a client in a timely manner, that’s suitable for them, this can lead to more client success.

Think about when you look at a website and you get a friendly chat bot appearing or what about the email you receive once you’ve downloaded a report from a website?

HubSpot provides the capability to automate these repetitive tasks to help you concentrate on managing your client relationships and target audiences.

All these automated touchpoints are vital for nurturing leads and can help up your marketing game against your competition. This is data driven and can show you the result of your inbound sales, and where your new customer acquisition originates from.

Discover the benefits of automation

As a professional digital marketing and inbound marketing agency in London, we’re offering you a chance to discover the benefits of the HubSpot software and how it can help your business. We’d be delighted to arrange a free test of this great sales and marketing platform.

Go ahead, book a free consultation. As well as this we discover what we can do for your business with our digital marketing services, inbound marketing strategies, social media marketing and much more.

Using social media for inbound marketing

8 social media tips to drive inbound sales

04/01/202002/13/2020 by scmarketing

With an estimated 2.65 billion people using social media around the world (source: Statista), it makes sense to be part of the conversation when marketing your business.

Now, one size does not fit all. So, we’ve gathered a few top tips on what to consider when embarking on improving your social media presence for your inbound marketing strategy.

What social media platforms should you use? There’s no clear answer to this but what’s certain is that one size does not fit all. Review what social networks are right for your business, brand and the client base you want to reach out to. Don’t waste your time speaking to everyone. So, if you’re an accounting firm for small businesses or business owners of local businesses then using social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter are ideal for lead generation. But don’t dismiss Facebook. While you may think that it’s all about what you’re eating or doing at the weekend, having presence on this social media channel provides a link to help domain authority but also people use Facebook as a search engine so it means your business will be found.
Who do you want to speak to? It’s important to be targeted. You need to know and understand your audience. Define your audience and create a persona for them, read more about setting this up. This will help you build trust with your audience as they come to understand that you understand their challenges and you are helping them to overcome them.
Content is king: Once you’ve uploaded a blog to your website, share it on social media with a link back to your website. But, don’t just post without thought of what you’re writing. Tailor posts to the social platform, its users and your target audience. Regularly follow industry specific contacts and thought leaders, engage and share posts relevant to your audience. When you share another article, add comments to the post to move the story on or show your appreciation of what an article was about.
Imagery: Content is also about imagery. With people watching nearly 2 billion videos on Twitter per day, it makes sense to include pictures or video to help standout.
Be a thought leader: Provide your product services in the form of tips, advice and comments that your target audience will be interested to hear about and would want to share themselves. But all the time, be genuine and engaging while remaining respectful.
Be chatty yet professional: Get the right tone for the social platform you are using and make sure it’s right for building your brand awareness, your target audience and potential clients.
Remember it’s social: With social media marketing don’t lose sight that this is meant to be a social environment and people are generally not there to be sold to.
Part of the inbound sales marketing strategy: When it comes to Return on Investment, it may be one of the lowest returns in an inbound digital marketing strategy, but that by no means implies ignore it. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, therefore incorporating social media into your digital marketing plan means you have added another touch point to reach your audience, engage with them and learn about your offering. This is a vital part of your overall inbound marketing strategy to help build awareness and trust.

Free marketing consultation

If you need help, from a social media agency, with setting up your social media channels or your entire inbound marketing strategy, contact us today for a free consultation. We also work with on social media for accountancy marketing.