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Quick tips on using social media effectively

08/19/202207/05/2021 by scmarketing

Social media can be a cost-effective way to reach your target audience. Once you have worked out the right social channels for reaching your audience or you’re in need of a refresher on why you’re using social media for business, here’s a few quick basic tips to connecting and engaging with your audience.

Build genuine connections

To build a loyal following you need to be genuine. Take the time to get to know your online audience and make sure to communicate information which is valuable to them. Remember to have genuine interactions with those following you and those that you want to reach.

Social media is about dialogue

Refrain from using your platform as a megaphone to shout about everything your business has to offer. While it can be a place for promotions, the most effective way to use social media is to be social. This means sharing interesting tips and advice that will help solve your target audience’s challenges. As well as sharing links to articles of interest or introducing interactive polls. Focus on engagement!

Add links

Aim to direct traffic to your website from your social media platforms to specific landing pages to help generate leads. This can be done by adding links into your social updates or adding inks in your Instagram profile bio or swipe up links on your stories. It’s a great way to promote new blogs, discounts, or other helpful resources.

Digital marketing Croydon

Check out our free Lead Generation guide for 30 tips on how to bring lead generation to the forefront of your marketing campaign. Download The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips here!

Get in touch with Smart Cow Digital Marketing today for an in depth talk about how your business can flourish using social media as part of your wider digital marketing strategy.

Help with Lead Generation

08/19/202206/21/2021 by scmarketing

At Smart Cow Marketing, we have plenty of free resources which can help you improve your lead generation including our guide; ‘The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks and Ideas’.

In this blog we sum up a few tips to help you generate more leads!

Email marketing

Email marketing is key to being noticed. In our free guide we explore how to keep your email subscribers happy and interested in your content. Sending valuable offers such as enewsletters, discounts, educational content, or business updates, will keep your business front of their mind.

Go a step further by adding in tools for people to share the email you distributed. A simple ‘Forward to a Friend’, or a link to your social media platforms will encourage people to pass on the message!

Pay per click (PPC)

PPC can help promote your business through paying for boosted adverts for example Google ads. These ads pop up when someone types into a search engine and relevant results are returned with ads showing at the top of the results.

These ads target the audience you want and make for an easy way to track your investment. Also, you only pay when someone clicks on the advert link which makes it easy to control your budget.

Make sure to keep your adverts simple, concise, and relevant. Ensure that the landing page gives clear instructions as what the prospective client should do next. This can be anything from; a number to call, a form to fill out, a call to action button, or a bit more information about your business’s products or services. An effective landing page will increase the conversion rate.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Improved SEO will make it easier for your website to be found in web searches by people showing interest in your products. Search engines boost websites with original and consistent content. They analyse keywords on your website and align them to target audiences based on their search behaviour. That’s why it’s important that keyword research is conducted as part of your SEO strategy.

Digital marketing, Croydon

With everything digital marketing out the way, it is important to remember your website is the main focus. It is where all these leads come back to, therefore making sure your website is easy to navigate, engaging, and professional could make the difference between a prospect staying a prospect or becoming a client.

If you are looking to develop your business and gain more cliental, get in touch with our digital marketing team for a free consultation where we review your challenges and help you execute your goals.

Lead generation tips

08/19/202205/10/2021 by scmarketing

Your website should be the main focus of all your digital marketing strategies. Everything you do online should lead back to your website and to the services or products you offer.

This not only improves your ranking in search engine results pages, it also supports your lead generation strategy. This is vital to consider when looking to grow your business and in gaining high quality leads.

What works for your business may be different to another, but we have rounded together a few tips to help your lead generation campaign.

Website landing pages

Firstly, a word about your website design. Whilst wanting to encourage website visitors, the aim is to keep them on your website as long as possible. So, make sure that your landing page is relevant to the links that people will be clicking on. So whether you distribute email marketing or social media posts, your landing page needs to be relevant to the offer that has interested the website visitor in the first place which is an effective way of capturing leads.

A good landing page will include a clear headline and brief description of the offer (see our blog on creating compelling offers for more on this topic). You should have a relevant image and perhaps a bullet point summary.

What’s vital though is the inclusion of a form for your website visitor to complete. This will capture the information to convert your web visitors into leads.

Your content on the landing page should be consistent to the details of the call-to-action that people clicked on in the first place. Ideally your headlines should be the same.

Get your social on!

Utilise social media as much as you can but also be cautious as not all channels may be relevant to your business and target audience.

Create snappy engaging content with links back to your website. This helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) as the link is from a reputable source, as well as generating leads.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Just utilise snippets of content from your latest blog for a social media post with URL links to ‘Find out More’.

Gather quality data

Just because a website visitor does not choose your services or buy your products straight away, does not meant they never will. The fact they are on your website in the first place means thy are interested and so are a warm lead for future offers or insightful information.

So, set up a pop-up box on your website to ‘sign-up’ to the latest news. This means you can obtain their email address and be able to send future email marketing news and offers.

Keep testing

Keep tabs of what works and what does not. There is no point putting time and effort into something which does not reap rewards.

Check out more of our resources below which cover social media, email campaigns, and lead generation in more detail!

Digital Marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency, we specialise in helping Croydon business owners with a range of solutions to help improve online presence and generate leads.

Whether it’s website development, SEO services including content marketing, organic social media management, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google ads or email marketing, talk to us about your business needs and we’ll create a focussed online marketing campaign for you.

Resources for lead generation

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.