Lead Generation Inbound Marketing

Help with Lead Generation

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 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!

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.

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.

SEO – Improving online presence

So, you have a great website with easy accessibility, engaging content, and aesthetically speaking is pleasing on the eye. That is amazing, but it all means nothing if your website cannot be found.

But worry not, this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help. With 2 billion other websites out there, we have combined some frequently asked questions to help you and your website navigate SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of increasing traffic to your website through improving its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

How does SEO work?

People will rarely type in the name of a specific website, instead they search for keywords associated with what they are after.

For example, perhaps someone is after an accountancy based in Croydon, they might type ‘accountancy Croydon’, perhaps they are more specific and are after a tax accountant they might search ‘tax accountant in Croydon’.

If your website contains these keywords throughout its content and will help improve your position in the search engine results pages.

So, SEO is as easy a putting a few keywords on some pages?

Not quite. Keywords are important but SEO looks at a variety of factors:

  • Priority is given to original and consistent content
  • Relevant content for target audience
  • The quality of links; links both to other relevant pages on your website, or links to external websites
  • The use of images for optimisation

What will work for my business?

All businesses are different, they all have different target audiences, niches and specialities. Strategies which work for one business may not work for another.

SEO is a long-term strategy. At Smart Cow Marketing we provide a free consultation to review your website and suggest what digital marketing strategies will work for you.

SEO resources

Digital marketing for accountants

Tips to maintain online presence

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.  

Blog content

8 tips to maximise the content of one blog

With many businesses bearing the brunt of lockdown such as hospitality, leisure and retail closures, any additional cost is a major consideration. Whilst businesses are aware of the importance of marketing to stay front of mind, there’s a few things you can do to be efficient with your marketing and therefore be as cost-effective as possible.

So, you’ve written your blog and uploaded it to your website. Then what? Be efficient with the marketing content you already have.

Here’s a simple process to follow so that you maximise one blog once you have uploaded it to your website.

  1. Write a social media post. Add a link back to the blog post and share on social media with an image (your own image or purchase a stock image – do not use google images as these carry copyright).
  2. Don’t just leave it at writing one social post. Review the content of your blog and break that down into bite size chunks. You’ll find that you can schedule a number of different social posts simply by lifting a few sentences from the same blog and sharing them on social. You may have to tailor them slightly for the different social channels you use, but it will take you a lot less time.
  3. Get your employees and colleagues to also re-share what you post on social media to spread the news through your social network.
  4. Conduct a poll question relating to your blog. This is particularly good on LinkedIn as it engages well with your network and allows them to comment.
  5. If your business is on Instagram or Facebook, share the social post to your Stories to highlight that you have a new blog post. The gifs on Instagram are great for stand out.
  6. Add a summary of the blog as an update to your Google My Business page with a ‘learn more’ button with a link back to your blog. And, if you are on any other listing directories such as associations or event websites, check if they have the option of adding regular updates from you as this all helps with link building.
  7. Send an email to your marketing database. If you have an email database then start to utilise that. Create a template for an email. Platforms like Hubspot allow you to create great looking email templates. Then use the content from your blog in your email. Only use a small part of it to entice recipients to click to read more.
  8. If you want to build on your creative skills, why not create a short video with information taken from your blog? You can chat further with us about video creation if you want to know more about what you could do.

Well, we hope this gives you a few ideas to take advantage of for the next blog you write.
Remember that all this activity will help with search engine optimisation (SEO). With the blog itself ensure you have keywords included (the words and phrases that you want to be found for in search engines).

For social posts, email marketing and business directory uploads always ensure that you have included a link back to your blog. Link building with quality links also helps show search engines that you are a thought leader as well as improves brand awareness and lead generation.

Get in touch with Smart Cow, we provide digital marketing for accountants and a helping hand with content marketing for websites, alongside kick starting your SEO strategy.