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Lead Generation: Creating compelling offers

05/27/202103/15/2021 by scmarketing

Generating leads – both high in quantity and quality – is a key objective for a marketing campaign. There can be a lot of components for any lead generation campaign.

Here are four key mechanics for inbound lead generation:

Offers: such as books, whitepapers, free consultations, coupons and product demonstrations.
Call-to-action (CTA): bold text, an image or a button that links directly to a landing page so website visitors can download your offer.
Landing page: A specific page with information about a particular offer, and a form to download that offer.
Form: To collect contact information from a website visitor in exchange for the offer.

Creating your offer

In this blog we will cover the first stage of your lead generation campaign – creating the all important offer.

With your offer you want to create an air of exclusivity so that you can generate demand. An offer may be an ebook, video, research, whitepaper, free demonstrations, memberships, discounts, blog posts.

You need engaging offers because if you are asking a website visitor to part with their contact details, then it needs to be deemed of high enough value for them to do so.

Tactics that place a time limit can help encourage take up such as:

Limited time offers
Limited quantity offers
Or a combination of the above

Engaging offers

Encouraging a website visitor to sign up could take the form of saying how many people have already signed up to your newsletter or event.

To test how successful your offer is you could conduct an AVB test on the title of your ebook for instance. Send out email marketing to your database and see which is the most susccessul.

Different stages of the customer journey

Remember that even the phrase ‘contact us’ on your website is an offer. However, there are various stages of the sales journey and ‘contact us’ is for those way down the line. Prospects who already know you and may already be customers.

Many customers will conduct research first before purchase. So a constant feed of educational blogs, social posts and email marketing will get your brand messaging out there. Therefore these prospoects are more likely to be interested in downloading an ebook.

And, for those already aware of your products and services, then booking a demo would be more targeted for them.

So, making sure you cover each stage of the customer journey on your website with relevant offers will help you capture leads at the time suited for them.

The offers that generate leads

Here’s the type of offers, in order of performance, that generate leads. It’s important to test different types of offers with your audience to determine what works for you.

Ebooks or Guides
Templates or Presentations
Research & Reports • Whitepapers
Kits / Multiple offers
Live Webinars
On-demand Videos
Blog including offers in sidebar
Blog posts with a CTA

Inbound marketing Croydon

As a full service digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer inbound marketing for accountants and local businesses. We also offer advice to help increase online presence with search engine optimisation (SEO) and targeted lead generation campaigns.

Marketing tips for Croydon businesses

12/27/202403/10/2021 by scmarketing

As we wait with fingers crossed for non-essential shops to open and sectors such as hair & beauty, hospitality and leisure to resume, we thought we’d offer our local Croydon businesses some marketing tips to help increase online presence.

Google My Business

First things first, is your company on Google My Business? If not, get one set up – it’s free to do!

If you do have a page already then make sure all details are up to date and add as many ways for people to get in touch with you as they can.

Add any special offers you have running. Remember to add imagery to your business page, this is a great resource for the hospitality sector to showcase popular dishes.

Remind customers to leave a review. Testimonials are a great way to encourage potential and returning customers.

How to set up Google My Business watch our video.

Start increasing the amount of social posts you share. This will remind people about your offering. Encourage people to follow you for updates on when you will be opening but make sure you always remind people that they can buy virtually. Or for hair & beauty, get your bookings up and running by spreading the word on social media.

For our wonderful Croydon hospitality businesses, we can’t wait for the restaurants, pubs and bars to breathe life into the town again. Remind Croydon folk what they’ve been missing with fantastic images of your amazing dishes.

Instagram and Facebook are great for foodie places. With Instagram it’s all about the look and there’s nothing more appealing than a plate of tasty food. Give details of anything new, your most popular dishes and your specials. Be descriptive within your post though.

Re-confirm your opening times and update your profile with any new details.

Run teaser campaigns with a countdown to when you will open (although we’re aware that it is all tentative dates right now).

Extend reach of your social post by adding hashtags. Here’s some general Croydon foodie hashtags you might want to consider as well as some standard Croydon ones you should always think about:

#Croydon #EastCroydonCool #Croydonbar #Croydonpub #Shoplocal #Supportlocal #Croydonrestaurants #Croydonfoodies #Croydonfood #Croydonrestaurantquarter #Instafood #lovefood #foodstagram #foodpic #foodie

Don’t forget to utilise the Story function on Instagram and Facebook. This is another way to be seen by your followers as it stands out at the top of the feed.

Encourage customers and prospects to share posts on social media.

When someone shares a post and tags you in, you can use the little arrow function just below the image. This allows you to share this to your stories and you can thank the customer for their visit.

Or a simple way to create a story is once you have added a post to your Instagram feed, just click the arrow below your post and you can share to you story.

Website updates

If you have a website, make sure that all your contact details, products and services are up to date. For hospitality get your menus and booking forms sorted. If your website still says Christmas 2020, get that removed, potential customers will think you are not opening.

If you have a blog, make sure you add content to that and do so regularly. This really helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) and your business being found in search engines. Fresh content is great for ongoing organic rankings.

We’ve recently created a blog on 8 ways to refresh your website, here’s an overview of what you’ll find on that. These are great SEO tactics that you can implement yourself.

Check your website navigation, it should be easy
Review content, contact details and check links aren’t broken
Add new imagery to refresh the look
Complete any missing meta descriptions
Update and add new calls to action
Get a free website review from us!

Email marketing

If you have an email distribution list, then now is a great time to start an email marketing campaign. Remember to be clear in your message, include a call to action and ensure you have your contact details visible.

Look at our checklist in our blog on what to check before you send your next email marketing campaign. You must also ensure you are GDPR compliant.

PPC Croydon

What is PPC and why use it? All you need is in that blog. But, in a nutshell, Pay Per Click or PPC is online paid advertising which gets its name from the fact that advertisers pay when someone clicks on an advert that they have running. It’s a great way of appearing at the top of search results pages to give your website a boost.

Digital marketing Croydon

We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon providing digital marketing for accountants and other local businesses. Download our eBook with additional marketing resources and ideas for getting your business seen online – The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Beginner’s Guide to SEO

12/22/202403/09/2021 by scmarketing

With over 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, and over 7 billion searches on Google a day, making sure your website is noticed is a must. Which is why it’s important to consider using a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign to improve your online presence and make your website visible.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimising your content to improve its ranking on search engines results pages (SERPs), increasing your website traffic.

Search engines use bots to ‘crawl’ pages to gather information and place these pages in an index, where various factors are analysed to determine where they rank on search engines.

As a business, it’s important that you have a clear outline of what your objectives are before implementing an SEO strategy. Having an idea of what you’re striving towards will help formulate an SEO plan and the steps you’ll take to reach those goals.

If you’re unsure as to what your SEO objectives may be, think about what your business objectives are and how implementing an SEO campaign can help you reach those objectives.

Target audience

Your target audience are the people looking for your business’s services online.

Understanding your target audience is crucial to SEO, as you’re essentially tailoring your website to reach this audience.

A great way to better understand your target audience is to create an online persona. Think of your ideal customer and create a character based on that person – this will become your online persona that helps you tailor your marketing material including website content to target that person.

A few tips to help you create this persona include reflecting on the person’s goals and the challenges they may face trying to achieve them. Think of how your products and services may be the solution for those obstacles. These steps work together to help form a personality that gives you a better understanding of how your audience thinks and how you can market to them.

Our blog has further information to help you create an online persona.

Keywords

Once you have your target audience agreed and in mind, you can start to think of content for your website which will include keywords which will form a vital part of your SEO strategy.

Keywords are words and phrases that search engines use to determine what is on your website. When used properly, keywords can help boost how your website ranks on search engines, driving more traffic to your website.

With keywords it’s all about being specific to your business. With 53% of website visitors coming from organic search, thinking about what your target audience would type in the search engine function is a great place to start to help you create a list of the keywords for your audience.

However, a word of caution, excessive keyword use on a webpage can have an adverse effect on your rankings – this is known as keyword stuffing. So, high quality content should be fresh, unique and relevant to your target audience. Use your researched keywords within your web page which will help search engines understand what is on that page. Using the relevant keywords will ensure that visitors are getting the content they came for and not leaving too soon.

There are a number of keyword research tools online to help you work out what your keywords are, such as the Wordstream and Moz keyword research tools, and our how to improve onsite SEO with keywords blog also provides further insight on keywords.

Meta-descriptions

Another great SEO tip is to improve the quality of your meta-descriptions. The meta-description is a small snippet of text that appears under your webpage on search engines, to act as a summary of what the audience will find on your page and help boost click through rate (CTR) on SERPs. On search engines such as Google, the meta-description appears as a short paragraph below the web page title.

Good meta-descriptions are up to 160 characters and include targeted keywords.

Image optimisation

The optimisation of images on a website is also important and can be done in different ways. One way you can do this is by ensuring that every image has alt text – a written version of what the image contains. This helps:

When the image fails to show up for any unknown reason, as the alt text will be used as a substitute,
Screen readers as they read out the alt text to help the visually impaired better understand the page
Allowing search engines to crawl and rank your website

You should always try to include targeted keywords in your alt text as they’re another indication to search engines that your page is relevant to that search.

Optimising your images also includes making sure that they’re not too large, as the larger an image is the longer it may take to load. This may slow the load speed of your website and increase the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors that visit a page and leave instead of visiting other pages too. Research carried out by Google has shown that 53% of mobile users leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, further proof that you need to manage image size and load speed.

Link building

Link building is the process of having internal and external links throughout your website content.

Internal links to other pages on your website help by:

Easing navigation around your website
Enabling search engines to crawl your website more easily
Guiding traffic to specific pages
Improving engagement and time spent on your website

While internal link building focuses on connecting pages on your website, external link building is all about your website URL being on other websites which then direct back to your website – also known as a referring domain.

Search engines look at the quality of the links and the quantity to help give you a domain authority score. The domain authority is a report of how relevant your website is in any specific area or market. Websites with a high domain authority score will be seen as a more trusted source and rank higher than those with lower scores, so it’s important to increase your score where possible.

The best way of getting your website on another domain is through online directories and Google My Business is perhaps the most important online directory for you to be on. For more details on Google My Business, visit our Setting up Google My Business blog.

We’ve also listed some alternative directories to help you grow your list of online directories to be featured on.

Web design

How your website is designed has a larger impact on your SEO than you may think. Search engine bots emulate the behaviour of visitors, so if they see that users are leaving your page quickly due to bad user experience, your page will get ranked down. The opposite also applies if visitors have a good user experience your website ranking will increase.

That’s why having a well-designed website can be a strong contributing factor in your SEO strategy. The best websites:

Are easy to navigate
Have fast load speed
Create brand consistency
Are responsive

A responsive website is a website that adjusts its appearance according to the device it’s being viewed on. Websites are not only being viewed on desktop devices, mobile devices account for half of website traffic. This makes it clear that having a responsive website is crucial, as you can’t guarantee what device your website is going to be viewed on. Also, responsive websites load much faster, this improves user experience and helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages – Google certainly favours websites with faster load times.

As a digital marketing agency, we offer web design services tailoring a website to the needs of the business.

Landing pages

An SEO landing page is a specific page on your website used to convert visitors into leads. Landing pages usually have the following:

Succinct content with keywords relevant to your target audience
Bold calls to action (CTA)
Forms – for lead generation
Thank you pages – to continue the conversation and market something else to your leads

Landing pages are a great way to gather data whilst also generating leads. When creating landing pages, it’s important to pay attention to how visitors interact with the web page. For example, if you see that your page has a lot of visits, but the conversions aren’t matching this could mean that the layout of your page needs to be reworked. We would always recommend creating a specific landing page if you progress with a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign.

SEO agency Croydon

There’s a lot to consider but we hope this guide has given you a good overview of the type of activity you can implement to kick start an SEO campaign for your business.

By incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy, you can enhance brand perception and online presence as it helps your business rank better in search engines. This can help generate a better rate of enquiries due to improved visibility.

If you feel you need support in getting your website optimised, then get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss your SEO needs further.

SEO mistakes to avoid

08/19/202203/02/2021 by scmarketing

Your website is the centre of your digital world and right now it is the go to place for most people searching for products and services as COVID-19 has ushered along digital transformation at some pace. So, being found online is crucial.

This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key element of your inbound marketing strategy. SEO will help generate website traffic through various tactics such as completing meta descriptions and H1 tags. As well as writing fresh and relevant content for your website in the form of a blog with researched keywords and good navigation including internal links. The list goes on (we’ve listed further resources at the end of the article for you to tap into to help with your SEO campaigns) however for the purpose of this blog we wanted to highlight what to avoid so that your website is not negatively impacted.

Link building – Quality vs Quality

Link building is an important part of an SEO strategy. External links helps indicate to search engines that your website should be visited as they indicate importance and relevance.

However, these links need to be relevant and from trustworthy sources to build trust with prospects. So, the better quality of link from a trusted website is more likely to indicate to a search engine that you are a good quality website to show up in search results.

So, the main thing to remember is that it is quality over quantity. Understand and know the referring domains.

More on how link building can improve optimisation.

Don’t do nothing

It’s worth remembering that a search engine should be held in high regard like any other visitor to your website. So, you need to indicate to all visitors that you are current, relevant, knowledgeable and most importantly that you are open for business.

If the content on your website is out of date this will impact on where you appear in search engine results pages. The more people that view your fresh and unique content will help indicate to search engines that you are a good quality source of information relevant to return in results pages.

Update your website frequently, add new blogs, images, links and downloads.

Don’t copy content

Don’t infringe copyright. Respect fellow businesses. You are all trying to do the best you can to attract more customers. With blogs being a key part of an SEO strategy, you will ideally be uploading at least 2-3 blogs a month and much more if you have the time. But your content needs to be unique. You can’t copy an article as you will infringe copyright laws and incur penalties. Not only that, a search engine will see that it is duplicate and plagiarised content and this will go against you with organic search results.

Ultimately you are the thought leader in your field so talk about what you know. Help solve your customers and prospects challenges by giving them tips and advice. All the things you know about. This then comes from the heart and makes your brand authentic and trustworthy. Plus, with good quality unique content, this will help you in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Poor meta descriptions

The meta descriptions are ways to assist search engines in understanding what the page is all about. They can also provide the valuable first few lines in a search result listing – that little paragraph under the title that you can see when your search is returned to you. By not completing this you are failing to let search engines and potential visitors understand what they can read about on that specific page. So, when you complete it on the backend remember to include keywords relating to what is on that page.

Keyword stuffing

So, you’ve established your list of relevant keywords – those phrases that you want to be found for in search engines results pages. You’ve created a content marketing schedule of future blogs and you start to upload them to your website with keywords included. What you must not do is stuff that content with keywords. It will be repetitive, lack thought and knowledge. The content will not engage, it will not be insightful and therefore will end up with your bounce rate increasing. And, most importantly, search engines don’t like it.

Search engines will then penalise you for creating an article that is not relevant to your business. Readers might also feel cheated into reading a pointless article and this will go against you with search engines and lost prospects!

So, be thoughtful with your content and remember quality over quantity. It’s more important to have a quality read with one keyword over anything else as people will return to read more, people will share your article which will encourage new website visitors.

Broken links

Broken links in your website can have a detrimental effect on your website’s performance. Keep tabs on this through tools such as Semrush which can alert you to broken links. Fix them as soon as you can to avoid confusing search engines and creating a poor customer experience.

Not set up for local SEO

Make sure that you are set up on Google My Business – you may as well tell the biggest search engine that you are open for business, your website, contact details, address latest updates and offers. This will point back to your website providing a quality link. Repeat this process with other directories and make sure y our contact details are consistent. Watch our video alternative directories to Google My Business to help with your SEO.

SEO Croydon

So, you’ve got the idea of what to avoid. SEO is about attracting leads which includes search engines. In a nutshell, it’s important to create quality, unique and relevant content for your website to help improve your online presence in organic search and help drive traffic to your website.

We can work with you on your digital marketing strategy including a mix of tactics such as, web design, SEO services, social media management, Pay Per Click (PPC), email marketing and CRM – read more about our marketing services.