Tools to help you grow your business

10/18/201908/27/2019 by scmarketing

Unlock business growth

Name: Smart Cow Marketing
Price range: $$$

As part of our Practice Growth Sessions, we work with clients to unlock the tools at their disposal to help them lay the groundwork to grow their business. If you’ve been following our series of blogs about these sessions, you’ll see that we’ve already covered quite a few pointers to help you build your digital marketing campaign. In this blog, we focus on brand collateral that you have. It’s about delving into the tools at your disposal to grow your business, so you have a clear picture of what gaps you may need to plug.

What do you have in place?

Here’s a checklist to help you discover what you already have:

What processes and guidelines do you have in place?
Do you have a company logo or brand guidelines?
What are your company values and vision?
What are the strengths of your team? What hidden strengths can they bring to the table?

Having this background to hand will help you form a well targeted marketing plan as messaging will be aligned to your values and visions. It will also shed light on whether you need to relook at your branding to ensure it has the right look and feel to reflect your vision, services and target audience.

Investing in marketing

Once you’ve made these notes, think about your annual turnover and your current and potential marketing investment. The reason being is that if you wish to grow your business you will need to commit to investing in marketing. This is generally 10% of a targeted revenue.

Book a Practice Growth Session

You can use our blog series to help formulate your marketing plan as we run through all aspects of what you should do to prep a digital marketing campaign from understanding who your target audience is to listing keywords you want to be found for. If you would like some help with this then we’re running Practice Growth Sessions where we can help navigate you through these steps and tailor your digital marketing campaign. As digital marketers in Croydon, we are more than happy to lend you a hand in helping you grow your business.

Our sessions are for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. It will arm you with the fundamental details for you to be able to implement a campaign to help you grow.

Keep an eye on our blog for more tips on how to grow your business.

Chess pieces relating to digital marketing strategy

Do you know who your competition is?

11/18/201908/09/2019 by scmarketing

With over 1.5 billion websites you need to make your business stand out from the crowd. But how can you do this if you don’t know who your competitors are and what they’re doing?

What do your competitors offer?

Before setting out on any marketing campaign, drawing up a list of key competitors and the services and products they offer is essential. This not only means you know what you’re up against, but it means you can make your offers stand out which in turn will help increase awareness and traffic to your website.

For example, if you think of yourself with a bricks and mortar premises, if you were opening a café you would want to know what competitors nearby are offering so you can introduce something new, or make the decision to offer a loyalty card or perhaps offer different food. Doing this research also helps you understand the type of traffic you might expect into your new shop.

So, back then to the digital world, it’s no different. Who you attract to your website is not just about putting money behind a Pay Per Click advertising campaign, it’s about understanding how you can attract customers to visit your site by clicking on that campaign in the first place. Understanding what your competitors are offering will help.

Although don’t just research your competition. You need to know your target audience, create an online persona, pinpoint your geographic areas and get a core list of keywords and phrases you want to be found for. It comes back to having brand consistency. We’ve talked about these other aspects in our blog and our overview will give you good insight into what goes in to planning your own digital marketing campaign.

Book a Practice Growth Session

If you want some help formulating your marketing campaign, our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in digital marketing to achieve their goals. It will arm you with the fundamental details for you to be able to implement a campaign to help you grow. You can book a session with us for £95.

Read more tips for building a great website as part of a well targeted digital marketing campaign.

Source: Internet Live Stats

Try local search instead of marketing to the world

12/08/202008/02/2019 by scmarketing

As we’ve mentioned before, 97% of searches online are to find a local business*, it is therefore paramount that your business is visible online. But if you’re looking to grow your business by selling to potential customers in a specific area in the UK, how can you reach this target audience?

What areas are you looking to target?

Drill down to the areas you want to target to find new clients and use that for your future marketing campaigns.

Think about your content on your website, is it specific for the location you’re targeting? Have you mentioned that you are offering a particular service for people in a specific area anywhere on your website?

If you conduct a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, having an agreed area you are targeting, rather than a scatter gun approach, is key to the campaign’s success. You will need to have a dedicated landing page on your website with content specific for those areas.

Digital marketing campaign

To achieve the best results, it’s not just about the geographical area though. There’s a number of factors to build into your marketing plan which we’ve touched on in previous blogs including making sure you have created a list of keywords and phrases that you want to be found for. As well as ensuring you have a persona created for your target audience and drilled down to your brand identity so that your messages are consistent to your brand.

Here’s our top 8 tips for building a great website as part of a well targeted digital marketing campaign.

Book a Practice Growth Session

If you’re looking to grow your business, investing in a well targeted digital marketing campaign is fundamental to growth. Our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. You can book a session with us for £95.

Sources: *SEOExpertBrad

Word in dictionary illustrating keywords

How to make your marketing work – be specific

10/25/201907/30/2019 by scmarketing

Whether you are a local business, national or gain most of your leads through referrals, you will still need an online presence as it is the automatic first stop in searching for a businesses credibility. With 97% of searches online to find a local business*, it is a matter of necessity that your business is visible and you’re marketing to the online audience.

Although it’s no good marketing to everyone – you need to have worked out who your target audience is to help you decide what key terms you would like to be found for?

If you’ve not already worked out your target audience, take a look at our blog on this topic which will give you tips on how to create this.

Keywords

Your website in the online world is the equivalent to a business premises in the real world. What it looks like where it is found, how up to date it is and how easy it is to navigate are all key factors for success. A tailored SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign will help your business be seen helping it move up the search engine results page. This is why keywords are so important and one of the first things to look at when you’re working out how you’re going to target that audience.

Think about what key term you would like to be found for? The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by a search engine meaning your website will make its way up the results pages.

If you’re looking for keywords for an accountancy practice, for example, then the following will be a good place to start:

Accounting
Audit and Accounting
Bookkeeping

Find keywords that work with your business goals and target the areas you’re looking to promote. But finding out which keywords have the most traffic or competition isn’t widely available, this is where working with a digital marketing agency can help.

Long tail Keywords

Think about being very specific on keywords, which are sometimes given the term ‘long tail keywords’. For example, continuing with the accountancy theme people may search for “Accountants in Croydon”, “Accountant for business start-up”, “Chartered accountant in Surrey,” or “Accountant for SME Tax Return”. It’s likely to be a lot easier to rank for this as there will be less competition, but, while you may see less traffic to your website as not many people will search such a specific phrase, it will help it to be targeted.

Headings

Before writing content for your pages, you should always have your keywords planned for what you’re writing about and make sure you add them to your blogs. You should also add them, where you can, in separate heading tags. This gives your keywords greater authority and tells the search engines that the topics you’re talking about are important and relevant to your business.

The h1 tag is also key and should not be missed on any page. Search engine spiders pay great attention to the words used in a h1 tag as it should contain information about the content of the page, just as the title will. Search engines check the keyword consistency between the header tag and the content on the rest of the page.

Don’t stuff keywords!

But a word of warning – when you add keywords to your website’s pages, they have to be relevant. Don’t add keywords for the sake of it as this will act against you when the search engines crawl your site which they recognise as ‘keyword stuffing’. We find that focusing your content around one or two keywords will help you build on results overtime.

Book a Practice Growth Session

If you you’re looking to grow your business, investing in a well targeted digital marketing campaign is fundamental to growth and we, an inbound marketing agency in London, can help you with that. Our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals.

You can book a session with us for £95 and we can help you work out the keywords and phrases for your business to be found.

Sources: *SEOExpertBrad