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5 tips for an inbound marketing strategy

08/19/202209/07/2021 by scmarketing

With the acceleration of digital transformation and so much information available online, you need to stand out from the crowd.

Your website is key to your online strategy. What’s important is generating traffic and enticing leads to your website. Then, once you have web visitors it’s about finding ways to be that thought leader in your field of expertise so that you are the business that prospects want to talk to and therefore return to your website again and again. This is vital to lead nurturing.

Here’s our tips for what you need to consider as part of your digital marketing strategy:

1. Online Persona

Make sure you know who your target audience is. Create a persona that is very specific to them. This is a fictitious character that enables you to understand their challenges, goals and how your products and services can help them. You can then review your current website content and marketing collateral to check that your offering is appealing and relevant to your prospects and clients.

2. Tone of voice

Ensure that you have a consistent tone of voice and key messages, so that you are really targeting the audience you want to reach. This will also help inform your keywords that you want to be found for in search engine results pages (SERPs).

3. Content Marketing

Your tone of voice and online persona will then help you create relevant content for ongoing marketing. It means your social media posts and blogs through to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns will be incredibly targeted to your audience.

When you write content, think about the challenges your target audience faces and provide a solution. Be a thought leader rather than a salesperson with the information you share.

4. Calls to action

Once you have visitors to your website, remember to encourage action. Include bold calls-to-action to remind people to sign up to your newsletter, download a brochure or take advantage of a free consultation. This helps you gather contact details for your database for future email communication.

5. Customer Relationship Management

Generating website traffic is all about gaining quality leads. With options for website visitors to sign up to receive regular news or to get in touch about your services, you have now gained quality leads. So, ensuring that you engage with your leads and clients is essential and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can help with this. 

Instead of working in silos, a good CRM system can enable teams to work together effectively on leads and clients. Integration with marketing automation ensures that clients and leads get the best level of service.

Marketing Croydon

Are you looking to grow your business? We specialise in helping firms attract more leads, gain more conversions and improve return on investment (ROI). 

It’s important to remember that a sales journey is very rarely a one-stop shop. You customers will have visited your competition, researched your services and looked at online reviews long before they start speaking to you.

Talk to us about developing a tailored inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Lead Generation: Engaging calls-to-action

08/19/202203/22/2021 by scmarketing

Lead generation is key for marketing campaigns. This is the second blog in our mini series which looks at the four key mechanics for inbound lead generation to help gather quality leads.

We’ve already discussed creating compelling offers, in this blog we look at the next step of creating engaging calls-to-action.

Calls-to-action

We often talk about making sure that calls-to-action are bold and stand out. The reason being is that they need to catch people’s attention to complete the action.

Positioning of the call to action is important. Have this prominent on the web page, usually towards the top of it (or above the fold as you may have heard it referred as).

Be concise and to the point with your call-to-action such as ‘Download our eBook’. Ultimately you want people to click the button so if you have a cryptic message then you will lower the chances and perhaps might lose the lead.

Make sure that you have contrasting colours for your call-to-action. This will really help stand out.

Landing page

We’ve talked about landing pages before and this is certainly a scenario where a specific landing page is needed.

You’ve created your compelling offer so you now want people to take advantage of that offer. With a bold call to action you must lead your prospect to a dedicated landing page that will have all the relevant information about the offer as you want them to get the offer by parting with their email address and therefore you have converted them to a lead. If you make it too complicated for them to understand the next step then they will leave your website.

With a range of products or services why not think about targeted offers for each? Whether an eBook, discount, guide, whitepaper. This will also create a point of differentiation.

Remember to include a ‘Thank you’ pop-up once someone has taken action. This also provides an opportunity for a further call to action such as ‘book a consultation’.

Creating a successful lead generation campaign

There are four key mechanics for inbound lead generation which include:

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.

Inbound methodology for qualified leads

Keep an eye on our blog for the next two chapters in our lead generation mini-series. These will help you form your inbound marketing strategy and digital marketing plan to help grow your business.

As an inbound marketing agency we can help formulate your inbound strategies using a range of marketing services including refreshed web design, search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Digital marketing Croydon, London.

8 website updates for accounting firms

05/01/2020 by scmarketing

With all the change and uncertainty right now, as an accountancy practice your main concern is servicing your existing clients offering the most-timely advice as and when updates are announced by government that could assist your client base.

Importantly it’s also the key time to maintain your presence online to continue building that groundwork that is the necessity of any lead generation strategy. In time, when circumstances change, and businesses start to grow, it’s the firms and suppliers that have provided helpful advice that will be remembered and be seen as the go to company for new business.

So, what can you as an accounting firm do to optimise your website to help maintain your position in search rankings? Here’s our top website tips to help you kick start a great Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign for your business to get your website seen.

1. Is your website easy to navigate?

Check that your accounting services are clearly visible in the menu so that there is an easy path for visitors who reach your homepage. Show your key services on your homepage and a call to action to read more, download information or get in touch.

2. Do you have enough internal links on your website?

This is another navigation tactic. Make sure that you are making it even easier for visitors to find information on your website. Embed links into keyword phrases.

3. Complete your H1, H2 headers

This helps search engines work out the theme of the page to return the right answers to the searcher.

4. Complete your meta descriptions

This neat little paragraph is what you read when you search online. Keep to under 160 characters and make sure it’s relevant to the content on that web page.

5. Be image-led on your website

Help create stand-out with good photography and video content. But, make sure images are the right size and you have completed the alt tag on the backend as this will help site speed and prevent visitors leaving your site.

6. Create a content plan

A solid basis for any website optimisation strategy is to develop a content marketing plan. This should include a regular schedule of information such as blogs that can be drafted and uploaded onto your website. Search engines love fresh content. It helps position you as an authority in your sector.

However, ensure that you are using good keywords within your content. By this, we mean phrases that you want to be found for when people search for you. If you include these important phrases in content, in particular headings, then it helps you to be found when people search. Such as ‘Annual Accounts for construction firms’ or ‘Tax returns for a sole trader’. Think of who your target audience is and write content for them.

This has only touched the surface, so if you want to delve a little deeper into SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy then do get in touch for a free consultation via Zoom.

7. Calls to action

Calls to action (CTA) should form a key part of your content marketing strategy. These are best placed above the fold, the space before the visitor has to scroll down. Make sure you have a bold CTA so that it stands out and use design to make it clear that it’s a clickable link.  

8. Get a free website review

With so many factors affecting whether and where your website will be found on google search, complete our form to get a free website audit. This free review provided by Smart Cow Marketing will provide you with some interesting results to help with your inbound marketing.

Navigating your digital marketing journey

If you want the task of fixing these issues taken off your hands, then we’d be happy to assist you further with your digital marketing. Just get in touch about what your digital marketing requirements for your accountancy practice.

Smart Cow marketing specialises in digital marketing for accountants helping firms improve online visibility to attract potential clients through online marketing.

Digital marketing resources

Wooden dice with email symbol for digital marketing communications

6 Email marketing tips to grow your business

12/08/202010/19/2019 by scmarketing

How email marketing can grow your business

You may think that incorporating email distribution into your digital marketing plan as a bit old hat, but let us paint a picture on this cost effective marketing service for you. Think how you feel when you receive a letter at your home. You check your post every day and open letters addressed personally to you. You follow a similar process with your emails. Your phone is always at arm’s reach and when you get that notification you look to see what you’ve received – if anything to get rid of those red bubbles! But in doing so, you’ve clocked the brand – that’s helping with awareness. It’s then your choice as to whether you open and read, file or delete. But ultimately some impression on you will be made. But what makes an email campaign effective that can help to grow your business?

Newsletter sign up

First and foremost, you need a list of email addresses to distribute your content to. If you’ve already got your database sorted and it’s GDPR compliant then you’re all set.

But, if you do not have a list, one of the best ways is to make sure you have a newsletter pop up box on your website for visitors to sign-up to receive emails. But be very clear about what you’re capturing someone’s details for, as you need to be GDPR compliant (read about the ICO regulations).

You can also work with digital marketing agencies to help you with creating the pop-up box on your website or helping you to purchase a list. Create a CRM system too this will help you engage effectively with customers knowing their needs and and how bet to contact them.

Get to the point

So, with your GDPR compliant list you’re set to send an email. But wait, what are you going to tell your potential customers? Your content needs to be fresh, engaging and most of all worthy of someone opening the email and reading it. Really think about the news you are sending and question – “is it relevant to my target audience?”

The subject line is crucial. It needs to entice, engage, have meaning and stand out. Phrases such as “3 days left to save on your personal tax accounting fees” – it provides a hook to open the email.

Also, steer clear of keywords that will be caught by spam filters such as ‘free’ or ‘buy’.

Set the tone

By now you should have set up your target persona (check out creating an online persona to help with this). Therefore you’ll know the keywords and phrases you should be using, the tone should be a reflection on your accountancy firm.

Call to action

So, you’ve sent an email, so what. Make sure that the recipient knows what to do next. Make it clear and obvious what the ‘Call to Action’ is so they benefit from your email. Include trackable links to give you a picture of what’s popular and where leads have come from, e.g. links to blog posts, web pages, social media platforms.

Unsubscribe

You must always have an unsubscribe option in your email as well as a link to your privacy policy. While it’s sad that people may unsubscribe, see this as a positive. If people are not interested, then by making it easy to unsubscribe, you’ve cleared someone from your list that wasn’t going to engage anymore than that. Don’t alienate people by making it difficult, if they are not interested in what you have to say then that is their loss. Just focus on those who are interested. Remember, you need to be GDPR compliant, so transparency is important.

Images

Make sure your email template is easy to navigate but most of all you have enough pictures to make it interesting to look at.

Book a Practice Growth Session

To make a leading marketing campaign it makes sense to contact the experts; we are a email marketing agency in London. Get in touch to receive support in getting an email marketing campaign set up to help with your inbound marketing, then get in touch with us today.

We have expertise offering digital and email marketing for accountants and offer Practice Growth Sessions which are tailored for firms 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.