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How Video Can Elevate Your Digital Marketing Strategy

03/04/2024 by scmarketing

In an age where content is king and digital landscapes are evolving rapidly, small businesses need to harness the full spectrum of media available to them. Amongst the plethora of marketing tools, video emerges as a powerful frontrunner, offering dynamic possibilities for engagement and communication.

With the right approach, video can be a game-changer for your digital marketing strategy, propelling your business into the spotlight in ways other mediums may struggle. In this article, we will explore the myriad ways in which video can enrich your digital marketing efforts, resonate with your audience, and amplify your brand’s message.

The Impact of Video on Digital Marketing

The statistics surrounding video marketing speak for themselves. With over 80% of all internet traffic projected to be video, it’s not just prevalent; video is the preferred mode of digesting information for the majority of consumers. This signals a clear opportunity for businesses ready to tell their story through this engaging medium.

Enhancing Brand Visibility

Incorporating video content into your digital marketing strategy significantly boosts your visibility online. More than any other content type, videos have the propensity to capture attention on crowded social media feeds, offering visual stimulation that can halt even the most relentless scrollers in their tracks.

Search engines also love video content, which means including it in your strategy could improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Since Google owns YouTube, videos – especially those hosted on YouTube – are given favourable treatment in search rankings.

Building Deeper Connections

Video has the unparalleled ability to build connections and evoke emotions. Through storytelling, you can engage customers on a more personal level, humanising your brand. Whether it’s through behind-the-scenes insights, customer testimonials, or explainer videos, you provide additional layers of personality and authenticity which are invaluable for relationship building.

Supporting Compelling Storytelling

No medium tells a story quite like video. It combines visuals, sound, and messaging in a cohesive package to inform, entertain, and inspire action. For small businesses, explaining complex products or services becomes a narrative that can be easily consumed and understood, providing clarity and insight for your customers in a digestible format.

Driving Higher Engagement and Conversion

Video content also leads to higher engagement rates. Consumers are more likely to share videos they find entertaining or informative, expanding your reach organically. And when it comes to driving actions – whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or making a purchase – videos have been shown to increase conversions significantly. The reason is simple; viewers feel more confident in their decisions after watching a compelling video.

Measuring Success

Another benefit of using video in your digital marketing is its measurability. With advanced analytics, you can get insight into how viewers interact with your videos, such as how much of your video they watch, when they stop watching, and what actions they take afterwards. This data is invaluable for refining your marketing strategy and increasing ROI.

Implementing Video in Your Marketing Strategy

How, then, can your business get started with using video for digital marketing? The key is to begin with a clear plan and understanding of your objectives.

What do you want to achieve with your video content? Is it greater brand awareness, more inbound traffic, or higher conversion rates?

Once your objectives are set, focus on creating high-quality, original video content that aligns with your brand values, message, and aesthetic.

Here are some ideas to integrate video into your digital marketing strategy:

‘About Us’ Videos: Share your brand story and values.
Product Demos: Showcase the features and benefits of your offerings.
Customer Video Testimonials: Provide social proof and build trust.
How-To Guides: Educate your audience about your products, services and industry-related topics.
Live Streams: Engage in real-time and boost interaction.

Always remember, consistency is key. Regular social posting, email marketing and uploading blogs helps le to keep your audience engaged and look out for your content.

Video Marketing For Your Business

Video is an indispensable tool in a well-rounded digital marketing strategy for small businesses striving to carve out a space in today’s competitive online environment. It provides a dynamic platform to express creativity, forge relationships, and tell your brand’s story in an enriching and interactive way. When harnessed efficiently, video can result in significant improvements in brand recognition, consumer trust, and overall digital performance.

Small business owners should consider incorporating video into their marketing strategies to take advantage of its powerful influence on modern advertising and consumer habits. With professional and thoughtful content, your business can not only reinforce its market presence but also thrive in the digital realm.

Contact the team at Smart Cow about video marketing.

5 Ways for a Business to Improve Website Engagement

02/21/202402/01/2024 by scmarketing

In today’s digital age, websites have become one of the most important assets for businesses. However, having a website doesn’t guarantee success if the website doesn’t engage its visitors. Engagement is essential for any business website as it can lead to increased sales and conversions. Here, we discuss five ways for a business to improve their website’s engagement.

1. User-friendly Navigation

Navigation is an essential aspect of website engagement because it guides your visitors throughout your website. If your website has complicated navigation, visitors can easily get frustrated and leave. To create user-friendly navigation, you should use clear headings and labels that help visitors find what they’re looking for. You should also ensure your website’s main menu is easy to find, and all web pages are accessible from there.

2. Quality, Relevant Content

Content is king, and it plays a crucial role in visitor engagement. High-quality, relevant content is essential for attracting visitors to your website and keeping them engaged. When creating content, you should focus on providing valuable information that solves your visitors’ problems.

Think of what keywords and phrases people search for incorporate that into your content. This will help enhance search engine optimisation (SEO). Use pictures, videos, and infographics to keep visitors interested and enhance user experience – this also helps encourage shares on social media to widen your reach.

3. Clear Call-to-Action

A clear call-to-action (CTA) is essential for website engagement. A CTA directs visitors on what to do next and promotes conversions. A clear and concise CTA will help to increase the chances of visitors taking the desired action on your website. To create an effective CTA, use words that motivate visitors to take action.

4. Mobile-Responsive Design

With over 54% of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-responsive website is essential. Mobile-responsiveness means that your website adapts to the size of the screen on which it’s being viewed. A mobile-friendly website gives a smooth experience to visitors, no matter what device they use to access it. This means visitors are more likely to stay longer and engage with your website.

5. User Feedback

User feedback is an often-underestimated way to improve website engagement. It provides insight into what your users want and helps you to improve user experience. Gathering user feedback can be done through surveys, feedback forms, or online reviews. Implementing user feedback shows you value visitor opinions and encourages more engagement with your website.

Website Design For Increased Engagement

Improving website engagement is crucial for any business that wants to improve its digital presence. This article gives tips for businesses to create a website that attracts visitors and increases conversions. Remember, a website that is user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and provides high-quality content, a clear CTA, and implements user feedback is more likely to keep visitors engaged and increase your chances of business success.

Web Design Croydon

Contact our digital marketing agency in Croydon to chat about our web design services to help improve your online presence. Our web designers and developers can help create a new stunning website or help you refresh your current web design.

As a web design company, we have also created a website pricing calculator so you can get an immediate estimate.

Understanding SEO and Its Influence on Marketing

02/01/202402/01/2024 by scmarketing

Ensuring your website and content is as discoverable as possible — especially on Google — can provide both long-term and short-term traffic returns. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a critical component of modern day marketing strategies, and its importance continues to grow. Here, we take a closer look at how SEO strategies have evolved and why SEO is so important for companies today.

Evolution of SEO Strategies

In the past decade, search engine algorithms, such as Google, have changed dramatically. This has allowed for search optimisation opportunities that go beyond simply churning out basic posts with answers to frequently asked questions or keywords in them.

Here are some ways that SEO strategies have evolved:

Content Marketing: Content marketing is the process of creating content that is engaging, informative, and valuable to customers. Content should be high quality and should be tailored specifically to your target audience’s needs and interests. This can include blog posts, eBooks, videos, podcasts, webinars, case studies, infographics, etc. Quality content builds trust with customers which leads to better conversions and long-term relationship building.

Analytics Tracking: When it comes to tracking analytics for your website’s performance over time (e.g., page views over time), it’s important to understand what data you’re looking at and how it can help you make decisions about your website’s future direction.

There are many tools available to track website performance such as Google Analytics. These analytics tools allow you to track user engagement on your website (e.g., page views per visit) as well as the number of people visiting different pages within your site over time (e.g., top pages). This data can then be used to optimise your website for better performance in search engine rankings and conversions down the line.

Technical Optimisation: Technical optimisation refers to improving the speed/efficiency of your website so that it loads faster – this also helps improve user experience on your website which contributes positively towards SEO rankings. This is why it is so important to ensure that a website is optimised properly across different devices, browsers and platforms – if a website takes too long to load, users will leave.

Technical optimisation involves optimising code so that pages render quickly without any errors; compressing images; cleaning up HTML; using caching plugins; etc., all of which contribute towards improved user experience. This can lead to better engagement from web visitors which in turn can help improve organic search rankings.

The Importance of SEO for your Business

SEO has become an increasingly important part of modern day marketing strategies due its ability to drive potential customers from search engines like Google or Bing onto websites through organic ranking increases, all while providing valuable insights into customer behaviour once they arrive on one’s website through analytics tracking tools like Google Analytics!

Investing resources into understanding how these strategies work together can create more value for businesses who want their products or services discovered by more people online!

With an effective SEO strategy in place businesses can ensure their online presence is seen by more people than ever before! By understanding how SEO works alongside other digital marketing techniques businesses have greater control over their online visibility thus allowing them greater success in reaching their desired audiences!

The secret to content marketing

08/19/202212/02/2021 by scmarketing

For small business owners we know that you’re tight on time. There’s so much on your plate to running a successful business and so many roles you have, from sales, marketing, HR, recruitment and finance to name but a few. With this many hats you’re wearing, thinking about regular content marketing may be blue sky thinking, however the benefits of fresh and regular content are vital for helping your business be found in search engine results pages (SERPs).

So, with the little spare time that you have, how can you ensure you’re sharing regular content across multiple channels?

The secret is to utilise and repurpose the content that you have.

When you write a blog and upload it to your website, you’ll have spent time writing at least 500 words or so. Therefore, use it. Whilst a blog in itself can help with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), as search engines look for fresh content with relevant keywords on websites, there’s so much more you can do for SEO.

Follow this simple process to maximise one blog to its full potential:

Write social media posts. 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 than having to think up fresh new content.
Remember to add a link back to the full blog post and add an image (your own image or purchase a stock image – do not use google images as these carry copyright).
Get your employees and colleagues to also re-share what you post on social media to spread the news through your social network.
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.
If you have an Instagram or Facebook account, 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.
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.
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 a small snippet of the content from your blog in your email and add a ‘read more’ button.
If you want to build on your creative skills, why not create a short video with information taken from your blog? You can record a message simply on a mobile phone. Check out our blog with ideas for creating video for your business.

You can chat further with us about video creation if you want to know more about the scope of what you could do.

Digital marketing strategy

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 website. 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.

We provide digital marketing including SEO, Email Marketing, PPC campaigns and social media marketing.