Name: Smart Cow Marketing
Price range: $$$

What to consider when embarking on your social media strategy

Guide to LinkedIn for business

08/18/2020 by scmarketing

LinkedIn, the social media platform that allows you to build and engage your professional network, has launched a comprehensive guide to LinkedIn for businesses.

With over 30 million companies on LinkedIn and 675 million users, LinkedIn offers an influential social media platform for businesses to increase brand awareness with an interested audience.

If you are a business that regularly engages on LinkedIn or you are looking to grow your network and enhance your lead generation strategy, this guide will help you get the most from the social media channel.

The guide includes advice on how to tell your brand’s story on LinkedIn. It offers social media management tips, community management advice, information on paid social and ways on how you can drive business forward with your LinkedIn page.

Understand your audience

What’s key with using LinkedIn for your business, as with any marketing activity you embark on, it’s crucial that you know your target audience. This way you can create content that is relevant for them and ensures that your messaging will be of interest and ultimately lead to engagement.

When using LinkedIn, it’s important to remember that it is a business focussed channel and to keep content tailored with this in mind. Thinking about how your business services or products will help your target audience will really help engagement and generation of quality leads.

Now that many more people are working remotely and virtual events are the fashion for now, and probably for the foreseeable future, linking in with prospects is much more prevalent and somewhat expected.

But you also need to remember that your employees are also on LinkedIn so encouraging them to share and like company content will help extend your reach. As the LinkedIn guide says: ‘your employees are your greatest asset and typically have 10x the reach of your LinkedIn page.’

Keep content fresh

As we’ve mentioned before in our blog, by tailoring your content to your audience not only will this help position you as a thought leader in your field but also builds brand awareness and trust. But it’s not just about talking about your own products and services.

The LinkedIn guide reminds readers to ‘mix up content’ and encourages platform users to follow a ‘4-1-1 rule.’ If you share one piece of content about your company/brand, then share ‘an update from another source and four pieces of content by others.’ This could be an interesting article from a publication, or a new report just launched. All of which should be relevant to your target audience and be from a credible source that has similar values to your brand or is perhaps a client, supplier or partner.

Social media agency

If you’ve been embarking on more digital marketing, including social media for your business, but need some guidance or support, we’re a social media agency in Croydon working with local businesses including accounting firms. We work closely with companies on their online lead generation which includes social media strategies.

So, if you’re looking to improve your social media presence as part of your overall marketing strategy book a FREE consultation with us. Let’s see what marketing avenues and social networks are right for your business and which tactics can help you reach potential clients and achieve business growth. Set up a time for a chat and let’s see if there’s anything we can do to support you with a social media campaign or other digital marketing services.

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

8 tips on how to build an inbound marketing strategy

12/08/202001/21/2020 by scmarketing

At the core of your digital marketing campaign is the product or service that you want to sell or promote. Your offer should not only be something that your industry wants but also offering a point of difference. Truly understanding what you core offer is will help you to develop an inbound marketing strategy that will ‘wow’ your prospects.

Here’s some tips to help you structure and create your inbound digital marketing plan.

Understand your brand identity – it’s key for business growth: One way to start building and understanding your brand identity is by thinking about your business as a person. What characteristics does it have? Is this person professional, an expert in their field, knowledgeable, creative – you get the idea. Start to jot down your thoughts and you’ll start to build a profile for your business. This will need to be translated to your website design and blog posts.
Review the collateral you already have so you know your starting point: Here’s a few questions to consider – Do you have a company logo or brand guidelines? What are your company values and vision? What are the strengths of your team and what hidden strengths can they bring to the table? Having this background information to hand will help you form a well targeted marketing plan as messaging will be aligned to your values and visions.
Create a persona of your target audience: For small businesses especially focus on the target audience, no matter how micro that niche is, and you will fly. Try to grab the whole market and you will end up getting nothing or, at best, poor fitting clients. Your knowledge in your niche will grow and will position you as the expert and the go to person. Think about the goals or challenges of your target audience and create a persona. If you start with their job role, imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or a future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and start to note solutions for these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Then think about how your service or product can help them.
Research your competition: Before setting out on your inbound marketing campaign, draw up a list of key competitors and the services and products they offer. This can help you make your offers and services stand out.
Develop keywords and phrases for your business: 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 search engines and improve you search engine optimisation. This means your website will make its way up the organic results pages. 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.
Create a content plan with these overarching keywords at the core: Content marketing is a key focus for a successful inbound strategy. Create and align your content plan with any new product launches, service updates or industry report launches. You’ll then begin to get a picture of when to plot campaigns throughout the year and through what channels to be most effective. Develop specific content for your website to incorporate key phrases if you haven’t got relevant pages already. If you do, then they are likely to need updating. Also use backlinks to key pages on your website to help lower bounce rate.
Tell search engines you exist: One of the first things you need to do when you’ve created your website, or if you’re embarking on a digital marketing campaign to grow your business, is to make sure you’ve told search engines that you exist. The most popular way to do this is initially is by populating Google My Business with your company details. It’s FREE to do. The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact numbers and email addresses and a short paragraph about your company. But it also allows you to upload blog content, images and videos, therefore another place that you can be found online to help SEO and your company to rise in the search rankings.
Review results: With all the technology in the world at your fingertips, this alone is not going to be effective in getting a return on investment. Become data driven and review results of your campaigns will help you tailor, target and be relevant to the audience you want to reach. Through social media insights, PPC results or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, there’s tools at your fingertips to help you really tweak your campaign for the best results.

If you’re looking for more quality clients, become a lead generation magnet with a targeted inbound marketing strategy. Get in touch with us today or find out more in our handy resources. We are also a digital agency for accountants so check out our marketing services for accounting firms.