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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.

Is your marketing targeting your audience?

08/19/202208/13/2021 by scmarketing

Incorporating a tailored Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign into your digital marketing strategy will help your business be seen online.

SEO is a number of processes that help your website be found via search engines. This is when you appear in the Search Engine Results pages and your aim is to be in the first page.

Most online searches start with a few words relevant to what your prospect is looking for.

As part of your SEO strategy, have a think about who books your services and buys your products. If you don’t already know who your target audience is then you need to create a persona. This is a fictitious character based around the requirements of your target audience.

Once you understand the challenges and needs of your target audience then conduct an audit of your website with your persona in mind. You’ll soon see whether you need to change any content or add specific calls to action, a new contact form or a few new images that will appeal to your audience.

You don’t necessarily need a brand refresh it’s all about the initial details for landing pages such as your homepage or pages that are linked to your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign.

However, if you think a new web design could be in order then drop us a line to discuss as we can also provide a website audit for you.

Web design Croydon

We can analyse your website’s performance and develop a plan to boost your website’s potential with a tailored SEO campaign. We can also mix and match with other digital marketing such as social media, PPC, and email marketing.

We are a marketing agency based in Croydon, South London and work with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector.

Send us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826.

Quick tips on using social media effectively

08/19/202207/05/2021 by scmarketing

Social media can be a cost-effective way to reach your target audience. Once you have worked out the right social channels for reaching your audience or you’re in need of a refresher on why you’re using social media for business, here’s a few quick basic tips to connecting and engaging with your audience.

Build genuine connections

To build a loyal following you need to be genuine. Take the time to get to know your online audience and make sure to communicate information which is valuable to them. Remember to have genuine interactions with those following you and those that you want to reach.

Social media is about dialogue

Refrain from using your platform as a megaphone to shout about everything your business has to offer. While it can be a place for promotions, the most effective way to use social media is to be social. This means sharing interesting tips and advice that will help solve your target audience’s challenges. As well as sharing links to articles of interest or introducing interactive polls. Focus on engagement!

Add links

Aim to direct traffic to your website from your social media platforms to specific landing pages to help generate leads. This can be done by adding links into your social updates or adding inks in your Instagram profile bio or swipe up links on your stories. It’s a great way to promote new blogs, discounts, or other helpful resources.

Digital marketing Croydon

Check out our free Lead Generation guide for 30 tips on how to bring lead generation to the forefront of your marketing campaign. Download The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips here!

Get in touch with Smart Cow Digital Marketing today for an in depth talk about how your business can flourish using social media as part of your wider digital marketing strategy.

Why you should create an online persona

08/19/202204/23/2021 by scmarketing

We often talk about online personas to help you with your digital marketing strategy. An online persona is based around your target audience. This fictitious character acts as a reminder of who you are talking to when you are marketing. Therefore, it helps you define key messages that really resonate with your prospects and help you retain customers.

Understanding your target audience is essential to increase your opportunities to sell your products or services. From our experience, creating an online persona is vital to run a successful digital marketing campaign.

Who is your target audience?

If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting your products and services to reach. Ask yourself some questions such as:

Who does your company identify with? Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
Who are your long-standing customers?
Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
Are the businesses you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?
Are the individuals purchasing your products a particular age?
Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?

Steps to create an online persona

If you’re a small business, setting up a persona is something you can do yourself with a few simple steps. Equally, you can also work with your digital marketing agency to help create a character of your ideal customer. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with your agency or colleagues will get that character swiftly into shape.

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to as part of your lead generation strategy to gain qualified leads. It helps to personalise campaigns and be targeted.

You need to consider a number of areas such as the character’s goals or challenges. If you start with their job role and then imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Questions to ask to help you build your persona include:

What’s the person’s age?
Where do they live?
What’s their job role and sector they work in?
Imagine their goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion.
Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these.

Once you have this character created you should get a clearer idea of how your services or product can help them. Think about the solution you are offering them with your product or service and create a few buzzwords and one or two sentences around this solution you have to their problem or needs. This can then become one of your key messages in marketing.

Create a visual of your persona

We create a simple one slide PowerPoint visual once we have gathered all the facts about our persona.

Create bullet points that answer all your questions that offer a solution to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages within your content marketing for ongoing digital marketing campaigns.

Finalise the visual with a clear box out which defines:

How you help them
The overarching marketing message of how your business helps them
Your one-line elevator pitch

The reason we create this simple visual is that it’s then easy to share with sales and marketing colleagues; business development teams; design or digital marketing agencies. This helps you to maintain brand awareness and consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.

Digital marketing Croydon

So, with these few simple steps you can begin to get a feel for what makes your target audience tick, and what digital channels you would use to reap the best sales results and return on investment.

Get in touch with us at Smart Cow to discuss how a digital marketing campaign, tailored to your audience, can help your business.