Name: Smart Cow Marketing
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Complete our business growth scorecard for personalised results

08/19/202209/15/2021 by scmarketing

Are you looking to grow your business? We know that the top priority for marketing is generating leads using activity such as ads and audience targeting as one of the top ways to drive demand, but before you get to this stage of implementing or refreshing your marketing plan, perhaps it is time to review your future goals and get a plan in place that will attract your target audience.

Being focused with the tactics you use and being targeted to the audience you want to reach is key to business growth.

Attracting and retaining business

Attracting leads and retaining clients is imperative to your business growth plan. So, how do you obtain leads in the first instance?

Essentially there are 4 stages to win new clients. In a nutshell, here’s the path to gaining leads and ongoing client retention:

Attract people who are unaware of your business but have the attributes you suspect will be interested in your product or services.
Engage with these leads to see if they are a good prospect that you can help and do business with.
Convert these leads to clients.
Deliver a good service on an ongoing basis by providing regular insights that will help your clients. Not only is this about sharing regular emails, social media or blogs, it’s also about regular calls to impart knowledge and help your client overcome any business challenges.

Gaining a clearer understanding of where your business is right now in terms of lead generation will help you to create a tailored marketing plan that’s right for your business.

Complete our Business Growth Scorecard for your personalised results.

Book a free consultation

Once you’ve taken a moment to review the results of the scorecard you may be keen to understand how inbound marketing can help to grow your business. Get in touch as we can provide feedback and we can advise on the types of digital marketing tactics suited to your goals and business.

Our Free consultation should be between 15 and 30 minutes. The goal is to provide you with thoughts on how to start an effective marketing campaign and for us both to see if it would benefit your firm. No obligation at all, we just want the best for you.

Content – the foundation of search

08/19/202209/14/2021 by scmarketing

Just like a bricks and mortar shop you need to build a website on good foundations. There are numerous frameworks that allow website owners to maintain and add content. These are called Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress. The beauty of a CMS website is that it allows the user to easily update content especially blogs.

Hubspot says that: “Text will always be the foundation of search so making sure the text around your website’s assets is descriptive will help them rank well in search.”

In a nutshell, this means that the content you add to your website is a key element in generating leads via search engines. This is because if you have relevant content in relation to what someone types into search to find you’re making the search engines job in finding your business and returning you in the results page a lot easier. With this in mind, here’s some tips to consider to help improve the content on your website for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Great content

To get your message across to your target audience, and Google, keep content relevant and to the point. This is essential to help you be found in search engine results pages and it helps to position you as a thought leader in your field of expertise.

Potential clients and search engines need to see you as an expert. This is where a blog helps as you can add fresh content regularly. Your blog should have tips and advice that answer your target audience’s pain points and issues.

If you are writing the blog posts yourself and struggle to think of new content every week it’s worth noting that 51% of companies say that updating their old content has proven a great tactic for creating blogs (Source: SEMrush, 2019 via Hubspot).

There are more tips about writing engaging content in our recent blog which covers creating offers, developing case studies and topics of interest.

Keywords

When you embark on writing a blog or creating a new website it’s worth thinking about what you want to be found for in search. This will help define what is on your list of keywords or phrases to include in your content moving forward.

Working with a digital marketing agency or using a tool such as Semrush can help you identify the volume of searches associated with a particular keyword as well as its difficulty to get ranked for. This can help you hone the list of keywords further so that you have a good balance of words and phrases.

Understanding that 49% of users say they use Google to discover or find a new item or product, being found in search engine results pages should be a key part of your SEO strategy. (Source: Think with Google, 2019 via Hubspot )

A picture tells a great story

Don’t just think of content as the written word. Sometimes less on a webpage is more and breaking a page up with relevant images will help make the page easier to read, builds your brand and helps visitors get a feel for who you are.

Make sure your images are optimised for use on websites. You may need to resize them before you upload as large images can impact site speed. The first five seconds of page-load time is crucial as it can impact on conversion rates. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (Source: Portent, 2019). Also remember to complete your image alt tag on the backend. This is good for SEO.

Can website visitors easily move from webpage to webpage?

Make sure your website menu is easy to read and navigate. Ideally a webpage should be no more than 2 clicks – preferably 1 click – from the homepage.

Create bold and clear call to actions with directional text so visitors know what to do. Make it easy for them. Add a call to action near the top of a blog as well as the end to help with engagement. Phrases to encourage action include:

Download our ebook
Book a meeting
Contact us for more information, email us on…
Get involved by registering at….
If you want to attend the networking session, contact…
Free website review

Internal links throughout content especially in blogs also helps guide visitors back to services and products where you mention them on the site.

Digital marketing Croydon

We are a Croydon based digital marketing agency offering SEO services including blog writing, keyword research, local SEO, Google Ad campaigns to help improve your online presence and visibility online as your SEO experts.

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.

Smart Cow Marketing Email Marketing Agency in London

9 Tips for your next email marketing

08/19/202209/01/2021 by scmarketing

Email marketing is a great inbound marketing tactic to help generate leads. Each distribution is all about increasing your open rate and click through rate. This is helped by creating engaging and relevant content to your target audience. Here, we cover some of the things for you to do in the future to help improve engagement for your next email send-out.

1. What’s the story?

Ultimately you want people to read your email. So, make your subject line clear, short & snappy and something that will grab attention so that recipients are enticed to open it. This is the first thing that will be seen. Tell people what’s on offer in the email to give them a reason to open.

2. People like people

We all like to think we’re talking to someone we know. So, make sure that the email sender is someone from the team rather than an ‘admin’ email address.

3. On brand

Keep your design and messaging on brand. If you’re starting to regularly send out e.g., a round-up of news on a monthly basis then make sure that you create a template in keeping with your brand and stick to that format. People like familiarity and it helps to build trust.

4. Keep content relevant and original

Keep content relevant, original and regular. Once your recipient clicks on your email you need to get to the point quickly. What is the main message of this email?

Maybe it is an interesting business update with statistics. Perhaps you have an offer they should know about but make sure that you explain how this offer can truly help them to encourage click throughs.

Try and make sure that any email you distribute points back to a blog post on your website, offer or download. In fact, you can save time by re-purposing content based on the many blogs you have already created.

5. Calls to Action

Once you’ve decided on the theme of your email, you need to let the recipient know what to do next. This is where you need a bold call to action (CTA). Be clear on what you want the recipient to do, whether to ‘download now’ or ‘register today’ adding a link back to your website.

6. Links

Include links back to your website as well as all your social icons to encourage people to follow and share on social.

7. Be image led

You’ll often hear us talk about being image led which is really important for email marketing. It’s eye-catching, helps to break up text on the page allowing the recipient to easily read through the content.

8. Unsubscribe

You always need to give the option for a recipient to unsubscribe. Add a link to this at the end of your email, it’s a necessary requirement so don’t miss it off. Whilst sad when someone does unsubscribe, look at it positively as it means that your email list is much more targeted.

9. When to email

Once you’ve got the email set up, send it at an optimal time. According to Hubspot the highest click-to-open rates for an email are 10am midweek. We would suggest Tuesday and Thursday’s as a good option.

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is an effective way of working out the best day to send an email marketing campaign. Send out groups of emails on different days and compare performance, with the best performing group giving you an indication of when clients are willing to receive emails.

Email marketing agency Croydon

If you need a helping hand building an email marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign! As email marketing experts in Croydon, we can create your initial email template, write content and distribute to your database.

Other digital marketing tactics we offer include web design and development, SEO services, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.