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How PPC can help business owners attract staff

08/19/202208/18/2021 by scmarketing

With job ads on the rise for some sectors by over 19% (according to Recruitment & Employment Confederation), how can a business owner boost the reach to cut through the noise and reach prospective applicants?

Conducting a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can help businesses create a truly targeted advert to promote the job role and convert to enquiries.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is online advertising which offers a very targeted way to reach your audience. It does what is says on the tin really. Advertisers pay when someone clicks on an advert that they have running.

The most common form of PPC service that advertisers use is paid search such as Google Adwords. This means that the ads will appear in relation to a relevant search typed into a search engine to find products or services.

So, if someone is looking for a job in a certain role and location, they will type that into Google and this is where the ads that are relevant will appear at the top of search.

While Google AdWords is the most popular, you can of course also run PPC campaigns on other search engines.

Be targeted

When you create your ad think of targeted keywords that you want to be found for in search and add these to your ads. Utilise the ‘ad strength’ guide when you create your ads to make sure that headlines and descriptions are well rated.

Create responsive search ads as well as text ads. This enables Google technology to create the best combination of title and text into the ad based on which is performing well.  

Add specific locations to your ads so that it targets people looking for jobs in that area.

Unlike a traditional advertising campaign, you can continually change online ads to reflect analysis. For instance, with Google Ads you can review regular recommendations for tailoring your ads even further. This means you can add or remove keywords or negative keywords. You can change the content of ads or snippets to help optimise performance. Insight also includes number of impressions, click through rate, conversions and cost per acquisition to measure return on investment.

Google AdWords certified 

Each year at Smart Cow Marketing we ensure that we are Google AdWords certified. We are now a Google Certified Partner and the only Google AdWords Partner in Croydon.

While gaining the AdWords certification qualification year on year highlights our in-depth knowledge and expertise on the fundamentals of setting up and managing successful AdWords campaigns, being a Partner shows that Google trusts us even more with the support we offer clients.

PPC agency Croydon

Whether you’re looking to recruit at your company or want to promote your services and products to your target audience, a Pay Per Click ads agency (PPC) can help your firm be found and to stand out in local search results.

With many digital marketing tactics whether social media, new website design, search engine optimisation (SEO) or PPC management, we can help guide your online marketing.

We can provide a tailored digital marketing strategy for your business needs. Book a free consultation.

Using social media for inbound marketing

Maintain presence through social media

03/30/202003/26/2020 by scmarketing

As we start to adjust to our new ‘normal’ working from home, having meetings via video and keeping in doors to stave off coronavirus, now is a good time to take stock of your current social channels for your business and how it fits into your overall marketing strategy and search engine results. Make the most of your channels and continue to maintain presence over the next few months.

In this blog, we’ll give you a few tips to help you with your social media presence as well as ideas for making your content more targeted.

Who are you marketing too?

It’s important to be targeted. You need to know and understand your audience. Now could be a good time to take a look at who your core customer is and really understand their needs as business owners. Once you’ve defined your audience, use this insight as the basis for creating a persona for them, read more about setting this up.

By having the details of the persona to hand when you write social media posts, or any content for that matter, this will help you provide answers to their questions and help them overcome their challenges. Ultimately you want to build trust with your audience.

Content marketing

Build a social media strategy and tailor your social media posts to the platform, its users and your target audience – your potential clients. A chatty tone for Facebook or Instagram will differ to the messages you want to get across on LinkedIn.

Whichever social network, remember to be a thought leader to your audience. You can do this by providing tips, advice and comments that your target audience will be interested to hear about and would want to share themselves.

Right now, writing blogs, email marketing, or creating ad campaigns about the government’s coronavirus advice for businesses and access to grants is a great way for accounting firms to keep in touch with their clients to help give some reassurance to large and small businesses alike at this unprecedented time.

It’s important to get the right tone of voice for the social platform you’re using. But, that’s the beauty of taking the time to research and create a persona. Now you know the right messages for your target audience.

Avoid sales on social

Ironically in order to drive sales you have to refrain from using textbook sales techniques on social media platforms. This is meant to be a social environment and people are generally not there to be sold to. Especially at this time, businesses are looking for advice, tips and how to guides to help them get through the challenging times.

Have a think about what tips you can offer your target audience and create a blog and a few image led social posts centred around your helpful tips.

Due to these unprecedented times, it’s less about lead generation and more about being helpful and supportive with your content marketing. Think of how you can support local businesses at this difficult time.

Review your social media channels

Social media management for your company is key, however it is important to note there’s clear answer as to what the right social media platform for your business is to reach out to your client base. It’s worth remembering that one size does not fit all. Take the time to review what platforms are right for your business, brand and the prospective clients you want to reach out to.

By maintaining presence through social media and new blogs on your website can help in the long term with your website ranking in search results.

For support on social media communications and other marketing services please schedule a free consultation with Smart Cow Marketing which is a social media agency in Croydon

Social media marketing resources:

9 tips to create email campaigns that convert

06/14/202103/04/2020 by scmarketing

With active email accounts expected to hit 5.6 billion (Source: Statista 2019 via Hubspot), email marketing offers a great inbound marketing option. Here’s our top tips for creating a successful email marketing campaign.

Good quality data

Make sure you have good quality data. Segment your list, clean it and don’t be upset when people unsubscribe. You don’t want to be sending someone emails that they feel are spam. You want to make every email count which means that those left on your subscriber list are relevant. Segmenting a list makes it targeted. Recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns (Source: MailChimp, 2017 via Hubspot)

Be compliant

You must always have an unsubscribe option in your email as well as a link to your privacy policy. 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 further. Remember, you need to be GDPR compliant, so transparency is important.

Make content snappy

Don’t forget the point of your email. With hundreds or emails received by people daily – what’s the purpose of yours and why should the recipient read it, how will you make yours an effective email? Knowing the key challenges of your target audience will not only help you create content that answers their questions but also will help you to personalise your email.

Call to action

Make it obvious what you want the recipient to do. Download a case study or report? Answer a short poll? Follow you on social media? Have a link to your blog posts? What the call to action is will vary from the types of email you send out. There are many actions that you can add but make it easy for your reader to know what to do.

Website landing page

Make sure links in your email work and are going to the correct page on your website to avoid bounces. You may need to create a specific landing page or update content to be relevant to your email campaign.

Images

Make sure your email template is easy to navigate but most of all you have enough pictures or video to make it eye-catching and attractive to look at.

Be mobile responsive

With 46% of emails opened on a mobile, it makes sense to ensure your emails are responsive for all devices.

AvB test

Always test the subject line of your email. Test some of the distribution list initially with a split of subject lines and then with the most successful open rates, send out the remainder using that title.

Analyse your results

Make a note of what works and what doesn’t. Campaign monitoring is important so avoid copying old formats which don’t get clicks, be innovative and creative.

We hope this provides you with the help you need to embark on your email marketing campaign. If you need support on this, then do contact us, a email marketing agency and digital marketing agency in London, and we can chat through your marketing requirements.

9 tips for optimising your website

02/26/202002/05/2020 by scmarketing

When businesses come to us to embark on an inbound marketing strategy, it’s usually about getting a business seen and getting leads. By optimising your website, you’re improving visibility of your services to your target audience which means a better rate of enquiries.

Website optimisation involves looking at how your website is built. This means the keywords within content as well as understanding your target audience and their search behaviour.

Armed with this background knowledge, you can build a strategy to improve your rankings in the organic (non-ads based, natural) search results.

Top tips for SEO

Here, we look at tips for optimising your website for inbound marketing.

Review your website: Is the content relevant to the audience you want to target? Note what amendments you may need to make to your website content or call to action buttons to help make it engaging to this audience. Conducting this initial research will stand you in good stead for website optimisation. Read on for more of our top tips for optimising your site.
Technical SEO: SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is not just about what visitors will read on the website, it’s also about being aware of the backend. Make sure simple actions are completed on each page of your website. This includes META tag description, ALT tags and H1 and H2 headings completed.
Keywords and phrases: What do you want to be found for? Work up a list to help get key phrases agreed. Review your competitors to see how they are performing and what marketing activity they are producing. All this will help you start to formulate a plan and strategy.
Time to set up a blog page: If there’s one change you make, we highly recommend that you add a blog or news page to your website. This helps keep content fresh which is something that search engines look for. But, make sure that what you post is relevant to your target audience. This not only positions you as a thought leader, but also will entice visitors to read the whole article, stay longer on the website and be a prospect to nurture with future communication.
Links: Internal links can ease navigation around the website. While incoming links to your website provide an indication of how useful your content is to others, less links will have an impact upon where you return in a search result for a given term.
What do you want your website visitors to do? Make sure your ‘Call to Actions’ are visible, look good and help ease of navigation.
White space: What does your website look like? Too cluttered and your visitors will not stay long. Why not try adding white space around text with smaller paragraphs and imagery – images are a must.
Images: A picture says a thousand words! You can also add the Alt tag on the backend which helps SEO. But it’s not just about pictures, incorporate video into your content marketing plan. Placed at the top of a page it can provide engaging content for your website. But also, more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day (Buffer via Wordstream)
Marketing automation: Is it time to consider looking at tools to make your business more efficient? Considering a chatbot on your website provides a friendly, warm welcome to your page, helps visitors navigate and pre-set answers can help free up your time.

Quick SEO tip

One of the first things to do when your website is live and to help it be seen in search is to fill out as much as you can on about your company on Google My Business. It’s FREE to set this up! Our blog on completing a Google My Business page gives you the lowdown on what to do.

If you need help with your inbound marketing strategy get in touch today.