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Your 5 minute daily social media routine

08/18/202201/28/2022 by scmarketing

For small business owners, running a business, managing finances, employees and new business takes time and a lot of effort. Marketing your products and services is just another key element to keep your brand front and centre of your clients and prospects and another activity that you need to juggle.

In this blog, we provide an overview of what you can do to conduct a mini audit of your social profile before taking up the challenge of conducting a 5-minute daily social media routine to help maintain and build on your brand awareness.

Social media audit

When was the last time you checked your social media profile on your business social platforms? Is it up to date? Is it clear what you do? Have you completed all you can – LinkedIn is great in highlighting how much of your profile is complete whether for your company or own personal profile.

Make sure your website address, email, telephone number visible and correct. On many social channels such as Facebook you can add in your opening times.

Perhaps it’s also time to refresh your company bio. Keep it simple and get across what you do and whether you have any key areas of specialism to highlight.

Which social media platforms are relevant to your business?

Take a moment to review your social channels. You may already be on Facebook and Instagram but what about a LinkedIn company profile? Including this activity in your social media strategy will help you concentrate your efforts moving forward.

Conduct a little research with your customers to find out what channels are most popular. Also take a look at your competitors and see which channels they use. Check when they last posted as that can indicate how popular that channel has been for them.

Always have in the back of your mind who your target audience is to help you work out what channels are best and to ensure content is relevant.

5 minute daily social media task

If you write blog posts for your website, then use this content in bite size chunks across a number of social posts. Re-purposing your content is a great time saver. But if you don’t have a bank of content already, here’s some ways to start posting regularly and encouraging engagement with your audience:

Create lists of favourite news feeds and share interesting articles for your audience. Once you have the list in place, each day dip into it and see if there is anything to share.
Check notifications, have you been mentioned, or any posts highlighted? This is another quick way to see if there is anything interesting to share. It’s also a time to make sure whether there are any comments you need to respond to or add your own thoughts on the topic so you can be seen as a thought leader.
Is it a national or international day of interest relevant to your business and your audience? Adding relevant hashtags will help extend reach.
#PhotoOfTheDay – does what it says on the tin really! Take a photo of one of your products and share.
Talk about a company milestone.
Give insight into how and why you started your business.
Do you have any new products or services to talk about?
Remind people about your core offering.
Run a special offer.

Social media marketing agency, Croydon

We’re a social media marketing agency and can help you formulate a social media campaign as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

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.

Why you should work on your content marketing strategy

05/06/202106/05/2020 by scmarketing

In the last couple of months, we’ve placed a focus on the importance of maintaining presence online during this time of uncertainty and change. The reason being is as we move into the easing of lockdown and ongoing gentle reintroduction of getting back to ‘normal’, firms that have maintained visibility from the start will have kept their existing clients informed, helped to build awareness with prospects and potentially gained warm leads.

But, if you haven’t been able to keep up your marketing activity whether social media marketing or regular blogs, distributing email marketing or running a google ads campaign, it’s not too late to start. But, now is the crucial time to work on your content marketing plan.

Ramp up marketing activity

With the easing of lockdown gradually taking place, more people are returning to work as non-essential shops will begin to open, sports will start to return (albeit behind closed doors), people are beginning to step out of hibernation so to speak. But throughout this time, potential customers have been looking and listening to what’s out there, ready to jump at opportunities that they have put on hold.

For those of you who have continued digital marketing for your business, carry on and ramp it up. Perhaps explore other avenues to extend reach further such as creating an ebook of your core products or services with tips and advice, or send out that email that you’ve put on hold and create that video to share on social media.

Content marketing tips with SEO at the core

If you fall into the camp of not being able to do any content marketing during this time, then pick up your digital marketing plan now, it’s not too late.

Here’s our top SEO tips on what you could do as part of your online marketing strategy to help give your visibility in search engine rankings a boost. But note this is a long-term strategy so once you start, you need to continue working on SEO to reap the benefits when we truly are back to ‘normal’.

1. Be targeted

Review your website, especially your homepage. Are you telling your target audience exactly what they want to hear about when they reach your website? A little market research can help you hone your messaging.

2. Be relevant

Refresh any out of date content throughout your website. In the back of your mind always think about what your target audience searches for online and make sure you include those keywords in content. But make sure it fits. Search engines know when you’ve just added words for the sake of it.

3. Fix broken links on your website

This can impact your search rankings so make sure all links are working. And, add more where necessary to help ease of navigation.

4. Calls to action

Add eye catching buttons with calls to action that will encourage engagement and ‘action’.

5. Now write some blogs!

Regularly uploading content relevant to your target audience is a great way to keep content on your website fresh and search engines interested! Search engines want to return the best results to someone searching, so it has to be relevant.

If you already have social channels but have stopped posting, now is the time to get back to it. Tell people you’ve just added a new blog to your website. Remind people of your core services and products. There’s a lot of activity out there so you need to be in the mix to start to be heard.

This is just a quick summary for those who need to pick up on marketing activity. If you start implementing this now, it will help place you in much better position than waiting until life is ‘back to normal’.

Free resources

We’re a digital marketing and content marketing agency in Croydon and we have the following resources you can draw on if you need any help.

Free website review

Find out how to improve your website’s performance.

Free digital marketing consultation

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.

8 tips on setting up and running social media

12/12/2019 by scmarketing

With over 3.2 billion people using social media platforms globally (Source: awario), it’s not difficult to understand why incorporating it into your digital marketing strategy is another great way of reaching prospects.

Here’s our top tips to remember when setting up and running a social media channel for your business.

One size does not fit all: Before you a start any social media for your business it’s worth remembering that not all platforms will be relevant to target the audience you want to reach. Conduct some research first and see what platforms your competitors are using. See how frequently they post and what they’re talking about.
Know your audience: As with any digital marketing tool you adopt, you must know your target audience before you can even think about what you should be posting about or who you should be engaging with.
Complete as much information as possible: Sounds obvious but ensuring you’ve populated as much as possible, helps build brand trust. So, check your bio and company details – do they need updating? What about your company details and services – are they all present and correct?
Be a thought leader: Provide tips, advice and interesting comments that your target audience will be interested to hear about and would want to share themselves. When you post a blog to your website, if you have social channels you have the opportunity to share this news to your social audience with a link back to your website. This extends reach further and helps your search ranking.
Quality not quantity: Make your content relevant and tailor it for each platform. And,nowadays the focus is on quality followers not quantity. Gone are the days when you would conduct a ‘follow / unfollow’ campaign.
Images: They say a picture is worth a thousand words so use images and video in your social media. Tweets with video attract 10x more engagement (Source: Business Twitter)
What’s the story? Instagram and Facebook both have a story function which scrolls across the top of the feed and so due to this prominent visibility helps with views and engagement. It’s a great way to post live from exhibitions or about things of interest to your business. Instagram Stories posted a 220% increase in year-on-year ad spend (Our Social Times, 2018 – Source: Hubspot) – Its popularity is certainly on the rise.
Get Networking: 40% of LinkedIn members visit the social network platform each day (Source: Omnicore Agency, 2018 via Hubspot). As a B2B channel, networking is at its heart. LinkedIn helps boost your businesses brand and profile, which in turns help the company earn trust.

Digital Marketing Resources:

Here’s more blogs to help you with your social media marketing.