Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing archive by Smart Cow Marketing, digital marketing agency offering the best lead generation services in and around Croydon.

Magnet symbolising inbound marketing

What is lead generation marketing?

by

A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. As a lead, you’d hear from a business or organisation with which you’ve already opened communication from, instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased your contact information.

The lead generation process starts with a visitor discovering your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, Ad or social media page.

That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) taking them through to a landing page on your website that’s designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.

What’s key to your lead generation marketing is the different channels that you can utilise to help start the lead generation process. Remember the information you provide is about providing your target audience – your ideal customers – with helpful tips, insight, a course or a template that will help with their business.  Here’s an overview of what inbound marketing includes to help with lead generation.

Content Marketing

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to offer visitors useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. At the bottom of a post, in the hero image, or even on the side panel. The more interested a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your CTA and move onto your landing page with specific instructions to ‘download an ebook’; ‘book a course’; ‘sign up to a newsletter’.

Blog

The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Zoom video conferencing, then you can write a blog post to accompany that with background as to the benefits and step by step points.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call to-action in your caption.

Email marketing

Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy.

Ads and Remarketing

The sole purpose of a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad such as Google Adwords is to get people to take action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is clear. Read more about the benefits of PPC.

Creating a marketing plan can help you run a coordinated campaign. Our Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing has loads more details for effective lead generation, download our free ebook.

Read more about inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Ebooks

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Magnet symbolising inbound marketing

6 reasons why you should use inbound marketing

by

To know why you should use inbound marketing, firstly let’s just touch on what inbound marketing means. It’s about content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, Pay Per Click advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s the digital marketing tactics we employ to help attract prospects to our services and products.

Here’s an overview of the reasons why you should be using inbound marketing for your business.

  1. Building brand awareness and trust: Marketing is all about building awareness of your products and services. There’s approximately 7 touch points needed for there to be an inbound sale or a clients success on boarding, therefore for you to get your message out there you need to continuously be talking about it in a variety of ways. That’s where digital marketing fits in. From blog page to social media platforms or email marketing, there’s a plethora of ways to get your business out there – you just need to be targeted.
  2. Reach the potential customers that you want to: Once you know the audience you want to reach you can get really targeted with your inbound digital marketing campaigns. Create a persona of the audience you want to reach. Think of their goals, challenges and how your service and product can help them solve their issues which will improve customer acquisition.
  3. Engage with your audience through social media marketing: With the raft of social media platforms and content being consumed in our daily lives, it’s worth remembering that this is yet another avenue for a company to reach potential new business. Importantly, it puts you in direct contact with your audience, allows you to engage directly which helps build awareness and trust. A successful digital marketing campaign will engage with people searching for your products or services. 
  4. Developing insightful content to build your brand as a thought leader: A blog or news pages on a website are not only key for keeping content fresh on a website which in turn helps SEO, but also helps build you as a thought leader in your industry. Being an authority in your field of business, offering relevant information to website visitors, helps build domain authority in search engines. It also helps you rise in the organic search rankings.
  5. Create additional touch points for your business to be seen: SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, these are all digital marketing tools to take advantage of which increases your chances of being seen by your target audiences. Creating a bespoke campaign using relevant channels for the messages you want to get out there will create an effective outcome through engagement, awareness, interest. It’s key to have these touch points to move your prospect through the lead generation funnel.
  6. Be focussed: 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years (Source: Venture Harbour, 2017 via Hubspot). Marketing automation frees up time by automating repetitive tasks, it also allows tailored automated responses, tracking of prospects activity on a website as well as chat bot automation.

If you’re looking for more quality clients, become a lead generation magnet with a targeted inbound marketing strategy. Get in touch with us at Smart Cow an inbound marketing agency in London, or see below and find out more in our handy resources and other marketing services from web design to video marketing.   

Digital marketing resources:

Here’s some further information on inbound marketing for your business.

Social Media

8 tips on setting up and running social media

by

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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)
  7. 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.
  8. 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.

PPC campaign mobile

Tips for setting up and running PPC campaigns

by

Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns create adverts online so when your business is not being viewed in the natural results, you can give it a little nudge with a paid campaign.

There’s a number of ways to conduct a PPC campaign and these include Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and social media boosts and ads. Here’s our tips for setting up and running a PPC campaign.

Google AdWords

While appearing on the first page in an organic search is the goal, if your website is new you need to give it a bit of time before your keywords and phrases start to take effect. So, this is where a paid campaign can give your website a boost in search as a paid for ad will pop up towards the top of the first page.

Understanding a Google AdWords campaign

  1. Set up the overarching Campaign: AdWords Accounts and PPC advertising are structured starting with a Campaign level, you can set up a number of Campaigns within this. Really think about your target audience for this campaign and the keyword you want to be known for.
  2. Create a subset of AdGroups: Each Campaign has AdGroups, so you can focus on targeting your audience with key messages. For example, you may want to focus on promoting CRM software so that would form one AdGroup within the Campaign. If you decide that you want to promote another service or product, you can create another AdGroup at any point Ensure each landing page is relevant in for said product of service.
  3. Focussed messaging for Ads: Each AdGroup has a number of Ads so you can have a range of messages per AdGroup.
  4. Maintain: Monitor and analyse the results and ‘throttle up’ or ‘down’ individual ads depending on how well they are preforming and how each PPC ad ranks.
  5. Be specific: Be specific with your keywords or negative keywords, and the geographic area you’re targeting.

Social Media Marketing PPC

You can also get targeted on social media with a PPC campaign.You need to carefully consider which channel is best for your business. If you’ve not already set up your channels, take a look at how we help our customers with their social media.

But firstly, let us explain the difference between ‘ads’ and ‘boosts’.  

Social media channels offer an effective form of advertising, but you need to select what’s right for your business and the purpose.

  1. Boost: While allowing you to use a relatively small budget to reach a wider audience, it’s more about awareness and ‘likes’ increasing visibility for a short time through sharing your post more widely.
  2. Ads: By setting up an ad you’re enticing people to take action by clicking through to a website or urging you to call. The goal is to get people to engage and encourage them to do this via your website.

Remember who your target audience is when you tailor your messaging. Most PPC campaigns have a limited number of words you can use, so be clear and concise. Campaigns that are very specific to the service, product and price are much more successful than a generic advert. In order to use PPC marketing effectively consult our SEO company in Croydon.

Digital marketing resources:

Read some of our PPC related blogs for further information.

Facebook Linkedin Instagram Youtube Envelope X-twitter