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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.

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.

Why investment in organic search can help in a crisis period

06/21/202108/16/2020 by scmarketing

Increasing your online presence in organic search should be the top of any business inbound marketing strategy. If it wasn’t prior to 2020, then now more than ever it should be. As more people are relying on online search to shop, search for services and communicate, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is vital, especially to small businesses and start-ups, to help your website be seen in the noise.

With marketing budgets for print advertising taking a hit due to COVID, many marketers shifted to organic search.

The reason businesses opted for SEO is that it helps a business be seen online and helped maintain presence during the crisis. As many companies had to change business model, such as restaurants turning to takeaway services, if the online world wasn’t already important it became essential compared to a poster in an establishments window. The footfall had moved online therefore SEO provided the capability of helping businesses stand out.

Local search rankings

With three in five (59%) consumers saying they have used more local services during lockdown, the importance of visibility online is crucial. The Deloitte report goes on to say one in three (32%) used new brands, products or services that they hadn’t heard of during the lockdown.

Therefore, it’s clear that having presence online opens up new opportunities with prospects and increased brand awareness. By ensuring content on your website includes relevant local information ensures that you are targeted and can help you improve in local search engine rankings.

Organic search and your website

When people search Google, SEO or local search is a way for businesses being seen by local potential customers. This is where companies that invested in organic search at early lockdown reaped the benefits as an SEO strategy is long-term as you need to keep up refreshing your site with mew, original content and keywords to maintain and increase your rankings in search engine results.

This is because search engines look for triggers such as content on a website that is tailored for the area you’re targeting.

Backlinks from referring domains including your Google My Business listing and your social media networks, help to identify your business as quality and trustworthy for the search engines to return in results pages.

Search Engine Optimisation for increased online presence

The crisis period may have subsided for the moment as businesses are opening and services resuming for most sectors, but now is not the time to draw back from your online presence.

Continued investment in organic search is a cost-effective digital marketing tactic ideal for SME’s to continue to grow their online market share even in these unprecedented times.

Digital marketing and SEO company in Croydon

As an inbound marketing agency, we provide digital and inbound marketing for accountants and local businesses.

Marketing is all about building awareness of your products and services. With approximately 7 touch points needed for a sale or sign up to a service, it’s important to constantly get your message out there to increase brand awareness. That’s where digital marketing can help. From local SEO to blog page and social media engagement, there’s a mix of tactics to get your business out there – you just need to be targeted.

We work closely with local businesses in Croydon providing SEO services. Get in touch for a free consultation to see what digital marketing services are best for your business and how an SEO campaign could prove beneficial for your business.

question marks to create marketing persona

Tips to create an online persona for your business

03/30/2020 by scmarketing

With many firms currently remote working due to the coronavirus, we thought we’d revisit how to create an online persona for your business.

As you adjust to the current situation you may find you are reevaluating business strategy which includes your marketing strategy and inbound marketing campaigns. At the core of this plan should be an online persona for your business. This provides you or your business development and marketing team with a representation of who your target audience is. This is based on either data you have acquired or through creating a fictitious character of your ideal client.

If this is not something you’ve looked at doing before, now could be a good time to take stock and really delve into who your target audience is. This way, when you start to ramp up activity in a few months, you will be in a good position to hit the ground running.

Who is your audience?

If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting to reach. Start with questions such as:

Who does your company identify with? Be data driven. Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
Who are your long-standing clients?
Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
Are the business you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?

Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?

Creating your persona

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.

The beauty of this exercise in setting up a persona is that it’s something you can easily do yourself with a few simple steps. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with a colleague (via video conference!) can help you get the persona into shape. Questions to ask to 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 start to answer these, you can quickly begin to see a personality form in front of you.

Create a visual record 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 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. The reason being is that you want a coordinated approach to your sales and marketing so that you have consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.

Get a head start with your marketing persona

By taking time to understand the needs of your target audience you can begin to understand what channels would be best for a digital marketing campaign. Right now you could use your persona to help you refresh the content on your website or add a blog page and use the right tone of voice in your social media marketing.

By adding fresh content to your website you’re maintaining presence while keeping your customers informed. You’re also keeping your website optimised which assists with your search engine rankings.

With this persona to hand you will really understand the wants and needs of your target audience.

Keep an eye on our blog over the coming weeks for further digital marketing tips and advice from Smart Cow, an inbound marketing agency in London.