Magnet symbolising inbound marketing

6 reasons why you should use inbound marketing

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.

Word dictionary search SEO

Quality website content that improves business

To help you make the most of your online presence, here we take a look at content and how it can improve your online visibility in search. This in turn will help your business grow as more and more potential clients find you and engage with you. Looking to ramp up your website design in London? Get in touch here for a Free Consultation.

Who are you targeting?

Before you embark on any fresh content for your website or if you’re updating your current website, make sure you have a target persona created. You need to understand your audience and their challenges, wants and needs before you can know how to write relevant content that will make them listen and engage with you. Take a look at our blog about setting up the identity of your target audience to help you create a persona for your business.

Content is and will always be king 

We’ve said it once and we’ll say it a thousand times, content is king. Relevant content for your target audience that is succinct, to the point and carries good call to actions will not only help with engagement and ease of navigation, it will also help you rise in the rankings in search. Why? With a well-tailored Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign you can help your business be seen by ensuring you are using the right keywords and phrases.

Read our blog on SEO to help you improve your content and impact on where you appear on a search engine results page (SERP). Remember that 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search* so it’s important to ensure you have great content that helps you move up the rankings and support your goal to appear on the first page of search.

Watch your tone

We would also advise that you draw up a list of how you would like your content to sound and come across to your audience. This means that you have consistency across your website as well as other marketing channels such as social media and email marketing. It also means that if you have a number of contributors they can write in a similar manner so you can maintain consistency of brand.

Book a Practice Growth Session

If you feel you need some support in getting your website Search Engine Optimised then get in touch with us today.

We also run Practice Growth Sessions which are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. You can book a session with us for £95.

Sources: *Search Engine Journal

SEO Agency

Why website optimisation is key to business growth

Why website optimisation is key to business growth

Your website in the online world is the equivalent to a business premises in the real world. What it looks like, where it is found, how up to date it is and how easy it is to navigate are all crucial factors to its success. A tailored Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign will help your business be seen.

What is SEO?

SEO is a collection of processes that make it better for a website to be found through the search engines. Most online searches do not start with the company name being typed into the search engine, it’s usually a few words relevant to what you’re looking for. So, if you’re an ‘accountancy’ practice in ‘Guildford’ then you would likely be interested in your company showing up on page one of a search relevant to these keywords.

Website optimisation involves looking at how your website is built, the keywords within content on your website as well as understanding your target audience and their search behaviour. Armed with this background you can build a strategy to improve your rankings in the organic (non-ads based, natural) search results.

Target audience

You’ll already have worked out your online target audience persona to create the content for your website. But if not, it’s not too late. Look at our blog to help you create a persona. Then think about what tweaks you may need to make to your website content or call to actions to make it engaging to this audience and worth their time visiting your website. Think quality over quantity when it comes to content on your website. This will stand you in good stead for optimising your website.

Outbound, internal inbound links

As part of the ranking process, search engines consider the quality of links, awarding scores based on the usefulness and relevance of those links. Internal links can ease navigation within the website itself, this includes making sure it is mobile friendly. While, incoming links to your website provides an indication of how useful your content is to others as people share posts on social media. Less links will have an impact upon where you return in a search result for a given term.

Meta descriptions

Think about when you’ve recently searched online for something. You see a return of results where companies have great headlines and a paragraph of well written copy that entices you to click the link instead of others. Behind the scenes you can create these paragraphs or meta descriptions on pages on your website – these are really good when it comes to blogs you may upload. Meta descriptions are a website’s way of telling Google and other search engines exactly what each of your pages are about, what to display and how to display it in the results.

Tip: Google My Business

Check out our blog on completing a Google My Business page. 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 this page – it’s Free to do!

In a nutshell the benefits of SEO are:

  • Enhanced brand perception and online presence through better ranking
  • Better rate of enquiries due to improved visibility
  • Prime and prominent visibility across Google Maps
  • Attraction of closely related audiences through better use of popular search terms

Book a Practice Growth Session

Smart Cow assists in website design in London and Surrey. If you feel you need some support in getting your website Search Engine Optimised, then get in touch with our web design team today to create you a bespoke website.

We also run Practice Growth Sessions which are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. You can book a session with us for £95.

Compass

Try local search instead of marketing to the world

As we’ve mentioned before, 97% of searches online are to find a local business*, it is therefore paramount that your business is visible online. But if you’re looking to grow your business by selling to potential customers in a specific area in the UK, how can you reach this target audience?

What areas are you looking to target?

Drill down to the areas you want to target to find new clients and use that for your future marketing campaigns.

Think about your content on your website, is it specific for the location you’re targeting? Have you mentioned that you are offering a particular service for people in a specific area anywhere on your website?

If you conduct a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, having an agreed area you are targeting, rather than a scatter gun approach, is key to the campaign’s success. You will need to have a dedicated landing page on your website with content specific for those areas.

Digital marketing campaign

To achieve the best results, it’s not just about the geographical area though. There’s a number of factors to build into your marketing plan which we’ve touched on in previous blogs including making sure you have created a list of keywords and phrases that you want to be found for. As well as ensuring you have a persona created for your target audience and drilled down to your brand identity so that your messages are consistent to your brand. 

Here’s our top 8 tips for building a great website as part of a well targeted digital marketing campaign.

Book a Practice Growth Session

If you’re looking to grow your business, investing in a well targeted digital marketing campaign is fundamental to growth. Our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. You can book a session with us for £95.

Sources: *SEOExpertBrad