With over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, Instagram is one of the leading social media platforms out there. It’s a platform adopted by many users for sharing high-quality, eye-catching photos and graphics with friends and potential customers. Many marketers believe Instagram is heavily biased towards the B2C market, but many B2B businesses also use the platform. With continuous growth in popularity and improvement in features, you should seriously consider using Instagram for your business if you’re not doing so already.
Instagram launched in 2010 as a photo-sharing app and was acquired by Facebook in 2012, now Meta platforms. It remains a trusted marketing tool, and the platform has since evolved into a photo and video content sharing app. You can also use the app for advertising through the Facebook Ads management platform.
Key areas on Instagram include:
Instagram has around 600 million daily users worldwide, and 50% of the UK population have an Instagram account. The highest percentage (30%) of these users fall in the 25-34 year age range, often regarded as one of the best consumers to target as they tend to have more disposable income. Hence, the platform provides a massive potential reach for businesses.
It’s not just the potential reach and the age of users that makes Instagram perfect for business; it’s the platform's capabilities. Below, we highlight some of the benefits of using Instagram to reach new customers.
Instagram is a fantastic word of mouth platform for businesses. A well-rounded Instagram profile indicates legitimacy, enhancing consumer trust. User generated content (UGC) is important for businesses. By sharing imagery from your users, you build a community and trust. Engaging with comments and feedback from individuals also reflects your business values, so you must keep everything professional yet personal.
Instagram makes sharing content easy. Users can tag brands in their own post, to maximise reach. Encouraging people to share your content through entertaining and educational posts increases your chances of gaining visibility.
Instagram doesn’t allow links within the caption of any post. However, for B2C customers, you can integrate Instagram shopping into your posts using the online shopping option. It provides users with a click-through option to buy products.
In 2021 Instagram started allowing links in Stories for every user, and it's now possible with one click to direct your audience to the exact page you want them to land on. Before this feature, you needed a verified account – a bonus if you are a business trying to sell or promote their products on Instagram – or over 10,000 users before you could add links to Stories.
Your competitors are already likely to be on Instagram, and using the platform to monitor their strategies provides insights you their engagement tactics, helping you build on your current organic social media strategy to benefit your target audience.
Hashtags are very popular on Instagram, and users can follow hashtags that they want to see more content about. One of the best competitor analysis approaches you can use when starting on Instagram is looking at your competition’s hashtag usage and seeing how popular those hashtags are.
Your Instagram profile showcases your company’s culture and values, which serves as a magnet for potential employees. Highlighting your team and workplace environment allows you to attract new talent and customers to your business.
Influencer marketing is very popular on Instagram, brands across all industries make use of influencers in order to enhance their visibilities. Companies like IMB, Microsoft and Amercian Express all have successfully engaged influencers for B2B campaigns, proving that influencer marketing isn’t just B2C.
The Instagram Business tool allows you to have complete transparency over how well your posts are performing, which will help you understand what works best for your business and what resonates with your audiences. Key metrics to consider include engagement rates, traffic to your website, and sales or Conversation rates.
As well as using Instagram for organic, consider Instagram ads to enhance your profile and conversions. Using
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to benefit from highly targeted campaigns and develop creative, eye-catching adverts. You also have complete control over the budget and duration of your adverts, and it offers in-depth performance insights so you can track what works and what doesn’t for your brand.
Develop a great Instagram strategy, post regularly and make use of the features the platform features , so your business can thrive on Instagram.
If you need assistance developing your Instagram presence or understand more about the platform’s features and what it can offer your business, we can help. As a social media agency, we have plenty of experience building client engagement through Instagram and other social networks.
Enquire today, and we can get your business in front of the right audience on Instagram in no time.
Since its beginnings in 2003, LinkedIn has become a popular business growth tool with over 830 million users worldwide, and it is an excellent communication tool for businesses to reach their customers. Whatever your industry, LinkedIn can become a vital part of your long-term digital marketing strategy, whether your marketing objective is brand awareness, driving traffic or recruitment.
In a nutshell, yes. LinkedIn can be used for any business with clear goals in mind.
Business to Business (B2B) marketing campaigns can benefit significantly from using LinkedIn. It can be a place to discuss industry updates and share news that others may be interested in. In addition, you can connect with professionals who may be interested in your products and services or with other businesses in the same industry. With clever targeting, messaging and making the right connections, it’s also a valuable sales platform for B2B companies when used organically and via paid advertising.
Business to Consumer (B2C) users should approach LinkedIn differently. You can use LinkedIn to target potential customers based on their interests, especially business owners or professionals who would more likely be on LinkedIn. Also, B2C companies may benefit more from a LinkedIn brand awareness campaign. You can showcase and highlight the people behind the brand name and network with businesses like yours to create collaborations that your customers will enjoy. You can also engage influencers who can help get your products in front of the right audience.
As part of a well-thought-out social media marketing campaign, LinkedIn can help inform customers throughout their journey and enable other aspects of your marketing campaign to perform well.
You can set up a LinkedIn business page in a few simple steps.
If you have a personal profile, navigate to “work” at the top and choose the “Create a Company Page” button. If you don’t have a personal profile, you will need to create one first.
Next, choose the right page for your business based on its size or type. You can choose from
A showcase page is a page to present a separate division of a company, and an educational establishment would cover a school or university, for example.
Next, fill out your details, add your logo and tagline and create the page. Once it's created, you can optimise it by completing your company description, website URL, industry, cover photo and a custom button. Remember to add hashtags related to your page and keywords into your description, as LinkedIn pages are indexed by Google, which can also help your company's SEO efforts.
You should also make sure you add your company branding to your page. For example, use your profile picture to display your logo and cover image for further branding, so your page is easily recognised.
Finally, share your company page using your personal profile; encourage your connections to follow the page and share it. You should also ask your employees to update their profiles to add the company page as part of their work history.
It’s also important to share a link to your new profile directly from your website; you should do this for all social pages, including Facebook and Instagram.
Once you have a functioning LinkedIn company page, you can use it to help hit your business's goals.
Your overall marketing strategy should include a LinkedIn campaign. To put this in place, you should answer questions such as:
The answers to these questions will help you develop your strategy. Pick one or two goals to get started. We suggest creating a calendar to build your posting schedule; this could be an Outlook Calendar or a simple spreadsheet template. There are plenty of free templates available to download online.
There are four common goals that we’ve found companies want to work towards on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn provides more benefits due to its background as a place for professionals to hang out. These include recruitment, networking, becoming a thought leader and advertising.
If you want to attract new talent to your business, LinkedIn is a fantastic resource. When you post jobs through your business account, individuals using the LinkedIn jobs section can easily click through to your profile.
If you’re posting regular updates showcasing what it's like to work for your company, people interested in working for you can get a feel for your company culture, and you’re more likely to attract the right people to your business.
While the jobs platform has an additional cost attached to it, you can use your company page and even your personal page to list vacancies, and by using hashtags and your connections, you can get the advert in front of the right people.
The more engaged your company is on LinkedIn, the more likely it will be followed by people interested in your industry and those who want to work for your business. Also, if your employees are happy to share your business' content, ask them to! A Management Today study found that candidates are 29% more likely to consider a job if they have a LinkedIn connection who works for, or works with, the company.
LinkedIn makes it easy to network with people in your industry; there are countless industry groups where you can find people with similar interests. You can use the hashtag features to find posts about specific topics, and if you know of other businesses in your industry that you’d like to collaborate with, LinkedIn makes it easy to connect with them.
Networking tends to be linked to personal profiles rather than the business profiles on the platform, but there’s no reason you can’t use your business profile to find networking opportunities. First, check out who likes your page and then look at their profile; chances are, if they are interested in your company, they’re likely to be linked to your industry, so connect with them.
Then finally, once you have a network of people linked to your industry, start interacting. The more you comment on posts, engage with polls and share the content of the people and companies you connect to, the more you put yourself out there as someone to talk to within the industry.
Suppose you have a website where you share a lot of information about your industry and products. In that case, this content is perfect for repurposing as LinkedIn articles to establish your business as a go-to source of knowledge. According to LinkedIn, 45% of the readers of articles on the platform are CEOs, VPs or have positions in the higher levels of businesses, so you can get your content seen by some key decision-makers.
You can also use the platform’s “skills and endorsements” section to cement your expertise in specific areas and ask your colleagues and connections to endorse you where possible. Again, while this is connected to your personal profile, if you want to be seen as a thought leader for your brand and industry, you’ll want your profile to look its best.
Stay ahead of the game in your industry, keep on top of relevant updates and movements in your sector and be sure to offer comments about these. Use the articles space to write long-form opinion pieces about any changes, whether good or bad and offer tips on how others can navigate these updates.
Most social networks come with the ability to target people through advertising, and LinkedIn is no different.
There are a variety of options for advertising on LinkedIn, from sponsored text ads that appear on people’s feeds to sponsored messages that go straight to individuals' inboxes, photo carousel ads, dynamic ads and more.
The advertising platform within LinkedIn offers heavily targeted marketing and an excellent engagement rate with the right ad and audience. As mentioned, many of the users on LinkedIn are in senior positions within their company and have buying power. So, using specifically targeted advertisements can quickly get your business seen by the right people.
Once you’ve created your LinkedIn marketing strategy and are ready to start posting to the platform, you can create a content calendar for the posts you’d like to publish. The types of posts you publish could include:
Your calendar should reflect everything you want to communicate through LinkedIn and how often you would like to do so. When you’re ready to post to the platform, head to the home page and create a post using the “start a post” box.
You can add a related photo or video to make your post more engaging and shareable. You should also add related hashtags, making your post more discoverable by the relevant people. You can create a job post or a thought leadership article from here, depending on your goals and communications highlighted in your plan.
The work on LinkedIn doesn’t stop after you have posted. It’s essential to analyse your performance against your initial goals to help improve your posts and strategy moving forward. You can look at engagement, including post likes and comments, follower improvements, brand tags, job applications and website traffic.
LinkedIn provides an internal analytics tool to show you some data, including visitors, updates, followers, competitors, leads and employee advocacy.
You should look back at your initial goals to see if you have met these, creating benchmarks based on your performance for the future to ensure continual improvement. If you haven’t hit your goals, it’s important to find out why. For example, is your messaging reaching the right people, or are you posting at the right time of day to suit your audience? You can test different types of content to ensure you’re posting the best content to engage with your target audience.
If all this sounds a bit too much, and you feel like you need a little help with getting your business profile out there, we can help. As a LinkedIn marketing agency, we’ve helped many businesses with their LinkedIn advertising.
Our social media marketing team are on hand to post regularly to your business profile or offer insightful articles to your connections.
Get in touch with our team on 01524 580777 or send us an enquiry today.
Businesses are presenting information to online audiences in various ways. Google continuously promotes user-friendly mediums by allowing content to appear in search results in multiple formats. Video content is increasingly popular on websites and across all marketing channels. More and more companies are taking advantage of video, and it is fast becoming a fundamental ingredient for a successful digital marketing strategy.
Videos can be used to share information about brands, products, services, reviews, how-to guides, and so much more. The use of visual media is increasing, and when considering the future of digital marketing, there is no doubt it will be front and centre. It is estimated that 92.6% of internet users worldwide consume video content each week.
When it comes to developing website content to be more engaging and informative, videos should be at the top of the list for several reasons:
Videos increase the time visitors spend on your website. If a person lands on a webpage but leaves quickly, it can be seen as a quick exit, suggesting poor content to search engines. The more time a visitor spends on a webpage signals to search engines that the page contains engaging and helpful content. This helps with your website’s SEO optimisation and the chance of converting that visitor into a customer or client.
Embedding the video on your page keeps the content highly shareable. Users can access and share the original video when content is uploaded to a video-sharing website such as YouTube or Vimeo. Using a third-party platform means the video isn’t hosted on the website and prevents the page from being resource-heavy and slowing it down. Slow loading pages will be frustrating to a visitor and reduce engagement.
Also, as well as videos being able to be shared across social media platforms, Google can also index the video in search results from the third-party hosting platform as well as the webpage it is hosted on within your website. Hence, the video can be indexed twice.
Research has shown that users are two times as likely to purchase a product after viewing content such as a video review or demonstration compared to text or images alone.
Many B2B companies use videos to generate website traffic as part of a B2B marketing strategy. Selling a service can be harder than selling a product online. Video format provides you with the opportunity to share more information about a service and who you are, all in a succinct and digestible way compared to text. When it comes to building trust, a video can be a powerful tool.
Mobile devices offer convenience and information at your fingertips. It's no surprise that mobile use has been on the up for years with no signs of slowing down. A mobile phone screen simply can’t show the same amount of text or images that a desktop can. This is why responsive web design has developed in the way that it has, providing different but equivalent user experiences across device types. Videos bridge this gap by offering the same high-quality experience regardless of device.
The starting point of any video is content creation. Develop an understanding of what you want the video to convey. Think about the tone, length and film quality. Consider using a professional videographer to make this first step easier with professional results that match your brand. Videos are a great ranking factor for SEO, consider creating relevant videos to enhance key product pages or services pages for a boost to your organic reach. Or, to help boost conversion rates and trust, consider using video for testimonials, case studies or on your key business information pages. Whatever you decide, make sure you have a clear aim and stick with it.
You have many options for video hosting. Vimeo and YouTube are two very popular free platforms. Facebook is also a free video hosting platform however it does compress files. Be prepared to see the video quality reduce if you choose to upload your video to your Facebook Business page. The second option is to upload the file to your website but be warned videos can increase the loading speed of your website.
Both YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook provide embed codes that can be directly added to website pages to ‘pull’ the video into the page.
Use Schema markup to clearly mark the video properties to Google and other search engines. VideoObject Schema includes details such as the content or embed URL and can be used with HowTo Schema. Marking up the videos increases the chance of them being indexed by search engines.
There is a reason that digital marketing agencies like ourselves will encourage the use of videos. Not only do marketers see the value in video, but Google also recognises this valuable media format, allowing it to be found in Google search results, Google Images, video search results, and Discover. They've even launched a Video Indexing feature in Google Search Console, allowing website owners to track the coverage website videos receive in search (whether it appears in Google search or not).
This new feature also provides information about why a video might not be indexable. There are several reasons why Google cannot index a video; the file could be too large or too small, a thumbnail may be missing, or the URL could be invalid. All information can be found within the report, allowing you to identify and amend the issue easily.
In addition, if a video file is too large, not only will this cause indexing issues, but it could negatively impact core web vitals, an important SEO ranking factor. For more information about video indexing, please see the video below from Google.
For additional information or help with your video marketing strategy, the team here at SQ Digital can help you out. Please request your FREE SEO audit today to discover what we could do for your website's SEO. Or, get in touch, and we will be more than happy to discuss our services with you.
When starting a digital marketing strategy, building and maintaining a strong online presence is vital to your campaign's success, but targeting the right people with the right content is just as important. One of the best ways to reach your target audience is an effective email marketing campaign.
Here, we're providing our expertise and exploring what makes a successful email marketing campaign. We look into what goes into an effective campaign, targeting your audience, and how to know whether your campaign was successful.
Email marketing is the process of sending mass emails to a list of contacts who have already given consent to receive the emails from your business. People can provide consent through your website by, for example, signing up for a newsletter or placing an order online, but they can also give consent in person when shopping in your store.
A typical email can include a promotional offer, a new service or updates about your business. Email marketing is similar to a newsletter, but as well as using it to inform your contacts of news, its focus is to generate leads and sell your products and services.
You have more than likely received a marketing email in the past. However, we have come a long way since mass and spam emails, moving towards a more personalised, segmented email marketing method to ensure you are targeting the right people. Think of the "Don't abandon your basket" or "Thanks for your purchase, make another and receive 10% off" emails. When you use these emails correctly, they are incredibly effective.
There are different types of emails to think about when setting up your campaigns; here are some examples:
If you want to create your email marketing campaign, the first step is to establish your goals. What is the purpose of your campaign? Do you wish to increase brand awareness? Increase website traffic? Drive sales? It's essential to have a clear target in mind to help create your content much more straightforward.
Once you understand the purpose of your campaign, you can decide what kind of person would benefit from receiving the email. For example, if you sell wholesale products to other businesses, then create a separate list of B2B contacts. Additionally, if you plan on sending an email regarding booking a table in time for Christmas, a B2C list would be more beneficial.
When you begin to write the content of your email, make sure you write an attention-grabbing Subject Line and Preview Text. The Subject Line is essentially the email's headline and needs to summarise what the email contains in around ten words or less. The Preview Text shouldn't be any longer than forty characters and is the second selling point of your email. It should explain why the recipient should open the email.
Keep the content in the body of the email brief, and remember that you're promoting your products and services and not writing a newsletter. Make the offer or product the focal point of the content. Write a couple of engaging sentences explaining the purpose of the email, and then let your images, links, and CTAs (call to action) do the talking.
You must choose the right images for your email. Your email needs to look good, so avoid empty white spaces, and choose bright, eye-catching imagery in line with your brand and the purpose of the email. For example, if the campaign promotes a sale, think bold red banners, large "SALE" text, and percentage off stickers.
Remember, the purpose of an effective email marketing campaign is to drive traffic to your website. Whether you want your recipients to view your latest product launch, revisit their basket or do something else, include the appropriate links. Similarly, your email is not complete without a CTA; there must be a clear point to your email.
Putting all this together may seem complicated, but it can be simple if you use email marketing software such as Mail Chimp or Klaviyo. These platforms help you create templates to standardise your emails and ensure your branding is clear.
One of the most important factors to consider when setting up an email marketing campaign is how often you should send emails to each contact. If you send the same list of people a welcome email, new product or service launch, seasonal sales, and drip campaigns, you're going to overload them and more than likely cause them to unsubscribe.
Separating your contacts into various lists is a must to target the right people for the email and ensure you're not sending a specific person too many. In addition, space out each campaign.
Ideally, you should only send one email per week. For example, if a client had an appointment with you, send a "Leave a Review" email 24 afterwards. If this results in no engagement, consider adding them to your Drip Campaign list the following week or month.
You can use several different metrics to decide whether your email campaign is successful. Your email marketing software should provide you with the data to help you with this. Consider the below:
Klaviyo, for example, provides you with a long list of metrics for you to delve into and explore. Take time to familiarise yourself with these. Then, once you have sent your email out, leave it for a week and come back to check the open rate click-through rate, and then a month to look into conversion rates and the campaign ROI. This information will help you see which campaigns are successful and to assist in planning similar emails in the future.
If email marketing sounds like something your business would benefit from, but it is more than you can handle on your own, then the team here at SQ Digital can help you out. Please don't hesitate to contact us.
We have over 20 years of experience helping companies build a successful SME marketing strategy, and we can help you with yours. We offer a wide range of services, including PPC, SEO, and content marketing, which we can integrate alongside email marketing to create a well-rounded digital marketing strategy.
As the digital world evolves, many small businesses find digital marketing intimidating and often don't know where to start. Digital marketing covers various services, including SEO, content marketing, PPC, social media and more - all of which, when used in conjunction, can form a solid digital marketing campaign.
One of the most important aspects of any digital marketing campaign is Search Engine Optimisation (“SEO”). SEO refers to the practice of increasing the visibility of your website or landing pages on search engines (such as Google or Bing) and driving organic traffic to your site through a variety of methods.
As an expert SEO agency, we understand the importance of SEO for small businesses and how it can transform a digital marketing strategy, bringing in new, relevant customers and enhancing overall brand awareness. This article discusses the top reasons why SEO is essential for small businesses and why your business should implement SEO into a digital marketing strategy.
There’s possibly nothing more important for a website than user experience. Having a poorly structured website is similar to a messy high street shop where it is hard to see where to go and find what you are looking for. With a well thought out website layout and structure and a good page experience, you can expect your online customers to hang around and browse your website.
As a technical SEO agency, we are constantly improving the technical aspects of small business websites. Staying on top of technical SEO is vital for a small business as a good page experience can bring customers back to a site and increase brand loyalty.
Fixing technical SEO issues such as 404 error pages and broken internal links and images is essential in enhancing the user experience. It can be very frustrating for users if they come across these and will most likely leave the site prematurely.
Technical SEO also focuses on issues such as page loading speed and optimising this to reduce user frustration. Page loading speed is a significant contributor to conversion rates. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will abandon the site. Also, 52% of online shoppers have stated that a quick page loading is essential to their site loyalty, making them more likely to buy.
SEO can boost conversion rates by driving targeted traffic to the site. We use SEO to target potential customers at each sale/enquiry funnel stage. By regularly publishing SEO optimised blog content, we can help small businesses attract new customers who are still researching products, services and suppliers. You should produce content that provides relevant information to the reader and potential customers.
You can also optimise product content to target potential customers who know what they want. The content can attract users to your specific service or product. It also means that you are more likely to receive conversions in the form of enquiries or purchases as the initial user intent is to use what you have to offer.
SEO focuses on improving search engine ranking positions using keywords and optimisation. Search engine rankings can vastly improve with a successful SEO campaign, with keywords ranking on the first page of search engine results.
If your site ranks on the first page of results, it increases the amount of trust that potential customers have in your brand. High rankings from reputable search engines such as Google show that they have confidence in your brand, which increases user trust as the search engines have a lot of influence on customers.
Also, if your search engine rankings are higher, it helps increase brand awareness as a more significant number of people will see your brand name when searching. Higher rankings also mean that your brand is easier to find when searching for the key terms, which ultimately means that your site is visible to more customers, hence increasing traffic.
Using SEO techniques can also boost the physical visibility of small businesses with a brick-and-mortar store. When typing a query into a search engine, the searcher's location is also considered.
Search results can vary when searching from different places. When you search locally, maps and addresses of local businesses are typically displayed on the right-hand side of the page. This is one of the first features that users see when searching. A Google My Business account can be created for small businesses and optimised to appear in local results and maps. As an address is listed, it can also drive people into the physical store rather than just increasing online traffic.
Search engine optimisation can be a very powerful tool, and with the right optimisations, your website can start to rise in rankings and surpass competitors that do not utilise SEO. As a small business, it can feel overwhelming when up against larger competitors in the same industry. However, many more prominent companies online are still not using SEO services, which can put your smaller business at an advantage.
Using SEO competitor research, we can identify gaps between small businesses and competitors, whether that be through keywords or content. We can then develop a plan to level the playing field and ensure that smaller firms have the same advantages as larger competitors.
One of the primary practices in SEO is to carry out keyword research, which forms the basis for any optimisation campaigns. We use keyword research to highlight the specific terms that users search for to find relevant products and services. We also consider the search volume of keywords to ensure we optimise sites for frequently searched terms, thus increasing the chance of being seen.
As sites are optimised for key terms, it ensures that only potential customers who are actively looking for a product or service relating to the business are being directed to the site. This eliminates traffic from those looking for unrelated services or products and ensures that the traffic to the site is relevant and can lead to conversions.
With online advertising, the results can often only last as long as the investment. However, with SEO, the results are long-lasting, as long as you continue to use On-site SEO techniques to build up a solid optimisation of your site.
Once higher ranking positions have been achieved, you can use SEO to maintain these positions. Over time, with increased brand awareness, customers will become familiar with your brand and re-use services if satisfied.
Although results can be long-lasting, it’s essential to stay on top of SEO as your competitors will not stand still and will constantly update their site. Furthermore, the search landscape is constantly changing and should be considered in optimisations.
As an award-winning digital marketing agency, we have over 20 years of experience providing SEO services for small businesses. With a successful SEO campaign, a small business can expect an increase in targeted traffic and conversions, along with further digital and physical visibility.
To find out more information on how SQ Digital can help your small business grow with SEO or other digital marketing services, get in touch with us today.
Over the last two decades, especially in the previous few years, online marketing is becoming crucial to help your business succeed.
However, knowing how to start your digital marketing campaign can seem daunting, let alone keep up with the latest trends and best practices. Nowadays, it can even depend on your industry to know what you should do and what you should avoid; it can get complicated!
Here, we'll help you understand how to start your digital marketing campaign as a B2B (business-to-business) operator.
If you want to learn about what you can do ahead of launching your campaign to improve the chance of success, we recommend you read this guide from the beginning. However, if you want to skip straight to the “How to” guide, use the links below.
The ecommerce (commercial transactions conducted electronically) market is something we can all relate to since most of us have bought something online at some point. The buyer journey usually begins with research, often on a search engine such as Google or Bing.
With the B2C buying journey, the purchase decision is often driven by emotion, and the sales process can be quick and impulsive. The consumer will search for product information, which tends to be followed by market research looking for the best deal. This stage of the buyers’ journey can be influenced by adverts such as social media retargeting or Google retargeting banners on other websites.
For B2B, sales tend to be influenced by budgets, ROI (return on investment), and a logical mindset - the sales process can take months, and we will see how this impacts your strategy later.
On different platforms such as social media, you can advertise products to a given demographic and potentially prompt sales from people who initially had no intent to buy online. This tactic usually only works for B2C and is not viable for B2B.
You can begin to understand what may and may not work for a B2B marketing campaign by understanding more about your target market. Before you can do that, you should also understand your company’s purpose. Sharing your purpose with your target audience will lay the foundations for true success in marketing.
Building a brand is just as important as selling a product or service. Customers will return time and time again to a brand they can trust.
Before launching your marketing campaign, it’s essential to establish your brand values and proposition. Determine what products and services you provide and what the benefits are. Invest time to understand your customers' expectations, values, and what they deem important.
Trying to market everything you do to a relevant target audience can be time-consuming, costly and lead to thinning resources. The best marketing strategies will line up with a company's goals. For example, suppose the company wants to increase revenue for a new product. In that case, the marketing should primarily focus on the product launch and make it visible across all marketing channels and platforms. The focus of resources and effort will see more success than a broad but thin campaign across all products and services.
KPIs (key performance indicators) break down and clarify company goals into bite-size and digestible objectives to help teams understand their targets and how they fit into the broader company objectives.
For instance, if the aim is to increase revenue by attracting new customers, the KPI target for the Sales team could be to increase the number of calls with new customers. On the other hand, a Marketing team may have a KPI of growing customer sales leads through the website. The KPI could be website metrics such as new vs returning visitors, number of contact form submissions, email subscriptions, and so on.
KPI’s should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound) and be able to identify real improvements. The same is true for a marketing strategy – define the KPI’s, so success is measurable.
You know your target market is a business that needs the products or services you offer, but knowing who you are trying to attract specifically is even more insightful. A few factors you should consider are;
Knowing who to approach will undoubtedly change your marketing messaging. Remember that you will often be looking to identify two to three different client personas’ depending on your industry.
An established B2B business will have established USP’s. These are the factors that will set you apart from the competition. For instance, perhaps you offer an initial free consultation or a volume discount that increases when order number increases? Whatever it is, use it in your marketing strategy, shout it to the hills to get your target market to come to you and not the competition.
All businesses are unique and specific methods will work better than others. However, we’ve listed tried-and-tested methods that are best suited for B2B marketing. Use these tools in your B2B campaign to achieve your set KPI’s
As a B2B business, email marketing is something you really should be doing. It can offer the best ROI of all marketing channels when done correctly. When planning your emails, you should segment your email list into different persona’s to target your audience more effectively. You should automate the process to plan for scaling your email marketing.
Also, think about your audiences’ needs and not yours. It’s great that you have a new service or product, but that won’t necessarily catch their eye. Focus on how it will help your customers and what benefits they can expect. Create a catchy subject line to get their attention. Don’t forget to measure the success of your campaigns and tweak them accordingly.
B2B businesses tend to have less success with social media marketing channels such as Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn offers an alternative platform to engage and connect with other businesses. There are almost 50 million business decision-makers active on LinkedIn.
Create engaging content using a social strategy that forms connections and interacts with your target audience. Aim to build beneficial relationships to help generate leads and referrals.
From our own experience and that of our clients, often personal profiles do better than company profiles, but both should be used synergistically as part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising a website to appear higher in a search engine, such as Google. Unlike paid ad listings using PPC (pay-per-click), these are organic results. A successful SEO campaign will help you bring in new customers and is an excellent tool for expanding your online reach.
Most user’s regard organic listings with greater trust as they are selected to rank higher based on merit. The keywords you target with your SEO campaign must be relevant and match the correct intent of a potential searcher. This will mean fewer irrelevant leads down the line.
The main thing to remember with a B2B SEO campaign is to be patient! Improvements in rankings can take months, depending on how much time you invest in your website. Coupling this with longer lead times for B2B, seeing a ROI can take time.
Launching a marketing strategy for your company is exciting, but regular check-ins with KPI metrics for each marketing channel must be a pillar of the strategy itself. Make sure that you are recording what is important for each channel.
As an SEO service provider, we monitor Google analytics and click data in Google Search Console and Google Business Profile metrics (formerly known as Google My Business). Calls and directions, for example, can be monitored, but the actual value of the SEO work is measured by the value of a lead, not just lead number.
For B2C businesses, it is easier to track a transaction value and is usually instant. As a B2B business, take the time to match up your marketing channels to lead value. This will improve your strategy and save you money in the future.
Often overlooked by B2B businesses, content marketing can offer numerous benefits. Webpage content explaining your products and services and what sets you apart from your competition is key.
A website is a modern-day substitute for the initial face-to-face contact with a company. Instead of being able to tell someone directly why they should buy from you, you will need to use content marketing to do this for you. Guiding the reader through the website and explaining what you can offer is essential. You should highlight your technical capabilities and expertise.
B2B webpages often lack content and don’t provide the user with much information to make a decision. This can be frustrating and results in a poor user experience and a potential client will go elsewhere.
Blogging regularly can improve your SEO and target clients who are still in the research phase of their enquiring journey. It is a simple technique that can expand your online reach. This could be your secret weapon!
One metric we track, is the device type used to look for our clients’ products or services. We regularly see that more B2B target audiences use desktop devices more than mobile, however this gap is narrowing and both platforms need to display a good user experience. A website must load quickly and efficiently across all devices. On average, if a webpage takes 3 seconds to load, 40% of people abandon the page and use a webpage from a competitor website. Effective B2B website design is one of the most overlooked parts of most B2B marketing campaigns and such a simple concept as page experience can impact lead generation significantly. A fast and responsive website works hand-in-hand with SEO, it can encourage PPC conversions and yet, without it, your marketing strategy can go down the pan. We would recommend you consult a website design agency, if you are not sure whether your website meets these criteria.
This is aimed at B2B companies who have a local presence or a physical address. Optimising your Google Business Profile with the correct information, photos, opening hours, service category and regularly posting content, can help you appear higher in local map pack results (please see an example image of these results below). For localised searches, these results capture most of the traffic available and so you need to appear here. In addition, good review ratings and review count, impacts advocacy and your profile’s rank. Ensuring that you have the infrastructure in place to encourage reviews from clients will help you out and increase the conversion potential of prospective clients. [insert image below]
The benefits of a PPC campaign are plentiful. Before investing in a long-term SEO campaign, PPC can ensure that even very niche B2B businesses can succeed and bring in relevant online traffic. PPC is an immediate form of marketing that can bring in leads fast. It can also verify the need for an integrated SEO and PPC campaign to maximise your leads. This marketing platform is a conversion driving tactic and involves using a budget to bid for advert placement at the top of Google search (we focus on Google in both our SEO and PPC campaigns due to the search engines 92% global market share). PPC for B2B companies can be expensive but focusing on long-tail (generally less competitive but more specific) terms can be rewarding. It can also help with brand awareness.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is another branch of your B2B marketing strategy, which without, can make it all pointless. Every single channel used links in one way or another to your business’s website as a central resource, but if the structure, layout, or any element of the website is confusing, unhelpful, or messy, then people just won’t enquire. Think of this as having a high-street shop but with bins and boxes cluttering the sales counter, very few people will make the effort to break through. A bad website user experience can unfortunately make your strategy destined to fail. You need to have a slick and easy to navigate website with an easy contact option. This involves minimal effort on the user’s part, but maximum information and slick design on the website’s part. It is not easy to know how everyone interacts with your website, but tools such as Microsoft Clarity are a great place to start.
This channel was traditionally considered as a B2C technique, however, increasingly B2B businesses are finding value in remarketing. Also referred to as retargeting, Google’s remarketing platform, allows adverts for your business to follow a website visitor across the internet after they have left your website. They can be set up so that they follow people who did not enquire on your website. This can be help you stay present in the minds of potential customers as they evaluate multiple different companies. Retargeting on Google’s Display Network has a lower cost per lead than other non-branded campaigns such as PPC.
Now we have looked at the top 10 B2B marketing strategies for 2022, it is important not so consider these different techniques as isolated campaigns. Every single branch works with the other channels and so you must approach your strategy in the same way. Remember, think SMART, regularly review progress and adapt based on your results. SQ Digital are an award-winning digital marketing agency who work with several B2B businesses. If you need any assistance in launching your B2B marketing campaign, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
There's been a significant shift in how small businesses use marketing, and traditional marketing efforts, such as print and billboards, are taking a step back. More and more businesses are realising the benefits of digital marketing and are investing more resources in digital marketing services, such as SEO, PPC, Content Marketing and Social Media. Business owners now have a wide range of digital marketing methods at their fingertips that can be adapted to suit their objectives, budget or industry.
It’s fair to say that digital marketing has entirely transformed how businesses connect and engage with their customers. With more consumers searching and buying online than ever before, digital marketing has become crucial. In essence, it allows businesses to effectively put their brand in front of their target audience at the right time and in the right place cost-effectively and measurably.
So, what does digital marketing have to offer you as a small or medium-sized business owner?
Investing in digital marketing services is crucial for your business; if existing or potential customers can’t find you easily online, they will likely go with another business. This is the nature of business today. If someone wants to learn more about your brand, they will probably research you online; perhaps they’re looking for reviews to see whether or not your company is a good fit for them.
As of last year, around 36% of small businesses were operating without a website. Without an online presence, potential customers may assume that you’re not legitimate or may not take you seriously. The result is that they will choose a competitor instead.
Consumer expectations have changed in today's digital world; the average customer tends to search for a product or service online, likely starting with Google. If you don’t have a website or social media presence, it will be next to impossible to compete.
Digital marketing helps to promote smaller businesses in a way that allows them to compete with well-established brands.
Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing gives you the ability to monitor the performance of your campaigns in real-time. You don’t have to wait until your campaign ends to gather the data and analyse the results. By accessing timely data through tools like Google Analytics, you can review the effectiveness of your strategy and make changes accordingly.
Being able to gain these invaluable insights into your digital campaign allows you to respond quickly. You can adapt and refine your digital marketing strategy in line with your customers’ requirements.
It’s also much easier to measure the success of a digital marketing campaign. You can easily track metrics such as engagement and conversions, which is much harder to pinpoint for traditional marketing, such as print ads. With digital marketing, you can see results within a matter of hours, whether it be the number of visitors to your website, the number of people clicking on your ads or the level of engagement you’ve had on your social media posts.
Gaining additional customers is essential for growing your business in terms of revenue and profitability. There are several ways of reaching customers through digital marketing, from websites to video marketing and social media.
It also helps you to attract mobile customers, which is a huge and rapidly growing market. At the end of last year, in 2020, mobile devices (apart from tablets) generated 52.6% of global website traffic; in 2009, this value was 0.7%. Digital marketing helps you to capitalise on this traffic to ensure you’re not missing out.
Digital marketing offers a platform to explain why your customers should choose your business and why your products and services help them.
Rebranding a small business that you’ve been growing can be a daunting decision and task. You may hesitate at the idea; however, even though rebranding can be overwhelming, it can also offer many benefits, from breathing new life into your business to changing the way your target audience perceives you.
There are several reasons why a company might consider rebranding, such as transforming a brand that may have become outdated, further distinguishing a brand from its competitors’ or reflecting a change in your product line.
Such was the case with ROCCIA, the largest independent retailer of tiles in the North of England. The Company wanted to transition from Tile Mart into Roccia to reflect the high-end services and products. The challenge, however, was to ensure they didn’t lose the reputation they’d built over 20 years. To accomplish this, we created a content marketing strategy aimed at the new audience ROCCIA wanted to target, and a Digital PR campaign picked up by many publications.
After a 100% retention of authority and rankings and a 254% increase of traffic to blog posts, it’s fair to say that a well-thought-out digital campaign can help a business to follow a new vision by transforming its brand.
For a small or medium enterprise, keeping within budget is essential. Investing in staff to promote your services and products can be costlier in the long run; while you may have to spend some money on sales efforts to grow your business, having a strong online presence can help you boost sales and reach your audience more efficiently.
A well-designed website will ‘work’ for you every hour of the day, every day of the year, allowing potential customers on the other side of the world to easily browse your services and products outside of office hours. This means that, while your sales team is off the clock, your website is still hard at work and helping to bring in more business.
Many small businesses don’t have the budget available to utilise costly traditional marketing services such as TV and billboard adverts, putting them at a distinct disadvantage to competitors with larger marketing budgets. Only well-known brands can adopt this approach regularly, which meant that they could dominate the market with ease.
Luckily, digital marketing is an affordable and cost-effective option for all businesses. A well-executed and effectively targeted digital marketing strategy can reach potential customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing. By only targeting users actively looking for your services or products, you save money and time.
This puts smaller businesses back in the game. By giving them resources that were previously only accessible to larger corporations, these businesses now have the ability to compete for the same traffic as those with much bigger marketing budgets.
For an example of this, you can read about the work we do for Electronic World. The trick is to be ‘strategic’ about your marketing campaigns; by clearly understanding the results of your data, you can increase your revenue without spending a lot of money.
We created a valuable asset for our customer Morecambe Metals; in this case, a well-researched infographic supported with creative content based on the popular TV show Game of Thrones. We succeeded in getting this featured by The Express newspaper, securing a link from a high-authority website and generating brand exposure nationally.
This only serves to prove that you don’t have to spend big money to get big results.
The reason why companies invest in marketing is simple: they want to maximise profit. Return on investment is the ultimate goal, whether it be through traditional or digital strategies.
We’ve already mentioned that digital marketing is cost-effective. Still, for business owners who want to achieve a high ROI, digital marketing has also proven to be successful without a shadow of a doubt.
We can track almost every aspect of our customer’s campaigns, rankings, conversions, leads, or traffic with our digital marketing services. Analytic tools allow us to focus on what is and isn’t working, enabling us to utilise the available marketing budget effectively. Simply put, we can stop spending money in areas that aren’t working and focus on what is most likely to drive enhanced ROI.
When it comes to paid advertising, ROI – or, more commonly, ROAS – is often the main KPI, especially for e-commerce businesses. ROAS (return-on-ad spend) is found by dividing ad spend by the revenue generated by ads.
Not only does this assist in identifying areas for optimisation, but it also allows decisions to be made using the data provided, such as how much money needs to be assigned where. ROAS essentially measures how much of your advertising spend you get back in revenue.
Digital marketing has completely revitalised the way businesses engage with both current and potential customers. It has made them at once accessible to new customers and familiar and recognisable to existing customers. So How Does Being Accessible Help with Brand Awareness?
Firstly, digital marketing has become an incredibly effective tool for building trust and fostering long-term relationships. It’s important to take advantage of social media platforms when it comes to connecting with your audience. By posting regularly, answering questions and queries quickly, and responding to reviews and comments – positive and negative – you are fundamentally improving brand loyalty and therefore increasing brand awareness. You are showing customers that you care about what they say and think.
Alongside this, you can also improve brand awareness through strategically planned content marketing that reflects your brand’s personality and motivations.
Content created with your target audience in mind can ensure that your brand is reliable and approachable. Writing articles and blog posts that reflect and address their interests and pain points will encourage more engagement and highlight you as an expert within your industry.
This is an approach that we have taken with our customer, The Aesthetic Skin Clinic. We have carefully developed a content strategy that has established them as an authoritative voice within the cosmetic sector, achieved through well-researched and well-written blogs, which have helped build trust among potential patients by educating them on their own health.
Traditional forms of marketing once meant sponsoring an ad during the break of a prime-time TV show and hoping that it reached the right audience. Fortunately, digital marketing allows for much more specific audience targeting. It’s no longer “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to marketing campaigns; it is now possible to become a lot more personalised. You can tailor campaigns to specific demographics, such as age, location, interests and gender, making them more effective.
With our client Axess2, a company that specialises in lifts, we targeted homeowners, architects and interior designers to establish Axess2 as a reliable expert in their industry. To amplify the reach of our content, we also created a targeted Digital PR campaign. This led to publications in important industry magazines, such as the Chartered Association of Building Engineers, and on websites such as the Durham Cathedral (after installing a lift in this UNESCO World Heritage Site building).
Specific audience targeting doesn’t restrict you to local campaigns either. In fact, you can realistically target people worldwide with just one marketing campaign. You can access a global audience through effective but specifically targeted strategies.
Social media platforms, in particular, have the ability to target ads to almost anyone; by using information collected from their users, they can target people according to their behaviours, lifestyles, interests and connections.
By using this insight into your customers’ interests and preferences, you can easily tailor and personalise the marketing messages they receive. This is often considered digital marketing’s biggest advantage over traditional marketing, as personalised messages make customers feel much more valued.
One of the best things about implementing digital marketing is that people no longer need to come to your physical store for you to make a sale. It now takes a matter of clicks to convert customers online. Your website is your store; it should offer potential customers everything they need to know about your product and services so that they can make informed decisions on whether to purchase and enquire.
Whether you’re spending money on sponsored Facebook ads or Google Ads, you can embed unique codes that allow you to track who, when and how people saw your ad, as well as what they did after this. Did they visit your website? And if so, which page did they view? Did they download content? Place an order? With digital marketing, you can monitor your conversion rate to see which leads turned into revenue.
With our customer Banks Lyon, we have executed a paid media strategy that utilises Google Ads and Google Display Network, creating a seamless user journey, from remarketing at the initial customer touchpoint through to enquiry and purchase. This has allowed us to track them every step of the way.
To make digital marketing really work for your business, you need a strategy that uses the resources available to you. Many businesses experiment with digital marketing services, e.g. using social media and posting a few Facebook posts here and there or spending a bit of money on SEO. To really benefit from the power of digital marketing, you need to adopt a more holistic approach. An efficient digital marketing strategy means tying in all digital channels and creating a collective and collaborative campaign. Integrating all the platforms available will go a long way to achieving your set objectives.
Without an online presence, it’s now impossible to compete and grow your business. We work with our clients to develop digital strategies that are an innovative blend of analytics and creativity. We work together to seamlessly create and implement innovative and robust digital marketing strategies that help grow their business.
You can view more of the fantastic work we’ve carried out for our customers on our case studies page.
You can also get in touch with us if you want to learn more about how we can help your business reach its potential online.
With so many businesses now online, a digital marketing strategy is more important than ever. From writing blog posts and sending out newsletters to creating Facebook ads and social media posts, you can tackle digital marketing in a thousand different ways. This is why you should first implement a digital marketing strategy. It helps you see what works for your business and help you stay focused on your goals – making them easier to accomplish.
As an experienced digital marketing agency, we know all there is to know about creating the right marketing strategy for your business. This guide will help kickstart your digital marketing the right way.
One of the first things you should do when creating a digital marketing strategy is to set achievable goals. It's essential you know what you want to accomplish from the start, be it conversions, brand awareness, social media followers, likes on social media, or newsletter opens.
Getting people to buy your products and services online isn't as easy as it sounds because there's a lot of competition. Most UK businesses now have an online presence (83.4% in 2019), so it's more important than ever that you understand how to use digital marketing to your advantage.
If, for example, your goal is to be found more easily on Google, then ensuring your content is optimised with the latest SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) practices can help you achieve this. You will need to make sure you're using the right keywords, have unique and informative content, taken title tags and metadata into account, applying Schema to website pages and that your website loads quickly.
All this can help you rank higher in search engines, which helps your digital marketing strategy by implementing a solid SEO campaign. SQ Digital has been offering digital marketing services for over two decades, so we understand what it takes to set a business up for long-term success.
Think about your goals and how you can get there, whether you want to generate more leads, have more people interacting with your brand on social media or sell more products.
The revenue of online retail sales in the UK has been rising consistently in the past few years, as Statista shows – in 2012, the value of online sales was £33.24 billion and, in 2020, this figure was £99.31 billion. It wasn't all because of the pandemic, though; in 2019, online retail sales were already high, with revenue of £76.04 billion.
As of May 2021, online sales represented 27.3% of all retail sales in the UK. So, if you haven't already, be sure to capitalise on this trend.
Shopping habits are changing, and businesses, including SMEs, can take advantage of this. One way is to start using paid search more aggressively. You can find out where your target market spends most of their time online and figure out if they're searching for products on Google or browsing social media platforms.
You'll need to dig through your site's analytics to get this information. Once you have some data on this, you can focus your attention on a Pay Per Click (PPC), Google Shopping or paid social ads approach, depending on where your target audience is.
Consider where to place your advertising budget when choosing products to promote on your website. If you have any products or services with high demand, make sure to advertise them more aggressively.
Figuring all this out can take some time, including making sure mention your research is done well. If you don't put enough time into your research, you risk putting money behind digital marketing campaigns that don't work.
As an SME owner, you're already busy running your business, so you may want to consider using a digital marketing agency to take care of your paid search campaigns.
Capitalising on products that are in demand is an excellent way to build a successful digital marketing campaign. If you're experiencing a spike in sales or have some products that sell more than others, it may be time to focus on advertising them online.
Adverts allow you to bypass lengthy SEO campaigns to organically rank for keywords. Instead, you can build a robust Google Ads campaign or use social media advertising to maximise your exposure to your target audience. When done well, SEO campaigns offer excellent long term results, but if you're looking for quick wins, paid ads are a great option.
If you find that a product or service has soared in popularity and is flying off the shelves, make sure to stock up and market it extensively. Add a prominent banner of the product on your website, advertise it across all channels and create informative content to drive users towards a conversion.
Planning for the future is important too, so consider potential popular products and services. If you have items that sell well in winter, prepare for when the hot weather comes to an end since you might see a spike in business. Stay ahead of the competition, especially if you have a fully optimised website and a ready-to-go advertising campaign to match.
Strategy is crucial for a successful digital marketing campaign, as it gives you focus and allows you to understand better what will work for your business and what won't. Being consistent in this strategy is equally important – not only can this help you to see results more quickly, but it also shows your audience what to expect from you.
A consistent digital marketing strategy also means using marketing techniques, such as posting daily on social media and regularly publishing blogs.
For help or advice on how to best prepare your business for the next steps, our team is more than happy to assist you. Feel free to contact us to learn more about the digital marketing services we offer and our approach. Or get a free SEO audit to see how your website is performing.
Whether you’re a start-up or have already established your brand online, continuing to develop your content marketing should be at the forefront of your business.
Content marketing is all about communication. It’s about engaging, listening and building a relationship with your customers.
We’ve put together a simple guide to content marketing and developing your brand online.
In today’s digital society, we spend an average of 6 hours and 42 minutes per day online. This increased time browsing the web is an open opportunity to communicate and engage with your customers. It’s important to represent your brand online with rich content and strong marketing copy, no matter your marketing budget.
The best content for a smaller marketing budget would be well optimised on-site content, blogs, tutorial videos, collaborations with other companies and a strong social media presence.
Whether you’re sending a personalised email or posting a ‘how to’ video on Instagram, you can grow your business by speaking directly with your customers and listening to what they have to say.
Marketing copy is generally written with a specific goal in mind, often to compel the reader to do something. It could be to sign up for your newsletter, become a follower of your social media accounts, or make a purchase – we call these ‘conversions’.
There are lots of different ways to create compelling marketing copy, depending on your goal. A digital marketing agency can help you generate more valuable conversions using expertly written marketing copy.
A great place to start is by making sure your on-site content speaks to your target audience. On-site content generally refers to everything you write on your website. This includes help guides, FAQs or web page copy.
Good on-site content should speak your audience’s language. If you're unsure where to start, read our article 5 ways to strike the perfect tone in your content.
There are many benefits of writing blogs; they’re a great way to showcase your expertise and help build relationships with your customers. But writing an effective blog is about more than just sharing your thoughts or business updates with your audience.
Applying a robust SEO strategy to your blog content can attract more visitors to your website, which ultimately means more customers. A well-optimised blog will appear in search engine results when people search for the terms (or keywords) your blog addresses. Your blog will attract visitors who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.
Blog writing is a key part of any content strategy, so if you’re not already doing it, you probably should be.
As well as speaking your audience’s language, the content on your website also needs to speak Google’s language – this is where SEO comes in. SEO (search engine optimisation) will enhance a good content strategy. It ensures that the right people can find all the great content you’re creating.
By including keywords, meta-data, images, links and alt-tags in your blogs and articles, you can start to increase your website ranking on search engines like Google. Posting relevant, well-optimised content regularly is the key.
You can read more about how to optimise your content in our 10 SEO quick wins article.
Posting content about your business online helps you build a clear brand identity and share your company ethos with your followers. If you only have a limited marketing budget, it’s still a good idea to build a portfolio of blogs or videos and use your social media channels effectively to share your content.
By creating this online identity, your customers have a chance to get to know you better and communicate with your business. By being clear, visual and unique, you can set your brand apart from others. Applying a well-thought-out content strategy will establish a brand reputation, tone of voice and return business potential.
While it can take some time to see an impact from your content marketing efforts, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, as well as paid social campaigns, can deliver more immediate results.
PPC advertising puts your business in front of people who may already be interested in your products or services. In return, you pay a small fee whenever your PPC advert is clicked. The goal is for the revenue generated from the increased visits to your website to be higher than the cost of the clicks. So, there is a risk to running a PPC campaign, and it needs to be right for your business. Why not check out the pros and cons of running PPC campaigns?
On the other hand, a paid social media campaign can give you more options for targeting your audiences, like age demographics, location, and specific interests. This means you can be much more specific about who sees your ads, ensuring you get the best return on your investment.
If you’re interested in finding out more about developing your brand online from a content marketing agency, please get in touch. We could talk all day about the benefits of content marketing!
Over 3.8 billion people worldwide use social media – a figure expected to rise to 4.41 billion in 2025. With numbers like these, it’s clear that social media is a powerful tool for businesses, and one you shouldn’t dismiss, no matter whether you’re a B2B or B2C.
As a digital marketing agency, we help our clients take full advantage of social media opportunities.
Our Paid Social Media expert, Michelle Charnley, is a whiz at creating targeted and highly effective campaigns across several social platforms. She believes that,
“social media has a huge impact when it comes to promoting a business. It creates a positive link with customers and allows smaller businesses to compete with larger companies. It also ensures a unified brand message.”
From a boost in website traffic to higher customer engagement levels and the potential for lead generation, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram are great for promoting your brand, products, and services. These platforms can help SMEs stay competitive, allowing you to connect with potential customers and keep an eye on what other businesses are doing.
LinkedIn is a professional platform that allows you to showcase your expertise, promote your brand and business, interact and engage with your peers, and so much more. Offering professional tips and quick guides on LinkedIn is a great way to attract more traffic to your website, as shown below.
So, don't miss out on reaching your customers through social platforms where they’re already interacting with brands.
It's natural to feel overwhelmed at first, but if you’re looking to set up your online presence, we can help you figure out where to start your social journey.
The first thing you should do is set goals. What are you hoping to accomplish by signing up to a social platform or by talking to your audience? Do you want to sell more products or increase your brand awareness? Your goals will be the driving force behind your social media presence, so be specific.
Also, you should learn as much as you can about your target audience. This research will help you to figure out where your customers are and the types of content they consume. Find out what your audience cares about to better connect with them.
Choosing the right platforms is essential. If your audience hangs out on Facebook, this channel should be your priority; with 2.7 billion monthly active users by October 2020, this platform can be a safe bet for many small business owners.
If you make and share videos, a YouTube presence is a must and, if your content is highly visual, Instagram could be for you. Focus only on the platforms your audience uses so that you can increase your chances of success and not spread yourself too thin. Check out our article “Should Age Demographics Impact Your Social Media Choice?” for more information on which platform is best suited for your business and where to find your audience.
Once you’ve made a decision, think about the content you’ll be sharing. Quality is key here, not quantity.
As you start developing your social media presence, you’ll come across two types of social media content; organic and paid.
Organic Social Media refers to free content like photos, videos and stories you can post and share on your social platforms. These posts will reach existing customers and can be seen by a fraction of your followers and their followers (organic reach) and people following the hashtags you chose.
With organic social media, you:
All this is useful, no matter where your customers are on the buyers’ journey. As an example, we shared an article on Facebook by simply posting about it on our timeline:
In 2018, a Global Web Index study found that 54% of social browsers use social media to research a brand’s products, which further highlights that organic posts are a valid and crucial part of social media. When putting together your social strategy, consider organic content and how people will engage with it.
If you pay to have your content on a platform, you’re using paid social. This term refers to ads and sponsored posts with a reach bigger than your immediate followers; this allows you to connect with people who wouldn't discover your brand otherwise. You can choose a particular demographic to target and set a goal for the post, be it sales conversions or traffic to your website.
There are many reasons why you should choose paid social. For example, Facebook’s algorithm prefers posts from non-business accounts, which means small business owners may want to create Facebook ads to compete on the platform, like the example below from one of our clients.
The ad helps Video 2 DVD Transfers to showcase a discount, raise awareness to their brand and direct people to the website – because it’s a sponsored ad, it means it reaches more people.
In short, paid social media can:
Both organic and paid social should be used in tandem for the best results, as they work well together to promote your small business. Check out some of our tips to help you get started on social media:
Not every promotional post has to be paid. Hashtags – and even likes, retweets and follows – can be powerful for your marketing, and campaigns that use them can be a great way to bring awareness to a product or your brand.
You can see an example of how we helped Compare Cover do this with the hashtag #NationalWalkingMonth. This campaign was even shortlisted for two awards; Northern Marketing Awards for Best Professional & Financial Services Campaign, and UK Search Awards for Best Use of Social Media in a Search Campaign).
In essence, we launched a social media competition that targeted a specific demographic and which was supported by our content and design teams.
We created a Facebook and Twitter competition that encouraged people to like Compare Cover’s Facebook post or retweet and follow @comparecover, with a chance to win a prize. The result included an increase in the number of potential customers engaging with the client’s social media channels, a boost in followers, and an increase of 291.5% increase in website sessions.
On Facebook, you can pick your best-performing posts (an indicator that people are interested in your content) and pay to have it displayed to more people. You don’t even have to create an ad, as this is a low effort to see quick results.
For Simply Baby Lancaster, we boosted an existing post to help it get more reach – this means increasing its chances of people reacting, sharing and commenting on it. Boosting a post also helps people who don’t follow you, but who may be interested in your services and page, to find you.
Never publish a post without an image, a video or any other type of media. Think about it; when was the last time your attention was drawn to a post that was only text?
To get your audience’s attention, you need to make your posts attractive, and this means adding visual content, as the carousel below, from The Bath House, shows. It allows us to display our client’s products in a visually interesting way that immediately draws the eye.
Carousels are great for showing off multiple images and links in one ad and highlighting specific features in each card. It also creates a story that people can engage with by swiping to read more.
If you’re paying to run an ad, make sure it’s a good one. For that, you’ll want to optimise it as much as possible and test it with A/B testing, which allows you to run different versions of the same ad to test your CTA (call to action), the layout of the ad, the audience you chose to target, the type of ad you went with, the copy you wrote on it, and more.
For instance, with Smart Storage, we created different versions of the same ad to see which one performed the best. We changed the images and the CTA, and Facebook divides the budget equally between the posts. This approach allowed us to measure the performance of each strategy.
Ads are effective when they’re aimed at the right demographics and have the right message on them. You can choose an audience based on age, education, location, hobbies and interests, job title, and more, which means your ads will appeal to the people they’re targeting.
Targeting a specific audience will make them more likely to engage with your post, click on your links, and buy your products and services. Take a look at Facebook’s example of audience targeting:
Gathering data about your posts is important because it helps you understand what’s performing well and what isn’t – and where you should invest your time, money and effort. Facebook Pixel is a good example of this since it provides information on your audience and whenever someone takes action, such as purchasing a product.
As a business owner, you’re always looking to improve your brand’s visibility and get your business on people’s radar. Social media is a fantastic way to do this, as it helps you engage with people, attract new customers, grow your client base, promote products and services and establish your business voice.
Social media can also help you see a boost in website traffic and sales leads. With more than 3.6 billion social media users worldwide, you don’t want to miss out on the potential of this enormous market.
If you need help getting to grips with social media or you simply don’t have the time to manage it effectively for your business, we can help. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we’ll handle everything for you while you focus on growing your business.
As experts with 20 years of digital marketing experience, we can help small business owners promote their business online, so make an enquiry today.
User experience (commonly referred to as UX) transcends all marketing channels from SEO to PPC. It is a fundamental part of any digital marketing strategy as it is completely entwined with the user journey from site visitor to customer. In this article, we look at one of the tools we use here at SQ Digital to audit website UX.
If you need more insight when it comes to the marketing data you collect, there are plenty of options available. The Internet is awash with analytics tools designed to make it easier for you to work out precisely what your customers are doing – or, in some cases, not doing.
One very insightful tool, appropriately named Microsoft Clarity, helps marketers worldwide get a clearer idea of their position with user behaviour data. Let's take a closer look!
Launched in 2020, Clarity is a relatively new offering from Microsoft and is already proving useful for marketers and webmasters. It provides easy to understand data capture and analytics in a simple dashboard format. The tool contains several key features for a marketer to use; for example, session recording, which shows how users navigate pages on your website in reasonably granular detail.
This is a handy tool if you’re looking for more in-depth information on user behaviour throughout your website. Using screen recordings and heatmaps, you can see the most popular links on a page or what users are doing when they land on the page.
These heatmaps refer to the places where people clicked and scrolled when visiting your site, so you can more easily see what they’re doing. As for the sessions replays, you’re able to record how visitors are interacting with the pages.
The tool is GDPR-compliant, as you can also turn off the recording for places where sensitive information is gathered, like log-in pages.
Microsoft Clarity can be used alongside other tools, like Google Analytics, to give you a more detailed picture of how your site performs. For example, if a page isn’t converting, Microsoft Clarity can highlight further information and help you understand why.
In the example below, certain elements of our homepage are highlighted through the heatmaps, showcasing where users are clicking most often. This helps us to see what draws their attention and the pages they’re interested in.
People are engaging heavily with the navigation bar, which is understandable because it’s where they can find the links to other pages on the site, including more information on the digital marketing services we provide.
Microsoft Clarity can also provide a wide range of simple data tools for businesses. It can, for example, organise the pages on your website in order of how popular they are – helping you to understand what content is most attractive to your visitors. It might not go as deep into the numbers as Google Analytics, but it does give you a good starting point for future investigation.
Most PPC Agencies know that Google Analytics has long since been a big name in this field. It’s by far the most popular data analytics tool for digital marketers, and its association with the Google brand means that it’s likely to stay that way.
The general industry perspective on Microsoft Clarity is that it’s not – and probably never will be – a replacement for Google Analytics, as some of Google’s basic product features, such as bounce rates, don’t feature in Microsoft Clarity.
But rather than Clarity and Analytics competing with each other, we believe that the real benefit comes from using both platforms to build a complete picture of your site’s performance. Marketers who analyse and measure several factors simultaneously – such as several distinct campaigns at once or multiple conversion aims – can gather much more data than before, helping to better inform their decisions.
You can connect Clarity with Google Analytics by adding a link to Analytics sessions that helps you to identify areas where information is scarce. When you go back to Clarity, you’ll be able to see what visitors to your site saw and how they interacted with it.
To achieve this, Clarity creates a dimension called “Clarity Playback URL” that sends data to your Analytics account. Microsoft Clarity offers some metrics that Google Analytics doesn’t – or which Google Analytics doesn’t name in such a user-friendly way. This is why both Clarity and Analytics should be used together since they can complement each other well.
A marketer logging in to the Clarity dashboard will find, for example, ‘rage clicks’, a metric that works out how many website sessions featured negative user behaviour. The feature offers a simple way to investigate which pages of your website might be due for a redesign – and, unlike on the more complex Google Analytics, it can be done in seconds thanks to the centralised dashboard feature.
Both tools are free and simple to set up, requiring the addition of a script with tracking code to your website pages. As mentioned, Clarity provides actual recordings of visits, including where people place their cursor on a page and where they’re scrolling down to, which Analytics does not.
These are invaluable metrics if you want to improve your website, as well as the UX. For example, if users are leaving your site halfway down a page, you can figure out where the problem lies – it could be that the rest of the content on the page is not informative enough or that the layout is a little confusing.
This means you get the opportunity to look more critically at your site and analyse the users’ pain points. Why are they clicking on one link above another? Which pages are not performing as well as they should? How is the page rendering?
Clarity gives the answer to these and many more questions, so it’s fair to say it’s already a comprehensive tool despite being relatively new to the game. And it’s also clear that using just one of these tools could result in incomplete information – by combining Clarity with Analytics, you get access to more data than ever before!
But while we recommend using both analytics tools to get a more comprehensive view of your site’s performance, Microsoft Clarity is more straightforward to use than Google Analytics for those less confident with these types of tools.
And, given that the tools can integrate, investing time and effort in learning to use Clarity could give you more options, depending on the type of data you need and how quickly you need it. Clarity’s user-friendly dashboard is arranged so that the information required can be accessed and selected in just a few clicks, whereas Google Analytics might need more of a deep dive.
Ultimately, this goes to show that there’s no such thing as a perfect marketing analytics tool. A marketer with one set of conversion goals might need basic information, while a marketer with a different set of goals and requirements will need more sophisticated information.
Overall, Clarity is no better or worse than other tools on the market: it just caters to a particular need, and that need is simplicity and accessibility of information. Contact us today to find out how we can help your website reach its potential – or why not check how your website currently performs with our free SEO audit tool.
Whether you're a small, medium or large business owner wanting to grow your online presence, putting a well thought out digital marketing strategy in place is essential.
The digital landscape is always evolving – for example, the introduction of 5G, the rise in the number of social media platforms, and the constant Google algorithm changes. It can be challenging to keep up with everything, especially when you’re busy running a business.
As a digital marketing agency, SQ Digital can help you create and refine a digital marketing strategy that works for your business and which can adapt to an ever-changing landscape.
Look at it like a master plan or points of action that you can take to achieve your marketing goals.
A digital marketing strategy uses online tools, channels and digital marketing services - like social media, PPC, content marketing and SEO - to guide you through the process of growing your online presence; all these tools work together to help you reach your goals.
No two digital marketing strategies are the same, as they will depend on your business and what you want to achieve. So, it’s essential to create and implement a strategy tailored to your business and your specific goals, be they short-term or long-term.
Producing a bespoke digital marketing strategy for your business will enable you to:
A good strategy allows your business to reach out to consumers, convert them, and build relationships with them. A strategic approach to your digital marketing improves how you implement tasks because it lets you review your actions and make adjustments as needed, meaning your digital marketing can evolve with the digital landscape.
If you’re a Business Owner or a Marketing Manager looking to develop a strategy, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind.
Some of the key steps involved in creating a bespoke digital marketing strategy include:
One of the first things you can do is develop your buyer personas, which will help you identify who you’re targeting. After all, to have a successful strategy, you must know who’s looking for your products and services. Once you find out who your ideal customer is, including their age, gender, location and motivations, you can use that information to create a strategy and decide how to reach your customers.
You must set goals, as you can't create a strategy without knowing what you want to achieve. Make these goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely). This will help you figure out the digital tools you’ll need and establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which you’ll use to measure your strategy’s success.
Look at everything from a holistic point of view. What digital assets do you have, how is your business getting exposure, and how are your channels working together?
Typically, you can split your channels or assets into owned media, earned media and paid media, so this can be a good way to audit what you currently have in place.
Owned media refers to things like your website, your social media accounts and your blog. Earned media is how people are finding you (through guest posts you’ve written, PR work you’ve done, etc.), and paid media refers to Google Ads and paid social ads, as well as any other channel that requires you to spend money to advertise the brand.
Learning more about your competitors can help you identify whether you’re falling short in your marketing campaigns or if you need to improve the business’ website or your social media presence to gain a competitive edge, for example.
To achieve your goals, you must manage the resources you have. For example, you’ll need to decide where to spend your time and money. If you’ve determined that you get the most leads from your paid ads, you may want to focus on this specific channel.
One vital thing is to stay flexible. A good strategy doesn’t need to be overhauled, but it will likely need to be tweaked and improved as things change; your goals may change, industry trends can shift, search engines can alter the way they display links, and so on.
By collecting valuable information about your business, we’ll develop an approach that allows you to take full advantage of your digital marketing. Because we understand just how crucial costs are for SMEs, we can deliver successful campaigns tailored to your budget and business goals.
Simple but efficient, principles guide our approach:
We believe it’s crucial to know your business inside out, which is why we take our time to learn everything about it at the start. Our Discovery phase is all about knowing you and identifying your goals, allowing us to make recommendations that will help your marketing and save you time and money.
Our Retainer phase is where we implement your marketing campaigns, which have been designed with your goals in mind. This way, we can create a long-term partnership with you that will help your business succeed.
As a business, regardless of whether you're a small, medium or large business, you need to implement a solid digital marketing strategy to guide your marketing efforts. Your strategy lays the groundwork for implementing efficient, optimised campaigns, and can help reveal new growth opportunities, resulting in the best ROI – something especially crucial for SMEs.
There are several ways to create a digital marketing strategy, but it’s essential that you first learn about your target audience and set the goals you want to achieve.
When implementing your digital marketing strategy, SQ Digital uses several channels, such as content marketing, SEO, paid search and social media. We have 20 years of digital marketing experience and a wealth of knowledge at your disposal, so don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.
We’ll be happy to speak to you about how we work and what we can offer your business.
