Is the thought of Brexit bothering you? Regardless of industry, businesses have a great opportunity to harness the power of digital marketing to make more sales and create more leads online. But, if you’re not a seasoned digital marketer yourself, or using an experienced online marketing agency, how can you be sure of what exactly to do? We’ve got you covered with our online marketing tips in this look at the top 10 things we do to grow the businesses of our Birmingham online marketing agency clients using digital marketing.
Leverage these and you too will see the advantages of online marketing in helping you negate any potentially negative impact of Brexit.
Start At The Beginning! The Objectives Of An Online Marketing Agency (And Why They Should Be Yours Too)
First let’s lay the foundations. At our Birmingham online marketing agency we consider digital marketing, in fact any marketing, to be simply about achieving three main things:
- Connecting you with people who are searching for your products and services on the internet.
- Converting them into customers, increasing your sales and growing your business.
- Reaching new markets.
If you want your business to grow, you too should keep these goals in mind. If you don’t consider these tips, your online marketing strategy could meander along like an oxbow lake without having a clear outcome.
Here are the 10 online marketing strategic tips you should take note of to grow your business despite Brexit.
1. Measuring
Putting good measurement practices in place is key to staying focused on what works and what doesn’t. To achieve a profitable ROI you have to know this information.
Whilst not strictly an online marketing technique itself, measuring your conversions is essential to any good digital strategy.
At our online marketing agency, we guide clients in setting up a leads, sales and profit measuring system as part of a personalised lead generation strategy.
2. SEM: Search Engine Marketing
Sometimes now called just search marketing, SEM is the wider container if you like for the digital marketing techniques that will get your site higher up in the search engines and get you found organically.
To succeed online, SEM is essential.
Three key things we recommend for you:
- Identify your main keywords
- The importance of on-page SEO
- The need for regular content on your website
3. Blogging
No longer the preserve of the verbose, blogging is now all-important for any business online. It helps boost SEO (making sure your blog is properly categorised is important), positions you as an expert in your industry and can drive traffic back to your main website pages.
Search engines love a website that looks like the content within it is new. Obviously, you’re not going to rewrite your main pages every week so blogging is a great way of adding fresh content. You should have content rich, quality, original and optimised articles. Ideally, post once a week as a minimum.
And make sure you distribute. To your social media channels, your email list and beyond.
Not so freely articulate with the written word? Don’t let that put you off. Hire a copywriter to produce content around your products or services.
4. Google Adwords
At our online marketing agency, we affectionately refer to Google Adwords as direct marketing on steroids.
Adwords is one of the most effective pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms out there. If you’re not already using it to promote your business, you need to change that pronto.
The benefits of PPC in helping you grow your business are that you can quickly identify what adverts are working, tweak the ones that aren’t and keep a close hold over your budget. A manageable budget will work fine.
There’s another benefit of running PPC campaigns. As a side-effect, measuring which advert keywords perform best gives you more ideas for keywords to use or amend throughout your website to boost SEO.
5. Remarketing
Did you know 99% of people leave your website without buying or making contact?
Remarketing is designed to combat that and has proved to be one of the most dramatic and profitable internet marketing breakthroughs of recent years.
It’s a form of online advertising that allows websites to visitors who have already visited their site. The adverts are displayed on other websites the user visits.
Remarketing allows you to target people who you want to see your advert with laser precision. As a result it delivers excellent ROI. Google estimates that users are twice as likely to convert with remarketing.
6. Social Media
Social media is a great way to help grow your business online. You might not think so but businesses who are serious about using digital marketing need to be visible on social media.
It’s about being part of an online conversation. By doing so you can position yourself as an industry expert. Social media is all about building relationships so people like, know and trust you.
Research the social media networks where your prospects and customers are and join these ones.
Facebook, with 2 billion monthly users per month, is a good place to start if you’re unsure. Other ones include Linkedin, Twitter, and YouTube.
Be sure not to use social media just as a selling platform. People won’t take kindly to it. Think relationships and building brand personality first and foremost. Share interesting content to your social networks. Promote traffic to your website via social media by sharing your blogs on your networks with links back to your site.
On your website, position your social media icons so they are easily found to encourage visitors to click on them and follow you.
7. Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with customers and prospects.
But…
Make yours of value.
We all get so many emails today. So give the reader something worth opening. Analyse the data to see what works. subject lines, topics, send times, etc. Look at it all. Use that information to inform your emails.
Create a lead generation tool on your website to encourage people to sign up. Email them. Drive traffic to your website, then remarket to them. Set up auto-responders.
Regular contact with your interested prospects results in sales.
8. Video
Businesses can’t afford to ignore video. YouTube is the second largest search engine!
Any online marketing agency providing real value to its clients knows this.
Videos are a great way of conveying a lot of information about your company in a short space of time.
Keep videos short – two mins max. Have them professionally produced. Again, they are a superb tool to build ‘know, like, trust’ factor and to position you as an expert in your particular industry space.
Customer testimonials also make great videos to feature.
Make sure you optimise your videos on YouTube. Link back to your website and user YouTube adverts.
9. Backlinks
A backlink is a link from an external website to your own website.
Why are they important?
Because, in essence backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. They are really important for SEO. If a lot of sites link back to the same webpage or website it tells the search engines that the content contained within must be of value. In turn, it should therefore rank higher in the search engine results pages. Higher SERP rankings equal more traffic to your website.
Earning backlinks is part of off-site SEO. The more authoritative, trustworthy or popular the site which links to you, the better the quality of the backlink.
These are the ones you should try to earn.
10. EU Funding
That’s right. Despite Brexit, at the moment some businesses in the West Midlands can still access EU funding to help them with their digital marketing, so it would be absurd not to include this in our roundup. It’s not clear yet whether UK businesses will still have access to this type of funding post-Brexit so you should make the most of the opportunity to help you sell more online now.
Manufacturing firms can benefit from 35% towards a £4k spend (two projects) and other B2B’s can qualify for match funding for a spend of £10k-30k.
Why wouldn’t you want help with turning your website into a selling machine?
Online Marketing Tips From Leading Digital Agency | Conclusion
The power of digital marketing to help businesses in the UK to nullify any negative effects of Brexit is strong. By implementing an online marketing strategy that incorporates just some of the above tips you will help to put yourself in a more secure position. We’ve seen it time and again. Businesses who employ our online marketing agency tactics are connecting with people who are searching for them on the internet. Consequently, they are increasing their sales and growing their businesses as a result. And, doing it profitably.
You may also like to read our previous blog on 5 Ways To Give Your Website The Edge.
