Digital Marketing

Email marketing has gained a bit of a bad reputation, but that’s mainly due to the countless spam emails we receive every day. By running a permission-based email marketing campaign you can help your business to both generate leads and improve customer retention.

Permission based means that they have given you their OK for you to send them an email, this could be through an email sign up form on your website or it could be because someone has handed you their business card at a networking meeting. Buying lists and emailing out to the masses isn’t something that we would advocate and it can damage your reputation. You could even have your website and email blacklisted as a result and so I really would steer clear of this type of email mail out.

PPC (or pay per click) are adverts placed in search engines, they appear towards the top and right side of the search results page and look slightly different to the organic listings. The order in which these adverts appear is based on a combination of something called a quality score and the amount you are willing to pay for a click on your advert.

The idea is that you target your adverts to the things that people are searching for with a view to them clicking on that advert and being directed through to your website.

A webinar is a way of presenting to a large number of people at one time. It allows you to hold a virtual presentation with people regardless of their location, as long as they have Internet connection they can attend.

Holding a webinar is a great way to increase your company’s profile and to be seen as an expert in your field. The idea is that you present your content to a target audience in an educational way, so giving them some valuable information to take away with them.

We’ve all heard about how important first impressions are, whether its meeting someone socially, at the local gym or in a business environment. The way you present yourself has a big impact on what people think of you. For example, you would expect to see a bank manager in a suit and tie or a Personal Trainer that looks fit! We all have expectations of different industries too and this should be reflected in what you do online.

When someone visits your website you only have a few seconds to grab their attention before they decide to stay or go elsewhere, and the attention span of a mobile user is even less. It really is not long, so having a great landing page is very important. When you start looking at landing pages on the web you realise how many businesses have done this wrong, and even some of the bigger companies that you would expect to get this right haven't. Choosing the right design and making it easy is what customers want.

So we've been saying for some time now (years in fact!) that it's important to ensure that your website is mobile friendly. Well if you didn't listen and are now in a position where your website still isn't, then you need to act quickly. Google have announced that the mobile friendly ranking algorithm will launch on April 21^st 2015. They have also confirmed that this will have a bigger impact on search results than either Google Panda or Penguin did. So if your website isn't mobile friendly then ALL of your mobile traffic could be at risk.

Anyone who has attended any kind of business workshop or seminar has no doubt heard how important it is to set goals. But it's very easy to say that you want to increase turnover by 10% in the next year without actually working out how to achieve it.

Every goal needs to be reverse engineered and broken down into lots of mini goals, then each day as you start work you need to ensure that your to-do list is focussed around achieving those mini goals that will ultimately lead you to the big one! Many of us get constantly distracted and a whole day can easily go by where there's no doubt that we have been busy, but we've not actually really achieved anything of great significance, we haven't moved our business forward in the way that we need to. Some of this will be down to fire-fighting, some may even be a little bit of laziness, we might find it hard to delegate tasks and let go, or we might just be lacking focus. There are a whole host of reasons and justifications that we can tell ourselves as to why we haven't done the things that we really should have completed.

Google+ has been slow burn and as yet is a long way off taking over social platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, however, it's not one to be ignored. There are some SEO benefits in adopting SEO and we will go over this in more detail in another blog post, for this one though we will go over some of the basics and a little bit about how it works.

Negative SEO is basically when various techniques are used to try and damage your online marketing campaign. We've been noticing an increase in this kind of practise, mainly because Google penalises sites for trying to manipulate the search engines. It opens up opportunities to damage your competitors whilst improving your own businesses success online.

Personally it's not something we support and think its a really nasty way of trying to gain success. As a business, if you employ the services of an SEO company, you might want to check that they aren't doing this kind of thing, it can seriously give you a bad name!