Maintain now or regret later
Why you need a maintenance package for your website At Constructive Marketing we always say “a website is never finished” and a maintenance package goes hand in hand with that statement. We understand that as a business owner, you’re very busy so keeping your website up to date is probably at the bottom of your priority list. The problem is, if your website isn’t maintained it becomes outdated and a target for malware which could be disastrous for your business By having a maintenance package, you’re paying an expert to carry out these updates for you, keeping your website secure and working efficiently. They can also update the content on your website too, making sure that your main digital storefront is kept up to date. Bespoke Maintenance Packages No two websites are ever the same from the design to the plugins and software used to make the website work, as a result a maintenance package should always be able to adapt to the website it is servicing. It’s also worth mentioning that whoever designs and builds your website does not have to maintain it. When looking for website maintenance providers, make sure you check that they have expertise in looking after other websites built using the same type of platform. Also make sure there are no hidden charges. Be clear with your needs so they can price appropriately. The maintenance packages we provide can include software updates, content changes and website security. By having a maintenance package in place it ensures that there is always someone on standby to fix any issues that occur with your site. This includes things that are out of your control, such as server outages and errors. If these are left unattended they can be severely detrimental to a business’ online presence. So having a friendly team at the end of the phone to quickly fix these issues is not only really helpful but could also save you from potentially losing income Disadvantages of not having a Maintenance Package By opting to not have a maintenance package in place, your website is vulnerable to security threats, viruses and even malware. If any of these issues were to occur you would either have to spend your time attempting to resolve the issue or pay a large hourly rate (as an emergency call-out) for someone with experience to fix the problem. The hourly rate in question would most likely be more expensive than paying for a maintenance package in the first place. A maintenance package is essentially a warranty for your website which ensures there is someone to resolve any issues you might have. The requirements for needing a maintenance package always comes down to how much time and expertise you have to update and maintain your website. If, like most people in business, you are time-poor and the answer is very little, then we would recommend that you absolutely put one in place. If you would like to talk to a member of our team about maintenance packages then give us a call on 01903 686858 or email web@constructivemarketing.co.uk
KIP: Getting Results On Social Media
Social media is an essential marketing tool for businesses, but it can be difficult to use it in the right way to see the results you want. In this Knowledge Is Power article, we’ll talk you through the three main components to success on any social media platform. Before we do that though, it’s important to consider who your target audience actually is and that your business probably doesn’t need to be on every single social media platform. This is a mistake we see time and time again. So the first step to achieving your social media goals is identifying which platforms to be on. What social media platforms should my business be on? At Constructive Marketing, we look after a wide range of businesses’ social media channels and each one is on a different mixture of platforms. For businesses that operate in the B2B market, LinkedIn, Instagram and X is usually the way to go. Whereas one looking to target individual consumers needs to be on Facebook and Instagram or even TiKTok or X. This is only a general recommendation and where ‘knowing your audience’ really matters as you may find that a specialist platform, like Etsy, could benefit your business.. Of course, things aren’t usually that simple and for some clients we find that a two-pronged marketing approach works best for them. For example, some of our clients predominantly serve the B2C market, but can also supply to businesses. For them, a mixture of social feeds with varying content is the way to go. If you’re not sure where to start, it’s best to speak to an expert to make sure you’re on the right track. The Three Main Components Of Social Media Success With a combined social media experience of over 20 years, our social media team identified the three main components you will need for social media success. The great thing about these components is that they apply to each of the social media platforms and to any social media strategy. Regardless of what you want to achieve and on what platform you want to achieve it. 1: Accuracy The first thing to understand before you start using social media for your business is who you are trying to reach. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, sales, website visits or something else, you need to always start with that question – who am I trying to reach? Then you can move on to ask, ‘what is it I want them to do?’ This is the cornerstone of all marketing and is especially true for social media. The main aim of each platform is to show its users content they are most likely to engage with (and therefore keep them using the platform for longer and more often). So making sure that the content you’re creating will be liked by your target audience is key. This may seem like an obvious point to make, but you’ll be surprised by the amount of people that don’t do this. More often than not, people get carried away with creating content they like creating, or content that they would like to see in their own feeds. Rather than what is best for their target consumer. 2: Consistency There are two ways that consistency is important to social media success: the amount of posts and the quality of the posts. Posting consistently is crucial to get the attention of any of the social media algorithms. Think of it like knocking on the door of a packed networking room. Eventually, you’ll be let in and be able to meet everyone inside. Algorithms look for consistent activity so if you’re posting the same amount of times each week, your content will begin to appear to more people. Making sure that the quality of the content is always good is the other way that consistency is key. We’ve written a whole blog post on why content consistency gets great results. In that blog post, we also give a couple of client success stories that show that it works. 3: Time One of the misconceptions of social media is that it’s a quick fix that will secure sales straight away. Yes, a tiny percentage of posts do ‘go viral’ and create a huge buzz but in reality that’s not the case. Building interest and reputation through organic social media activity is a long game. Remember that, above all else, the aim of social media is to build a relationship with your current and potential customers, and this takes time. You wouldn’t walk up to a complete stranger, ask them to marry you and expect them to say yes, (unless you’re on ‘Married At First Sight’ of course!). It’s the same with social media; why should you expect people to buy from you after you’ve put out just one post asking them to? Instead, you need to take the time to build a relationship with them and gain their trust before they even consider becoming a customer. Your post also needs to direct that potential customer to a credible source of more information, such as a specific landing page on your website. There are lots of different factors at play that impact the time it will take so it’s important to trust the process. One of the mistakes business owners make is cutting their social media budget too early. Implementing these components into your social media It’s best to put the components into practice in the order we’ve listed them in. Identifying who you’re trying to reach and what you would like them to do is an important first step to getting the results you want from social media. We offer a diagnostic service that involves a half-day meeting with one of our experts to identify where you’re going wrong and what you need to be doing instead. Once that’s been done, we’ll produce a non-obligatory strategy that we can help you implement or you can take elsewhere. If this sounds like something you
Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Be Using WordPress
The first thing to think about when it comes to creating your new website shouldn’t be what it is going to look like but rather what you are going to use to build it. There are a couple of website builders people tend to gravitate towards when building their first website, those being Wix and Squarespace. While these do offer their own benefits, there are a few reasons why WordPress should be your first choice. Here’s our top 3: 1 – Easy to use and customise These simple website builders offer basic features for people who aren’t experienced in web design to build a website quickly. While these options may seem cheaper and easier at first, where these website builders fail is when it comes to expanding on your website with additional functionality and accessibility options. Something a website should do as your business evolves. This is where WordPress comes in, its ever-expanding library of plugins and themes far surpasses that of any other site building platform out there. How we’ve done this for a client – We built Woodstock Day Nursery a new website in a user-friendly website builder. This means that staff can make changes to the website themselves which is important to them as a busy small business. Once the website was completed, we delivered a training session for the staff to make sure they can use the website builder to make any changes they need to. It’s worth mentioning that 30 minutes of website changes are included in our website maintenance package. So even if you can do most of the changes, anything you can’t do we can do for you as part of the monthly fee for keeping the website secure. 2 – Security When you are building your new website you want to be sure that it is protected against malicious attacks. This is where the multitude of security plugins available on WordPress come into play. One popular example is Wordfence, a plugin which periodically scans your website for issues and security breaches. It can also send you notifications when users log in to your website. This can help you figure out who is accessing your website and when exactly they did it. How we do this for clients – Whenever we have a maintenance agreement with a client we always ensure that we add security plugins to the website. This is to ensure that the site is protected against malicious and harmful attacks. These attacks often include creating a backdoor into your website for unauthorised users to access, defacement of the website and slowing down the load times of the website. While these security plugins aren’t guaranteed to stop everything, they do protect against the vast majority of attacks. 3 – Data Data portability isn’t often something people think about when creating a website but it definitely should be. Being able to export your whole website and move it seamlessly to another location such as a new domain is a massive timesaver, and WordPress makes this very simple. Other website builders such as Wix make this process much more difficult than it needs to be, as they don’t want you to take your website away from their servers. This means that you can’t export your website to another host if you are unhappy with the service they are providing. Flexibility is what WordPress is all about. Being able to design your site how you want, with the ability to move it to a new domain in an instant, all while making sure your site is secure. What more could you ask for! How we do this for clients – We use WordPress for all of the websites we build and this allows us to easily transfer a whole website onto another URL. The huge benefit this has is that the website ‘in progress’ is a live site so it looks exactly how it will look when it’s transferred to the main URL. Rather than having to view the site in an editor which may not be showing you exactly what your site will look like when you hit ‘publish’. Personally, we couldn’t recommend WordPress enough. If you want to find out more about why you should be using WordPress give us a call on 01903 686858 or email our web development team at web@constructivemarketing.co.uk See below for some examples of websites we’ve built for a variety of clients. Clicking on one will take you to the site:
3 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now To Improve Your Social Media Marketing
As we head into 2024, you may be looking for quick wins you can do to get your social media marketing off to a good start in the new year. In honour of National Mentoring Month, we wanted to give you three easy things you can do to do just that. When we’re delivering social media training, we always like to give people a couple of ‘constructive nuggets’ that they can come away with and implement straight away. Which is what we hope you get from this blog post. So, without further ado, here’s what we suggest: Use authentic photo and video One of the things we see time and time again with all our clients is that when we use authentic photos and videos in their posts, they get a lot more engagement. With most of us having smartphones with fantastic cameras on them, getting quick snaps of the work you’re doing has never been easier. If what you do involves improving a space, a great thing to do is get a photo before you start work and a photo after – preferably from the same spot. This will allow your social media audience to see your work and compare the results. Which acts as a great portfolio for you and is something you can easily implement into your posts for better engagement. Make sure you’re using your banner photo space A mistake we see all too often is businesses not using the banner photo space they have on their Facebook, X or LinkedIn profiles to showcase what they do. This is something that can be easily fixed with a great photo of your product or service that will act as a centrepiece for your feed. As an example; you could use a before and after photo – as we suggested in our first tip – to really demonstrate what you do. There are free versions of image software like Canva that allow you to make sure that your photos fit in the given space. Which will ensure it crops well and is easily visible. Use hashtags properly If your business is on Instagram, X or LinkedIn, hashtags can be a powerful tool to help you reach the right people. Next time you write a post for your business, try to include hashtags that are: It’s important to make sure that you don’t overuse hashtags and keep them relevant to the audience you want to reach to maximise their potential. If you’re already doing these things and your business is still struggling to benefit from social media, it might be time to speak to our social team. They will be able to help identify where you’re going wrong and establish a social media strategy that works for your business. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email social@constructivemarketing.co.uk.
Content Trends To Look Out For In 2024
And how your business can start maximising them now! As 2023 draws to a close, it’s important to be looking ahead at 2024. Over the last few years, the content marketing industry has been growing rapidly and 2024 will be no exception. Statista predicts that by 2026, the industry’s revenue will reach $107 billion. The short of it is, if you’re not yet using content marketing as a tool to grow your business, you’re missing out. The good thing is that it’s never too late to start and with a new year on the horizon, now is the perfect time to get going. As content marketing specialists, we understand that the term ‘content marketing’ covers a huge amount of topics, techniques and theories. So, what should a business be paying attention to most as we head into 2024? To make things easier, we’ve listed the top three content marketing trends of 2024 and how your business can make the most of them now: 1. Video marketing We know you’re probably not surprised to see this at the top of our list. Video marketing has been growing exponentially over the last few years and it’s only going to get bigger. This is mainly due to the shift in just how much video content is produced and consumed everyday. At one time, video marketing mainly referred to online content with the exception of TV ads. Now, businesses are using other channels like DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) billboards to reach their target audience with video marketing. Video personalisation We’re also likely to see more personalisation come to video marketing. In previous years, personalised content was something that wasn’t used for video, but in 2024, it’s thought that this will be explored more. Businesses will likely be capitalising on it as a way to form a better connection with consumers. Short form videos These short, ‘snackable’ videos have become one of the most consumed forms of content in the last year or so and this is only set to grow further into 2024. Businesses have rightfully begun to use this form of content as a way to reach their target market and the need to do this is only growing. How can my business use video marketing? We often work with businesses that are reluctant to jump on the video bandwagon as they feel that a video can’t be made from what they do. This really isn’t the case! Video marketing doesn’t have to be something that’s scary to do, if you’ve already got photos of the work you do or the product you make, you already have the content you need to make a video. With a few clever animations, you can really capture an audience’s attention. Don’t have the time to put it together? We can help. Even if the work your business does is very hands-on, you mostly likely have an HD video recorder in your pocket. Just taking one minute to film what you’re seeing on the job, or a quick demonstration of a completed job filmed on your phone is more than enough to be getting on with. Just recently, a client of ours sent through a video of a product they had just installed in action and it has quickly become their most engaging post on LinkedIn. 2. User-Generated Content Authenticity and credibility have only increased in importance and will continue to do so well into 2024. This is mainly due to a societal shift in being less trusting post pandemic (when the public was most vulnerable) and the economy experiencing a shrinkage post pandemic. Both causing people to be extra careful with where and how they spend their money. With more and more information available for consumers to inform their buying decision, the process is taking longer. As a business, it needs to be a top priority to build consumer trust and make sure that you’re the business that consumers choose. Which is where User-Generated content comes in; the easiest and possibly the most effective way to build trust among consumers. What is user-generated content and how can I use it? User-generated content is as it sounds, content that has been produced by a user/ consumer. The most common form of this type of content is reviews and testimonials. By managing the community engagement your business receives through its marketing channels, you’ll be able to create a sense of belonging and trust among your consumers. Customer reviews are paramount We always tell our clients that one of the most powerful things you can do is collect customer reviews. These are like gold dust and serve as a good conversion tool as 47% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. The amount of reviews a business has can also influence how trusted it is among potential customers. Sharing customer reviews with your target market is a great way to use user-generated content and make for a great social media post too! 3. Meaningful content Something we’ve always said is the principles of marketing stay the same, it’s the channels in which we practise these principles that evolve. Meaningful content making it on the content marketing trends list for 2024 is proof of that. While it’s always been key to produce content that resonates with your target audience, it is now more important than ever. As we’ve mentioned, consumer trust has declined so it’s never been so important to make sure the content you’re putting out builds that trust with your potential customers. That, paired with the fact you’ll need to stand out among the rest of the noise, means that meaningful content is certainly going to be a trend for 2024. How can I create meaningful content? Understanding your audience is the only way to make meaningful content that resonates with them. Think of it like giving a gift, how can you give someone a gift they’ll like if you don’t know them that well? Understanding your target audience
Why Content Consistency Gets Great Results
Spending big advertising budgets with little ROI? Here’s how content marketing can help It can be tempting to want to spend big on digital advertising, but in our experience, it often overpromises and under delivers. At Constructive Marketing, we consistently produce high quality content to achieve clients’ business goals – and it works What is good content? Before we dive into why it works and the results we’ve achieved for clients, it’s important to understand what we mean by good content. What you think is a good piece of content may not be what your ideal customer is looking for and therefore may not resonate with them. Resulting in you not getting the results you want. We have written a whole blog post on what makes good content, but in short you need to ask yourself these three questions: We dive into these three questions deeper in our blog post so it’s well worth a read to help you improve on your own content. Why does good and consistent content work? There are two main reasons that good and consistent content garners good results, the first is that by consistently providing good content to consumers, you build up a good relationship with them. Which builds their trust in you and ultimately converts them in one way or another. Whether that be to sign up to receive more content from you. Or for them to purchase a product/ service from you. The second reason it works is because the algorithms love consistent quality! LinkedIn, for example, shows companies/ users that post consistently at the top of other user’s news feeds. With users spending an average time of just 7 minutes on the platform, you’ll want to make sure your content is near the top of their feed to increase the chances of it being seen. It’s important to remember that consistent doesn’t mean constant so it’s important to only commit to an amount of posts a week that you can stick to. Whether that’s once a week, twice or even three times a week. Whatever it is, making sure you can stick to it is the key. You also need to bear in mind that posting consistently isn’t a quick fix, but you will see results after a short time. As long as you’re consistently posting good quality content that resonates with your audience. In our experience, it’s like a snowball effect – once the ball starts rolling, it quickly picks up pace! Client success stories It wouldn’t be right for us to preach about being consistent with good quality content if we hadn’t seen fantastic results from it. So here are a couple of success stories we’ve had within the last six months. Propelling Cheesmur’s reach We are really proud of the fantastic success we’ve achieved with Cheesmur’s LinkedIn page. Over the last three months (July-October 2023), the page has had way over 27,000 impressions and has an engagement rate of 88%. Which is 84.5% above the average engagement rate for LinkedIn company pages. Earlier, we mentioned the snowball effect and Cheesmur has definitely experienced that with their follower growth having an increase of 8.5% when compared to the previous three months. Now, Cheesmur is consistently reaching, on average, over 300 construction professionals every day on LinkedIn alone and it’s thanks to consistent posting of good quality content. For Cheesmur, this means our content team works with the contracts Director and site managers to receive information about current projects. Which our team then turns into engaging social media and Google posts. We also develop the more detailed projects/ topics into long form content for their blog. All of which improves both their brand awareness through multiple channels; social media and Google. You can read the full Cheesmur case study here. Getting Admor on Google’s page one without spending a Google budget With our expert knowledge, we were able to take Admor’s budget and make sure that the content we produced for them was placed in the right place to achieve their goals. The result was that their dental software website moved to page one of Google and they began to get more traction on social media. You can read more about the initial stages of the strategy in the case study. Since then, Admor has trusted us with looking after their other brands. So we’ve implemented a content marketing strategy that spans across all three of their brands. The new strategy has only been in place a month (September-October) and has already achieved way over 285 impressions. With an engagement increase of 4,200% when compared to the previous period (July-August), we think it’s safe to say that encompassing all of their brands into one strategy has been a success. Let us help you too! We would love to help you implement a strong content marketing strategy to help you achieve your business goals too. Give us a call or email us letting us know what it is you’re looking to achieve. So far, we’ve helped businesses increase brand awareness/ engagement, sales and even helped over 20 become award winning!You can read more of our case studies here.
KIP: Branding
What is a brand? Why is it important and how can you start managing yours? One of the things that we do for clients is manage their brand reputation to make sure that they are represented in the correct way across all marketing channels. This can take a variety of forms as every channel requires different management. In this Knowledge Is Power article, we’ll be taking a deeper look into branding. We’ll explain what a brand is and give examples of the ways in which we manage our clients’ brands to give you a better understanding of how you can be managing your own. What is a brand and why do I need one? We hear the word ‘brand’ being thrown around a lot, but what really is it and why is it important to have one? In short, a brand is the identity of a business or ‘the sum of how a product or business is perceived by those who experience it’. The most important thing to remember about a brand is that it is one of the things that separates you from your competition. It also helps you to build a strong relationship with your customers. Both of which are very important when it comes to establishing yourself in your market. How to manage your brand When talking about branding, people often think about the huge international ones like Coca-Cola or Amazon, but every business has the opportunity to have a brand – including yours. There’s lots of components to a brand, but we’re going to be looking at brand personality and the elements you need to think about in order to manage it. As well as real examples of how we put theory into practice at Constructive Marketing. Be consistent As we’ve mentioned, a brand is a way for you to differentiate yourself from your competition. As such, it should be recognisable among others. The key to this is consistency with everything that you do. From the quality product or service you provide to the customer service and of course, your communications. There are two main elements of communication that people will recognise most – your visuals and your copy. Consistency with your visuals can be achieved by adopting brand guidelines and sticking to a template for social media posts. If it’s difficult to stick to a template for social posts, simply using your logo on all the images is a good idea so that consumers recognise it’s your business. Not to mention that by exposing your target audience to your logo, you will be reinforcing your brand to them. How we do this for clients For Cheesmur, we developed branded social icons that we use across all platforms for specific post types. For instance, if we’re posting about a finished project, we’ll use the ‘Cheesmur project complete’ logo. By doing this, a style can be established which allows Cheesmur to be recognised in people’s news feeds. Posting consistently with this style allows the Cheesmur brand to be reinforced to its followers. It also shows their target audience that they are actively working on and completing projects. Manage the tone of voice Although visuals are recognised quicker, the way your writing sounds when you’re representing the business is also important. A lot of people like to think of a brand as a personality and so the tone of voice in text is important. It’s how your business sounds and it needs to align with your brand values. Make sure that the copy you write for all channels is consistent to reinforce your brand and make it recognisable. That’s not to say that the message has to stay exactly the same on every channel as the audience will differ slightly from channel to channel. How we do this for clients Take Wall Bros as an example; the message we’re communicating for them is that they’re local flooring experts that have extensive knowledge on flooring. They also deliver high quality customer service and are traditional in their approach (they don’t sell online). We don’t explicitly say these things, but we convey that message in different ways across channels: The thing that stays consistent across all channels is of course the tone of voice. Which is warm and friendly. Hopefully seeing our breakdown of the different channels and what we do on each of them demonstrates to you how your messaging can be communicated through different channels in different ways. Making sure you’re managing your brand personality is integral to a marketing strategy and helps you achieve your goals. If you’re struggling with managing your brand, or you need help establishing a marketing strategy, get in touch. Our team of marketing specialists are on hand to give you the help that you need.
Our Top Tips For Making The Most From Exhibiting
We’re going to be exhibiting at the Better Business Show this year so we’ve been busy planning our new Constructive Marketing stand. Which has involved getting new pop-up banners produced (well, re-skinning the old ones!) and working out what we’re going to be giving away to help people remember us and our new branding. With all of this preparation, we realised that it might be helpful to share our top tips for exhibiting. Helping you make the most of exhibiting at the next business expo you attend. So here they are: Be memorable First and foremost you need to make sure that people remember you which we know can be easier said than done. Especially in a big space full of other businesses who are also trying to get their voices heard. But there are some things that you can do: Make sure people are drawn to your stand As we said, there are lots of other businesses competing for visitors’ attention in one room. Make sure that your stand is attractive to people – make them want to come over and say hello! When making your stand attractive to visitors there are two things to ask yourself: is my stand open to invite people in and what on the stand will catch people’s eye? It’s important for it to be easy for people to come and say hello. A common mistake is having a table on your stand because it creates an immediate barrier between you and potential customers. Instead, opt for no table and be standing up to greet visitors when something on your stand catches their eye. It’s great when the eye-catching thing on your stand is something that is to do with your business, but having something unrelated can work too. You just need something that acts as a conversation starter – a reason for people to visit your stand. Have something to give away We don’t know about you, but whenever we go to business expos we always look out for the freebies! Whether it’s a pen, mug or notepad, most stands will have something that they’re giving out and there’s a good reason for that. Having something for stand visitors to take away means that they’re going to have something to remember you by. The key with choosing what to give out is making sure it’s something that is useful and – if you can – making it something that will sit on their desk. Make sure you leave with homework to do We always know it’s been a successful business expo when we’re leaving with lots of people to chase up. So make sure that you get contact information from the people that you want to follow up with. If you have a lanyard scanner, then use it, but also get business cards if you can because they are more memorable. There are a few ways that you can encourage people to volunteer their information. The most common way at a business expo is via a business card prize draw. Another way is to make them want to give their details to you. A good way to do this is to showcase your expertise. Maybe have a show reel playing or a leaflet showing off your latest case studies. Then do your homework quickly! Although you might not have done it back at school, it’s important to do your homework as soon as you can. Getting in touch with people very shortly after the business expo will ensure the event is fresh in their mind and that they haven’t forgotten you. As the old saying goes: strike while the iron’s hot! At the end of the day, the whole point in paying to exhibit at business expos is to come away with useful business contacts and ultimately more business. Making sure you get contact information and follow up on those you meet will help you do just that. We wish you luck with whichever business expo you’re attending. If you’re at the Better Business Show on 21st September, make sure you come and say hello to us!
KIP: The Power Of Email Marketing
Find out what email marketing is, why you should be doing it and how you can implement it into your marketing strategy. Welcome to our new blog post series called, ‘Knowledge Is Power’ or ‘KIP’ for short. In this series we’re going to be diving deeper into different marketing topics, helping you to strengthen your knowledge of them and understand how you can start implementing this into your business. The more you know about how to market your business, the more it will help to ultimately grow your business. For our first post in the series, we’re looking at email marketing and the things that can be achieved when a business implements it in the right way. It’s a marketing technique that business owners often want to start doing, but they’re not sure where to start or what they really want to achieve with it. If this is you, we hope that this article is of use and that you find you can start using this amazing marketing tool within your business. What is email marketing? We’ll start from the beginning. Email marketing is a marketing technique which involves an organisation sending out a commercial message to a group of people over email. The great thing about email marketing is it doesn’t have to be a ‘hard sell’ tactic and can instead focus on building a relationship with the organisation’s target consumers. Just like other forms of digital marketing, email marketing allows the organisation to not only send out marketing communication but measure it too. So that over time campaigns can become more intuitive to the audience and more effective at achieving the goal they were set out to. The benefits of email marketing Email marketing can support any stage of the consumer journey and can help organisations achieve their marketing goals. Here’s a few key benefits a good email marketing strategy can bring to your business: Build relationships with existing customers Marketing isn’t just about acquiring new customers, it’s also about nurturing the relationship between the business and existing customers. This makes sure that they continue to see the business positively and, in turn, gives you repeat business or new customers through recommendations. Sending out regular emails to your existing customers increases the touch points they have with your business. This strengthens the relationship the two parties have and increases customer advocacy. What is customer advocacy? Customer advocacy refers to the final stage of the loyalty ladder, a concept developed by marketing theorist, Adrian Payne. The concept outlines the stages a consumer goes through to become an advocate of a brand. Meaning that they actively recommend your product or service to people and speak well of the company. A very powerful asset when growing your brand. Get customer feedback The only way to build customer relationships is to understand what your customers want and email marketing can help you do that. Through sending online surveys via email, you can gain good insight into a huge variety of things: Having these insights is invaluable and will help you to improve your future marketing efforts as well as your products or services. It can also work really well with customer nurture – how many times have you received an email that looks like this: Not only is an email like that a post-purchase touch point, it’s also an opportunity to gain customer insight. Send very specific content to target audiences While customer segmentation is possible in all marketing techniques, email marketing platforms like Hubspot make it really easy to segment your audience. Which is separating your contacts into lists based on different factors. For example; have they only just made their first purchase with you or have they been loyal for over two years? By segmenting your audience, you’re able to send very specific content to each segment. Making it relevant to them and increasing the campaign’s effectiveness as it’s much more likely to resonate with the audience. There’s no point in sending a ‘thank you for your first purchase’ email to a customer who has been loyal to you for years. In fact, it could harm your relationship with the loyal customer if you did so. Instead, why not offer your loyal customers a special discount to thank them for their loyalty? Which is possible to do with the correct segmentation Automate the nurture cycle One of the problems businesses face is not having enough time to maximise the benefits we’ve listed above. But, when used properly, an email marketing platform like Hubspot allows businesses to automate emails. So keeping on top of it doesn’t become time-consuming. Send out welcome emails, thank yous and even reminders to consumers automatically to make sure you hit all the right touchpoints and ultimately grow your business. How to implement email marketing into your marketing strategy Thousands of businesses are already harnessing the power of email marketing and using it as part of their marketing strategy, but it can be hard to know where to start. So here’s a step by step to give you some pointers. Although we would recommend getting a professional on board to guide you to making the most of your email marketing. Once you start using email marketing in your marketing strategy, you’ll start reaping the benefits we spoke about. As we said earlier, it can be beneficial to get an expert on board, not to take over your email marketing but help guide you in the right direction. When you’re ready to start using email marketing within your organisation, we recommend using Hubspot. As a very user friendly platform, it’s easy to get to grips with it – it has lots of fab free resources too! You can sign up for Hubspot here:
Telling Your Story In The Right Way
What is good content and why is it important? Over the last couple of years, the importance of good quality content has become really apparent. With Google changing its algorithm to favour helpful content and other search engines following suit, it’s important to make sure your content is up to scratch to maintain and even boost your ranking . What is good content? Algorithms are constantly changing which can make identifying good content seem like a daunting task. But there are some key principles that don’t change. So here’s three questions to ask yourself to determine whether your content is good: Is it relevant to your target audience? The age old rule for marketing is ‘know your audience’ and the same goes for content. You need to make sure that the content you’ve created is relevant to the audience it’s for. Which is what the search engines are looking for – they’re delivering the most relevant content to their users. Even if the content is ultimately selling your product or service, you need to make sure that it adds value to the audience. Is it original? There are billions of content pieces out there now so of course it is difficult to be completely original. But it is important to put your own spin on someone else’s idea to keep your content original. It’s also important to make sure that the exact same content hasn’t been posted elsewhere. This is especially important if working with AI platforms like Bard or ChatGP as these platforms mine the internet for answers to your questions. Always remember that whatever they produce, it won’t be original and it could be from out of date sources. Search engines hate duplicate content so publishing duplicate content will have a negative impact on your rankings and could see your website being downgraded. Is it focused? What we mean by that is, is it part of a bigger strategy? Moving away from just thinking about external factors, the content needs to be beneficial to your business. It should be helping you reach your business goals and align with your company’s objectives. Being part of a bigger strategy also means that it is not just a stand alone piece of content as, like with all marketing activity, consistency is key. How good content can help your business Unlike other ways to market your business, content can support your customers through every stage of the customer journey. Being such a versatile tool for businesses means that it can help your business in a variety of areas. Here’s just a few of the things we have achieved for our clients as a result of improving their content marketing: Less bounce rates and longer website session time By creating good quality content, target consumers are spending more time on our clients’ websites. Increasing their engagement with consumers and working to convert them into paying customers. Improved brand awareness Establishing a strong content marketing strategy has meant that our clients have improved their brand awareness. Making sure that the content that they put out reflects positively on their brand and firmly establishes brand messaging Built better relationships with customers Content marketing isn’t just about obtaining new customers, it’s also about improving your business’s relationship with existing ones. By creating engaging and consistent content, our clients have built better relationships with their customers. It’s these customers that become advocates for the business and ultimately refer new clients to you. Start reaping the benefits of a good content marketing strategy now. Get in touch with us to find out how our team of experts can help you achieve your business goals.