Digital Marketing

How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses

Hey there, small business owners and marketing enthusiasts! Pull up a chair, grab your favorite beverage, and let’s chat about something that can make or break your online presence: social media strategy. Now, I know what you’re thinking – “Not another social media lecture!” But stick with me, because I’ve got some real-world nuggets of wisdom to share that could transform your small business’s social game.

Before we dive in, let me tell you a quick story. A few months back, Slinky Digital Agency was working with a local coffee shop – let’s call it “The Daily Grind.” They made the best espresso in town, but their social media presence was… well, let’s just say it was as bland as gas station coffee. Fast forward three months, and they’re now the talk of the town, with lines out the door every morning. How’d we do it? That’s exactly what we’re going to explore today.

So, buckle up! We’re about to embark on a journey through the wild and wonderful world of social media strategy. And trust me, by the end of this, you’ll be itching to give your social presence a makeover.

Know Your Audience (Like, Really Know Them)

First things first – who are you talking to? And no, “everyone” is not an acceptable answer. You need to get specific. Really specific.

Think about your ideal customer. What’s their name? How old are they? What do they do for a living? What keeps them up at night? What makes them laugh? The more detailed you can get, the better.

For “The Daily Grind,” we realized our primary audience was college students and young professionals aged 18-35. They were health-conscious, environmentally aware, and always on the lookout for the next Instagram-worthy spot.

Once you’ve got your audience nailed down, it’s time to do some sleuthing. Where do they hang out online? What kind of content do they engage with? What time of day are they most active?

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10 Essential Ways To Make Your Blog Posts More Effective

If your website has a blog and you create posts for it, it is to your credit because we guarantee many competitors will not be. However, even though you publish blog posts, you might wonder why you see very little return for that effort.

Blog posts have several objectives that can be measured, such as click-through rates, the blog page’s ranking on Google, and the number of positive comments it generates.

If these, and any other way you measure your blog posts, are nowhere near where you hoped for, then it could be, despite your best efforts, that your blog posts are simply not working. There are several ways to address this, and none is particularly difficult. So, from a reputable digital marketing agency, here are ten essential ways to make your blog posts more effective.

#1 – Know Who Your Audience Is: One of the biggest mistakes we see is blog posts being written with no obvious audience in mind, and as such, they become a bland and unremarkable pieces of text. You should know who your audience is, and when writing each post, write it in a way that will resonate with them.

#2 – Create Compelling Blog Post Titles: Copywriters are paid fortunes to create magazine headlines, and there is a reason why. It is the headlines that draw in readers. That same principle applies to the title of your blog posts, so spend the time to create compelling titles that attract an audience to every post.

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5 Mistakes to Avoid with Adwords Marketing

AdWords marketing, a key element of a Google Ad campaign, is a powerful form of digital marketing that strategically places your product or service in front of individuals who have already demonstrated interest by clicking on your ad. This targeted advertising approach ensures your message reaches an audience that is more likely to convert. What makes it even more beneficial is that with a Google ad campaign, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad, not just when they see it, making it a cost-effective marketing solution. Many businesses have found this method to be highly productive in marketing their goods and services. However, as with any Google Ad campaign or digital marketing strategy, mistakes can happen that affect the overall outcome. To maximize the success of your AdWords marketing, here are five common mistakes to avoid.

It is choosing a keyword that is too broad. Even though it may seem likely to attract many potential buyers, the cost will be too high to give you a good return on investment (ROI). It’s better to start with several long-tail keywords that will be much cheaper and work your way up as you get more profits. These keywords can be found in your Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools accounts.
Many people try to squeeze as many keywords into each campaign as possible. The idea with adwords marketing is to be laser targeted. One keyword for each campaign and landing page would be ideal, but it takes too much time. Instead, restrict yourself to about five keywords.
Sending visitors straight to the home page of your website. This leaves them confused as they try to find the information they expect from the ad keywords. It results in higher bounce rates and costs more. You need a dedicated landing page for each Google ad campaign that gives the visitor exactly what they want without looking for it.

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7 Tips For Generating Prospective Clients For Your Landscaping Business

For any landscape architect who is ambitious in terms of wanting their landscaping business to grow and expand, one of the barriers they often come up against is not knowing which ways they can effectively market that business to gain new clients. Should that include you, and you are seeking marketing tips for promoting your business, read on and you will discover seven such marketing ideas, all of which are highly effective at generating new leads for local businesses.

Social Media

Having an effective social media marketing campaign can bring you leads from multiple places online. When you consider how many social media sites there are, and how many local people will be using them, it is a marketing channel that must be utilised. The key is having interesting, amusing and even shocking or controversial content that hopefully becomes viral and gets you noticed by even more potential clients.

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5 Tips To Ensure Any Google Ads Campaign Your Create For Your Family Lawyers Business Is Successful

In terms of cost, there are two options that you have with regards to promoting your family lawyers business. They are paid and free. To be honest, to call the latter free is a bit misleading because whilst you might not pay for each individual click or visitor to your website, there are costs with respect to time, and potentially to the SEO agency who optimised everything to rank your website highly on Google in order to gain those visitors.

The ‘free’ route also takes longer to see results so if you want to start gaining new clients as soon as possible then it is paid advertising that you need. One of the most effective paid advertising options online is Google Ads. Previously called ‘AdWords’, this allows your business to bid for clicks for specific keywords and if the bid is successful then your ad, and more importantly, the link to your website, appears at the top of the page.

It seems fairly straightforward and at its core it is a relatively simple concept to understand, however, the means by which you become one those top spots has a bit more to it in terms of learning and actions. Nevertheless, even this is not that difficult especially if you follow some simple rules. In addition, you need to approach the setting up of your Google Ads campaign with a plan and strategy , rather than just randomly choosing and bidding on keywords.

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7 Ways You Can Optimise Your Family Lawyers Website For Better Google Rankings

You are hopefully already aware that there are multiple ways in which you market and promote your family lawyer business. Some can bring instant results such as pay per click advertising on Google or Facebook. Others require a long-term approach and some patience, such as SEO. Of the two approaches, it is the latter which can provide sustainable traffic to your website.

One of the longer-term methods of marketing your business is search engine optimisation, or SEO as it is normally called. An effective SEO strategy crafted by an experienced SEO consultant, can help your website move up the rankings on Google and the other search engines, and in the best case scenario reach one of the top three positions. Once there, it will benefit from increased levels of traffic as potential clients search using keywords relating to your business niche.

To achieve all that we need to put the emphasis on the word ‘effective’ as there are countless businesses that never get close to page one of the search engine results. They may try, but the way they implement their SEO is often flawed or tries to take short cuts. That may have worked years ago, but Google has long since gotten several steps ahead of these and instead of rankings improving, they decline.

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What are featured snippets and should I be worried about them?

If you’re an SEO beginner, you might not have heard of feature snippets, and you, therefore, might not be optimising your website for them. However, if you’re not then you’re missing out.

Basically, featured snippet is the name given to the small entries that appear at the top of the search results. These include things like the “people also ask” boxes, and the “featured result” at the top of a search page.

If you really want to succeed when it comes to SEO, you need to make sure that you’re optimizing your content for featured snippets. Otherwise, you will be missing out on a great opportunity, and your website will suffer.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this short guide to featured snippets and the best ways to achieve them.

What Is A Featured Snippet?

To put things simple, a featured snippet is an answer that the search engine – be it Bing, Google, or another – has taken from one of the pages that rank for the search term in question.

It is usually framed by a box and positioned above the number one search result, which means that it’s a great place to be. It’s important to note that featured snippets aren’t always taken from the number one search result, which means that there’s a chance to grab one even if you’re not right at the top of the ranking pages.

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Four Myths About SEO You Should Be Aware Of

Mention search engine optimisation, or SEO, to a room full of business people and you’ll see a variety of reactions, many of which will involve puzzled faces, grimacing or even a bolt for the nearest exit. It is understandable, given the vast amount of conflicting and confusing information that exists relating to SEO.

Sadly, there are some elements of this information which are likely to do more harm than good if applied to a website’s SEO strategy, and yet they appear time and time again on SEO forums, discussion groups and social media posts. Some of this information may seem to make sense at first but a look at the guidelines given out by the main search engines will show they are myths.

Myth #1: You Must Use A Dot Com Extension For Your Domain Name

Whilst dot com is desirable, according to Google it is not the case that they prefer dot com domains and rank them much higher than other extensions such as dot net or dot org. It is true that in the very beginning, Google could only recognise dot coms, but those days are long gone.

If you are a local company, seeking to attract local customers then it is more beneficial to select a domain with your country code such as ‘.au’ in Australia, or ‘.co.uk’ in the United Kingdom.

Myth #2: Keyword Research Is No Longer Useful

Many business owners, and sadly, SEO agencies too, seem to think that ‘they know best’ when it comes to what potential customers will search for. As a result, they optimise their websites and backlinks based on this presumption and then wonder why there has been no uplift in visitor traffic.

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How to Choose a Digital Agency

Once you have decided to get your company’s website up and running you will need to choose a digital agency to help you with the many elements that are essential for success. It is important to think carefully about what your business needs so that you can choose the best agency – one that you will be able to work with, that has the skills needed for your particular business.

Find out what they offer

Not all digital agencies offer the same things. One might only design and implement websites and not do any social – or other – marketing. Another may perform SEO but nothing else. You need a digital agency to have the skills required for your business so it is vital to speak with them first and find out exactly what they offer.

Choosing the right professional digital marketing agency is somewhat like choosing the right builder. If you want a high-end home built, you would not choose a project builder who prefers to erect cheaper homes, or vice versa. Once you have found several builders, you choose 3 and ask for quotes. So you can do a similar thing when choosing a digital agency.

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Seth Godin Asks : Are you a Marketing Wallflower?

Always a favorite marketing guru around here, Seth Godin has a quick quiz with a surprisingly telling answer. Instead of trying to win over the whole world, you should aim for a select niche of customers.

True, you might have a smaller customer base as a result – but you will have greater loyalty amongst those few. Let’s take a glance at some fields where this works:

The “Twilight” fiction franchise – The majority of people just don’t get excited about vampire stories. So what? This series appealed to tween / teen girls with a vivid and somewhat macabre imagination. And now they’re rolling in the dough.
Ethnic restaurants – Sure, not everybody likes (or even understands) Mediterranean food. So what? When you want falafel, hummus, and babaganouch, you just aren’t going to get that appetite satisfied at McDonald’s.
Hot Topic – The mall-based clothing and gift franchise focuses on the “Goth” and “punk rock” demographic. The rest of the teens head for more traditional fare, but the headbangers and rivitheads all flock here.

Will Search Engines One Day Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

We were scanning this fascinating write-up over at SEOMoz about “author/agent rank” when this thought occurred to us. See, the idea is that as social media gets more sophisticated and more data is tracked, search engines could learn how much weight to give an individual’s opinion based on their past web activity.

This is different to say a smart autoresponderinstead of a business responding to negative Facebook complaints, which while it can work automated – is a lot more personal being human written. Now imagine Google’s search database plugged into a Rogerian psychoanalysis script, similar to “Eliza“.

Maybe a conversation would go like this:

“Eliza, I’m torn over my girlfriend. We have a lot in common, but we just don’t seem to click.”

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