Christmas Marketing Strategy for 2020 – For the COVID-19 Christmas we’ve never seen before.

Small businesses across the globe have had to change strategies in multiple ways to counter the pandemic and to stay afloat. With how volatile 2020 has been, we can count on the festive season being like no other. The behaviours, activities and routines of your 'ideal customer' have been impacted. This means how receptive your customer may have been to your marketing tactics previously, may not be as effective or may have to be adjusted to fit their needs

Digital adoption has accelerated during the COVID-19 outbreak. The older generation often referred to as 'Gen X' or 'Boomers' have become more and more familiar with eCommerce, with millions of them now beginning to shop online.

What does this mean for your small business?

Along with the increase in the number of consumers and customers, there has also been a surge in the number of businesses that have integrated an eCommerce element into their business and began using social media during this period. It also means how your business is represented online is more vital than ever. 

We’re beyond the “I just need an online presence” phase now – Your online presence is the face of your business for the foreseeable future and beyond. Remember how much time you spent decorating your shop, or office? Yeah, it’s time to do that for your online store and presence.

It's important to remember, marketing isn't always about showcasing or bombarding the customer with pictures highlighting the product you sell; it's also about showcasing what your brand represents. Yes, the product or service matters; but people want to know who they're buying from too. 

So what do you need to do for your 2020 Christmas Marketing Strategy?

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Showcase your brand values on Social Media

Focus on building your brand and sharing its values. The only way your consumers and locals will know what you’ve been up to during the pandemic is through social media, so use it to showcase everything you’ve been doing. Think about your social media strategy for the festive period and take this time to build up an authentic relationship with your consumers to allow them to understand your values.

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Give back to your community

How you've helped the community and people during COVID-19 will make a significant impact on your potential customers. They're more likely to remember, follow or purchase from you when they can trust you’re a brand that connects with its community and customers.

Partnerships and Collaborations

Some of us have been hit harder than others with the pandemic crisis, so partnering up with other companies, businesses or collaborating on some sort of campaign might be a great idea which will help both of you. For example, you could collaborate with another business to do a Christmas competition or giveaway.

This generally involves you posting something on your social media feed, encouraging them to interact or engage by ‘tagging their friends’ or ‘sharing to their story’ whilst tagging you in it. That way, you're giving back to the community, raising brand awareness and following whilst helping each other out.

Real-time Marketing

One of the best ways to involve consumers into your business is by providing them real-time updates. Instagram and Facebook offer a 'Stories' feature, which allows you to upload images or videos for a time of 24 hours. Additionally, Instagram has also introduced "Reels" - their rival the newcomer TikTok.

This is a great feature which allows or prompts your followers to engage, something as simple as "Releasing a new product – Can anyone guess what it is?" would encourage them to engage with you, spark interest and also keep them engaged. They would want to know what this new product is, and that element would keep them engaged with your page.

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Plan your Christmas content

It’s never too early to start your Christmas marketing plan. An effective strategy is to start planning what you’ll post, on what platform so you’re not rushing around trying to create and think of content to post during your peak season.

It's never too early to begin planning; the right time is now!

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Build Interaction

Diversification of content is vital to keep your followers and customers engaged and interested in your content. Not everything should be focused on promoting your product or service, it’s strongly recommended to plan posts that are specifically there to entertain, inspire or engage your following to allow them to interact with you.

A good way of doing this is by asking your followers a question, prompting them to engage. This works great using the 'Poll' or the 'Ask me a Question' feature on Facebook and Instagram. For example, one of the questions you could ask is "How do you plan to celebrate Christmas this year?" and see what everyone plans to do this COVID Christmas!

Christmas Offers

Who doesn't love sales? Especially when it's Christmas, and everyone looks forward to splashing out on gifts for themselves and loved ones. Make use of this festive period and make sure you run some promotional offers and sales to encourage your consumer base.

People are more likely to splash out during the festive period, so you need to give them every incentive to spend on your service or product.

Christmas Services

Depending on your product or service, you could entice your customers by offering them a service which might be appealing to them given current COVID-19 circumstances interfering with how Christmas is customarily celebrated.

You could create gift hampers out of the products you sell or offer gift packaging service with personal messages for those who wish to ship directly to their loved ones. All of these things would make things more convenient for your consumer and also appeal to them during the festive period.

Festive Decoration

Remember what I mentioned earlier about designing or putting as much time into your online presence as you would in a shop or office? So why not brighten up your page, add a ‘festive’ element to your logo, add a cover photo which reflects the festive season.

This will help your followers and consumers get into the Christmas spirit and also shows them you’re dedicated to your business and connecting with the community. Something as simple as this can be very effective.

When is the right time to start?

If you haven’t already started, the next best time is NOW. Christmas marketing takes time to plan, create and schedule. Before you know it, the Christmas rush will be upon us. Get a head start on your competition and begin putting your marketing campaign together now.  

If you want to get the most out of Christmas campaign but don’t know where to begin, or how to get started, then get in touch with us. We understand how busy it can get, and we have a wealth of experience to be able to plan execute and deliver successful marketing campaigns.

5 Personal Finance Tips For Small Business Owner

Today’s guest post is from Anthony Hanson. Anthony is the founder of iFinance Department, an online accountancy aimed at helping small and medium businesses grow through the combined power of cloud technology and true financial expertise. 

When setting up your small business, it can become easy to get lost in the day to day financial management of your business, and completely overlook your own personal finances. What many business owners don’t realise is that often, wise or good decisions made in their personal finances can have a positive impact on their own business finances, just like bad decisions can negatively affect the running of your business.

Here, we’ve compiled some of the best financial tips for small business owners that address how to handle money pertaining to your personal finances that will help you in business.

1.  Establish an emergency fund.

According to financial planners and financial experts, the best rule of thumb to work by is to have three to six months worth of living expenses (after taxes) stored in a rainy day, or emergency savings fund. However, if you own a business, you may want to have an even larger emergency fund in case your business takes a downturn or you experience seasonal fluctuations in cash flow. Your emergency fund money should remain untouched unless in the very direst of circumstances, such as a financial emergency like a car accident, sudden major home repairs or renovations, a natural disaster and subsequent repairs, or any sudden, unforeseen medical bills. Having this money stored will not only give you better peace of mind in your own personal dealings, but you know that in the very worst case you will be able to support yourself or your family whilst still focusing on running your company, without the worry of what was to happen in the event that you lost your largest paying client and had to take pay ramifications.

2.  Save for retirement.

Many business owners put off retirement funds, and instead become too busy focusing on the present to think or plan for the future. However like anything, the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to be truly prepared for when the time comes. Small business owners are known for investing a large majority of their profits back into their business, but that does not mean there is not a wealth of options available to small business owners to allow them to save for retirement.  Depending on qualifying factors such as annual income, some small business owners find they are able to save more money for retirement as someone self-employed, than they could as an employee. Additionally, a pension can become a tax efficient way of withdrawing money from a business, which can then be used to build an income in retirement. Pensions are also ring fenced from the businesses creditors in the event of the worst case scenario.

3.  Keep Track of Your Personal Credit

You may think that bad credit is just applicable to your personal finances, but often that is not the case. At the start of any business journey, potential business owners struggle to get their business established which leads to rash financial decisions that can have later implications along the road. Watch your credit score and make sure that you pay bills on time whilst watching for any credit arrears that may need resolving immediately. If money is tight, even the smallest repayment on a credit card on its due date can make a big difference. Having better personal credit does contribute to your business, especially if your business is establishing credit under your, or your business’s name.

4.  Don’t Get Carried Away

To celebrate their success, many first time small businesses owners, or initial entrepreneurs revel in the freedom of working for themselves and earning a proportionate wage that is not dependent on an employer. Whilst this newfound experience is gratifying, the temptation to live the ‘high life’ can offer incur negative consequences on your business finances. In the event of a sudden financial downturn, the money that has been spent helping to live extravagantly could have helped float your business through to the other side of the event. Additionally, if there is no secondary source of income to help supply your emergency fund, or you as the owner are suddenly unable to work, that money could also have helped either contribute to an emergency fund, or paid a wage for someone else to keep things ticking over in your absence. Always make sure that you are living well, but that your business is protected at the same time.

5.  Work with a Professional Adviser.

At the very start of your small business journey, it can be a confusing and overwhelming place. Not only in the initial steps required to establish a business such as advertising, marketing, collecting a client base and then finally undertaking the work, but also in the financial setup. It can be easy to be misled or confused by conflicting advice. Having someone to talk to so that you can make informed decisions about your personal and business finances can be a huge asset, and a large worry off of your shoulders. Finding the right Financial Adviser, as well as the right accountant will help you arrange your business and personal finances to keep them running as smoothly and tax efficiently as possible. Whilst expert advice does always come at a cost, just like you are good at what you do they will have the experience to know what they are doing which will pay dividends in the long run. Try and see professional advice as an investment, and not a cost.Making sure your two key advisers communicate with each other, and are aligned with understanding to help you work towards your goals will let you focus on running your company with a refreshed mindset of calmness and optimism.

Everyone, not only small business owners, can improve their personal finances. Whether it’s through establishing a solid emergency fund, curating trusted personal credit, or taking the time to plan and save for their retirement, these options allow business owners especially the ability to focus on building their company to its optimum standard, whilst being assured they are making the correct financial and personal decisions, keeping the equation balancing right.

Are You Wasting Money on Google Ads?

For many small businesses, getting to the top of Google is a key element in ensuring that they get seen by the right audience. However, if you’re just starting out, or are in a particularly competitive industry, doing this organically can be difficult.

Search engine optimisation can take time and effort, so for many business owners, choosing to use Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is a great option for your business to appear at the top of Google search results. For those who don’t wish to use a dedicated Google advertising agency, setting up your advertising account may seem to be the answer. 

However, while Google advertising can be extremely effective – if you get it wrong, you can waste hundreds, if not thousands on paying for irrelevant clicks. So, without further ado – we explore some of the ways in which you may be wasting money on Google advertising.

 PS - want some one to one support to make sure you’re not wasting your budget? Take a look at our Google Ads Training or join our Google Ads Bootcamp.

You’re Paying For the Wrong Keywords

This is by far the biggest problem we as an agency encounter when undertaking Google Ads audits for clients. When you set up your Google ads account, it’s vital that firstly, you think very carefully about the keywords you wish to target.

By undertaking keyword research, you should be able to identify what your potential audience is searching for when it comes to your products or services.

If you’re just starting out, using Google’s own keyword planner can help, but you need to make sure that you are applying a good rationale. Let’s take an example – say we were setting up an advertising campaign showing our Google ads service. We could use the keyword planner to give us some ideas. You can either start with a keyword as below

Or you can start with a page on your website (note this can be a great way of checking how Google views your site for SEO purposes!)

Let’s look at the results when going from our website page. Many of Google’s suggested keywords are way too broad to be able to nail them down to someone searching for someone to manage their PPC advertising. In fact, if we look at the results below – the only real valuable result here is AdWords agency. Getting this wrong could be a very expensive mistake; a high bid on Adwords has a cost per click of  £77.50! 

When choosing which keywords to bid on, be specific and think about intent. Let’s say we bid on the search term “Google Ads”. We could generate clicks from any of the following…

• Someone looking to log in to their Google ads account

• Someone just investigating what Google ads are.

• Someone doing research on Google ads for a content piece.

None of those clicks would be likely to convert and we would spend a lot of money in the process. 

To get the most out of your ad spend, it’s vital that you consider whether the keywords that you have selected have commercial intent (e.g the person searching is doing to with a view to purchase at some stage). Check out this great article from Wordstream on finding commercial intent keywords. 

Using the wrong match types

 So you have nailed down the search terms that you want to bid on and are happy that they are likely to lead to actual sales or enquiries, you’ve set your budget and all is well right? Wrong… If you’re using the wrong match types, it doesn’t matter how well selected your keywords are - the chances are that you may still be paying for clicks that are irrelevant. 

By default, when setting up a paid search campaign on Google, your keywords are set to something called “broad match”. This means that your ad can appear when a user searches any word in your keyphrase, in any order. It can also interpret your keywords with closely related keywords. This, in turn, can lead to your ad appearing in searches that are not relevant, or lack commercial intent. 

Learn more about Google match types here 

You Aren’t Tracking Conversions

This is something we encounter on a shockingly frequent basis. You’re spending money on your Google ads, but aren’t tracking your results! If you are not tracking Google ads conversions, you are likely to be wasting a lot of money on irrelevant clicks, or worse still - Google ads are not selling any of your product and you don’t know about it! 

Understanding conversion rates, and what works is vital to ensure that you are not throwing away cash on Google ads. 

Check out our blog on measuring ROI on adverting.

Using the Wrong Bid Strategy

One thing to always bear in mind – Google is there to take your money! It’s very easy when setting up a Google Ads account to see an objective of “conversions” and think – “hell yeah, that’s what I want – conversions” and tick the box.

A word of warning though, choosing automated bid strategies means that you lose control of your bidding amounts, and Google has to have data to work with. Therefore if you choose, for example, maximise conversions on a brand new account, Google has no data with which to know who is likely to convert on your site. This is why conversion tracking is so important – and choosing your exact goals.

At The Small Biz Expert, generally, we tend to avoid automated strategies to start off with and suggest, if you have the time to regularly check your account that you do too.

You’re Ignoring Auto Apply

When you log into Google ads, you often see a bunch of suggestions from Google that may not work for your business. For example, you may see suggestions for irrelevant keywords, a change of bid strategy or adding responsive search ads that aren’t going to work for your business.

When looking at Google recommendations, review them thoroughly and check whether they are applicable (hint – often they’re really not!)

Also, be careful of “auto-apply”. Auto apply basically makes changes to your ads after 14 days if you do not dismiss their suggestions. 

You Don’t Check Your Quality Score

When it comes to Google advertising, Quality Score can make or break your campaigns and seriously affect your budget. Googles quality score is a rating of the quality and relevance of your ads for any given keyword. It takes into account three main elements, namely

·        Your Click-Through Rate

·        The relevance of the ads in your ad group to your keywords

·        The quality of your landing page.

To get just an idea of how much Quality score could affect your costs, take a look at the photo below

You Don’t Check Your Location Settings

When setting up your Google account you would have considered what locations your business serves. You may offer a local service - where you can physically only get to customers within a certain radius of your offices. It may be that you sell products on a national or even multinational scale. You may wish to target only certain areas which are likely to contain your target customer. 

While you may have set up your Google ads to target a specific area - it’s important that you understand the different ways in which Google interprets area targeting. Remember, when you target an area - generally speaking you will also be targeting people with an interest in that area but who don’t necessarily live or work there, so make sure to exclude any areas or countries where you don’t want to do business. 

Take a look at this advice from Google on location targeting. 

If you’re worried about wasting money on your Google ads, why not get in touch with us for a completely free, no-obligation consultation. As a Google Partner Agency, we are more than happy to assist you and offer Google Ads training as well as Google Ads management.

How To Measure Online Advertising Performance

Measuring digital marketing performance is crucial to business success,  but a huge percentage of businesses are failing to accurately track how digital ads are contributing to business goals.

  One of the biggest benefits of online advertising, when compared to traditional offline marketing campaigns, is the ability to be able to obtain a huge amount of data and insights, however, for many of those who are just starting out in online advertising, it can be difficult to understand how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. 

With that in mind, we bring you our guide to measuring online advertising performance. 

What Is the Purpose of Your Advertising Campaign?

Before even considering which channels you wish to use, it’s vital that you consider the purpose of your advertising campaign, and the more specific the better.

For example, while your first instinct may be “we want to get more sales” it’s wise to break this down into further stages. For example, if you offer a brand new product which consumers are not yet aware of, it may be wise to invest some of your advertising budgets in growing awareness of the product first. Therefore you would be more likely to have a purpose to ‘inform’ rather than to sell at the first stage.

Before even considering which channels you wish to use, it’s vital that you consider the purpose of your advertising campaign, and the more specific the better.

For example, while your first instinct may be “we want to get more sales” it’s wise to break this down into further stages. For example, if you offer a brand new product which consumers are not yet aware of, it may be wise to invest some of your advertising budgets in growing awareness of the product first. Therefore you would be more likely to have a purpose to ‘inform’ rather than to sell at the first stage.

Additionally, sales may be a secondary result of a different type of campaign. For example, you run an informational website which drives revenue through advertising. Though of course you wish to reach more advertisers, the actual purpose of the campaign is to drive more readers to the website in order to be able to appeal better to potential advertisers.

Breaking this down even further, you want to appeal to specific advertisers – say local business services firms. In that case, the traffic you wish to drive to you site needs to match the local businesses target demographic – e.g local business owners.

Understanding the true purpose of your advertising campaign, and splitting into areas of awareness, consideration and purchase will help you to better understand your results, and also identify any weaknesses in your sales funnel.

Defining your digital advertising goals

Once you are happy that you are truly onboard with the purpose of your advertising campaign, it’s time to start defining your goals. Before worrying about how this can be measured, think about all the steps a potential customer may take and the value which it adds to your business.

For example, if you are trying to drive awareness of a cause – someone watching your video on your website or a social media channel could be classed as a goal. However, if you are a straightforward e-commerce seller than a goal is likely to be the sale of a product.

It’s vital that you also understand all of the stages which a potential customer may go through before converting to a sale. For example, are they likely to make an online enquiry and you then have a consultation. Is what you offer price sensitive? Perhaps you offer a home improvement service and need to visit their home to survey before providing a quote.

Depending on your business, there may be several steps both online and offline which a potential client must go through prior to becoming a customer, and measuring every stage will allow you to properly identify what works and where issues might lie.

Case Study Example:

The Small Biz Expert were called in to assist a client who had seen a sharp drop in appointments for the business over the previous three months. They were running advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads. Looking at the online statistics, the number of ‘conversions’ online had not dropped. They were measuring goal conversions from a potential client filling out a form on their website, and the number of forms filled in remained constant across the time that the number of appointments had dropped – so what was the issue?

Upon further investigation, we uncovered that, due to staffing issues, the time taken to reply to contact emails had increased due to staff workloads. Where previously contact had been made within the same working day when a form was submitted, this had dropped to the company responding up to three days later!

To overcome this issue we instead set up a book a call conversion – with available slots to both increase buy-in from potential customers, and make this part of the process automated for the client.

Setting Ad Goals and Conversions

Before embarking upon your “all singing all dancing” ad campaign, decide what actions will be considered your objective. If you are looking to drive awareness it may be views of a certain piece of content such as a video on your social ads or website.

For those selling products, this could be fairly simple – sell x amount of products, or increase average order value.

Depending on your niche, it’s vital that you then consider all of the ways in which your customers could take this action.

Let’s say that you run an accountancy business and are setting up an advertising campaign whose overarching goal is to get potential clients to book a free consultation. You have a landing page set up specifically for this campaign – it offers both a form to fill in and also includes your contact number. You are running ads on LinkedIn and Google targeting local businesses. Your Google ads include a phone number extension. Your LinkedIn ads are sponsored InMail ads – which send a message with a clear CTA to go to the landing page. So many ways that a potential customer could convert – so you need to be clear on what you are measuring, and what this means to you.

Take an example from our very own Google analytics. As a service based business, we have several ways in which a person may contact us - so we have conversions based on enquiries - so people may use several of our contact forms, start a live chat, email us, or request a free consultation.

Understanding the Value of a Conversion

So you now know what you’re measuring, but what value does each ‘conversion’ have to your business? Obviously, this can be super clear (for example – you sell x product at x price with a margin of x), or more ambiguous. For example, what is a “video view” worth to you?

Take time to consider the value of each step a potential customer takes throughout their journey with you, and bear in mind that not all of these steps will take place on your own website. It may be elsewhere such as on your social media page or on a review site.

Not sure what a good conversion rate is for your business? Check out this fab infographic from Wordstream. 

Enquiries vs Conversions

If you run an e-commerce business, conversion tracking is super straightforward. Someone comes onto your website, buys a product – job done. However, for those in sectors where additional steps are required, tracking your success isn’t quite as straightforward.

What if you run a campaign that gets lots of enquiries, but no one is actually buying. Setting a baseline of enquiries to actual sales before starting your advertising campaign is a must. 

Tracking Performance

While there are wealth of tools that can be used to track the performance of your online ad campaigns, Google Analytics is still one of the best ways of measuring everything that actually happens on your website. 

Whether you are creating a sales funnel through content marketing, or running a pure e-commerce campaign, google analytics allows you to really dig deep into how your potential customers interact with your website. 

Off Page SEO and Authorship

Your website is all set up, you are selling a great product or service, and creating great content on your site, it looks super cool, but for some reason, your site just isn’t appearing in the search engine results. What are you going to do?

In terms of ranking, where you appear on Google for search engine page results (SERPs) can make or break the number of people who will even know that your site exists. Pretty terrifying right?

So, how can you ensure that you are ranking highly for the searches that are relevant to your industry or niche?

How Google Ranks Websites

There are hundreds of ranking factors which Google takes into account when choosing when your webpage will show for certain search queries. What you have to understand is that you are basically dealing with robots! No human being at Google goes near the algorithms that determine your page ranking in the SERPS – it’s all done by bots, which ‘crawl’ the web (yes think spiders), and use machine learning to become experts in topics.

There are many improvements that you can make to your website to help you to start appearing at the top of those SERPs when a potential buyer or client searches for keywords relevant to your industry. Ensuring that your web pages are correctly structured with the right meta titles and tags and that you are offering high-quality content on the page will help to rank your website higher.

But right now, I wanted to talk to you about what you can be doing away from your own website, (known as off page SEO), to maximise people’s trust both in you, and your site.

Establishing Trust

With trust now the number one factor that clients consider when using a product or service, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your business is leading the way in promoting itself as an authority within your industry or niche.

And trust is diminishing. With trust in editorial almost in crisis, it is more important than ever to be creating content that is valuable to your audience.

As this research from Edelman shows, consumers are turning to both who they consider experts, and people just like them to offer credible information and advice.

Having a great looking website, or a perfectly formed offer is not enough. People (and Google) have to know and understand that you are a trustworthy provider of content relating to your topic.

What are Backlinks?

Google bots crawl the web using links to determine how pages relate to one other. Using sophisticated algorithms, Google uses links to understand not only the popularity of your page, but also the popularity, and trust of any sites linking to it.

Think of links as ‘the company you keep’ If you are associated with a popular, likeable person with integrity, other people will assume that you have the same values, whereas, if you run with the bad crowd, even if you yourself are an upstanding citizen, you will still get a reputation as a baddy.

For example, if you have a backlink from Wikipedia - a site which is well used, trustworthy and popular, Google will apportion trust in your domain when seeing that link. Conversely if you have links coming from a low content, irrelevant site, Google may penalise you for this, in fact, if you have a high number of links coming from questionable websites, you can incur a penalty that will stop your website from showing up in the SERPs at all!

Links from other websites to your site (backlinks) are one of the strongest signals that Google uses to determine how to rank you in the SERPs. Your site will be judged not only by the number of backlinks you have but by the quality of those links – are they coming from sites that are relevant and trustworthy?

Going back to the real world for a moment, who would you most trust to explain how a Tesla works. Elon Musk or your next-door neighbour? 

As humans, we tend to rely on authorities to guide us in certain subjects, and Google understands this, and therefore will lend more weight to an authority site or person linking to your website – so Google also trusts Elon Musk more than your neighbour too. 

Want to learn more about using good PR and content marketing strategies for building good quality links back to your site? Get in touch – we can help!

Establishing Yourself as Thought Leader

And it’s not just about making yourself an authority on your own page…    

My name (Charlotte Sheridan) is associated with the topic of small business marketing. If I publish an article elsewhere (on another domain) my name holds “trust” so that article is more likely to rank because of “who wrote it” even with no back link. 

This means, if my name is published elsewhere on the web, Google will instinctively trust what I am ‘saying’ as considers me an expert on that subject.

How do you go getting authority authorship on your domain? While focussing on your site content such as blog posts is of major importance it is easy to overlook what you are doing ‘off page’ – that is, where you are publishing information and content on websites that are you not your own, and where you may be obtaining links to your website from these other domains too!

So, how do you go about getting someone in authority to link to your site and content? Ask yourself some questions…

Who knows most about your particular niche?

Who is able to relate wider issues back to your niche?

Who can tell the world about a topic or issue relating to your industry

Has it dawned yet?

Yes, YOU!

You can become an authority author within your business industry or niche! What better way to both build your credibility as a ‘thought leader’ within your industry, and maximise the trust in the product or service that you promote than to establish yourself as a trusted author on your subject matter?

People who have confidence in you will have confidence in your brand. If you can show that you understand the needs of your industry, and give solutions to issues that your clients are facing, or information that they need, you will automatically increase trust within your product or service.

And it doesn’t end there. If you become a trusted author ‘off page’ more weight is given to the content you write both on your domain, and elsewhere.

Associating yourself to trusted domains establishes trust and authority to you – and for your customers gives them an additional reason to believe in you and your product.

And it’s not just about links to your site – if you are running an email campaign, think how credibility you receive if you show links to you talking with authority on a site such as Forbes, or Entrepreneur!

All sounds great, right? But we can’t just pop out of nowhere and establish ourselves as the new guru of our industry can we?

So let’s talk about how to grow your authority as an author. I am going to talk you through, step by step, how to build an outreach campaign that is going to establish you as a thought-leader within your industry, and ensure that Google will start to see you as a trusted author.

    How To Grow Author Authority             

1.    Do your research.

First up, take a look at who the authority domains within your niche or industry are. For example, do Forbes or HuffPost have a section which ties nicely into what you do. You need to make a list of authority sites in your sector and then look at what content you can offer them.

Ok, realistically if you are just starting out, trying to go straight into Forbes may be a stretch, so how do you chose the sites which you want to guest post on?  

The key is to source domains with good ‘ranking trust signals’ - sites that are trusted by Google (and hence people) to deliver good, honest content.

You will probably know who the great authorities within your industry are; start with them. Then try Googling phrases associated with your niche – what sites are showing on the first pages of Google (make sure to avoid the ads).

You can use tools such as Alexa.com to check whether these sites are gaining visitors, and how many. Look at comments, engagement and sharing of content on those sites. Are people really reading and liking what they read?

Now take a look at other influences within your niche. Who are the authorities, who is getting lots of comments and traction? Do they have a good social media presence? Think of them as your role model, and look to post where they are posting.  

How do you find them? You can use tools such as Rightrelevance.com

Simply type in your industry on niche, and you will be taken to a page showing results within that niche.

Let’s take an example – say you are a personal trainer. Type in personal trainer, and you will be taken to this page

Click influencers at the top left and you can see we have a list of companies and people who are influencers in the world of personal training.

You want to look at individuals, so filter by ‘person’ and then you have your list!  

So, you now have the names, but where are they posting? You can use the articles feature within Rightrelevance, but there are probably better tools to get a real-time understanding of what they are posting and where.

One such tool is Google alerts – go to www.googlealerts and you will see this screen. Just type in set up alert – and off you go

If you want to dig deeper, a paid-for tool such as BuzzSumo can really help you to understand not just where your influencers are posting, but also what content performs best for them and within your niche.

Remember, select your targets with care, they should have good trust from Google, you don’t want to associate yourself with the ‘bad guys’!  

You can use tools such as MOZ’s DA ranking to choose who to target, but generally, if it’s on the first couple of pages in the SERPs, and the existing content looks good, you are probably onto a winner.

Once you establish where you should be posting content, you can start to outreach to them to publish your content, with a call to action back to you site win – win! If you are on page one of their site – you are ranking as a trusted author.

2.    Get published

So you now have a great list of authority sites where you can look to post content. How do you go from simply wanting to be associated with them, to a published article?

Many sites will have a ‘write for us’ or ‘submit content’ section on their website – take a look for it. Or try Googling ‘your niche – write for us’.

Make sure that the content you want to submit is relevant, unique and interesting. The best ranking sites get a lot of submissions, so you want to make sure that you are standing out, and have something of true relevance to say. Remember too, that most sites will only accept submissions which are not going to be posted elsewhere.

Start with sites that are pretty open to accepting submissions (but remembering they still need to be of quality!). Once you build up a credible following of your posts, you will find that door will open to the better known platforms.

3.    Get the link!

Generally speaking, you want to link back to your domain on the bio of any published article – so you are author x of x company. Make sure you are associating yourself to your business. It’s all well and good being a favourite author, but if no one knows what you are ‘selling’ in the day to day, you basically just have a hobby! 

If your authorship is associated with many high profile, relevant sites to your niche, you will start to build up trust in your authorship both for Google, and within followers of the content.

You also need to ensure that you are crediting yourself as author on your own domain so that your site can reap the rewards of your new ‘superstar’ status!

Reap the rewards

Once you have started to build up a good number of articles on medium level trusted sites, you will find it easier to start getting content into the highly trusted sites (the ones which include all those trust signals which I mentioned earlier).

When you have this type of authority, it will start to open doors to truly reaching your target audience in a way that resonates with them. If you are publishing quality content on quality platforms you can leverage this within your marketing plan. For example, you publish a great blog about your industry on Forbes – use this within your next email campaign. Show your customers and potential clients that you are not only offering a great product or service, but that you understand your industry as a whole, and are considered an expert!

Being associated with quality brands and authorities increases buyer trust, and is an invaluable tool with which to establish trust from your buyer

Blogging For Business - The Do's and Don'ts

The Do’s and Don’ts of Blogging For Business

Blogging for your business – is it something you actively take part in, or a chore to be endured? Or perhaps you don't offer blog content at all? However, adding high quality content to your website can be a sure-fire way to both engage with your customers, and can help with making sure that they can find you online by increasing options for organic traffic to reach your website.

With that in mind, we talk about the do's and don'ts of blogging for your business.

Do – start with your audience

Before getting anywhere near putting pen to paper (or more like finger to keyboard) it’s vital that you think about your target audience – the customers you wish to attract and retain. What are they interested in? What problems do they need to solve? What content are they already engaging with?

It’s often the case that we see business owners who, while really interested in getting blogs or article content onto their site, then use their blogs as an extended advert. Articles such as “Why [insert company name here] is the best” isn’t really offering your readers a great experience and it certainly won’t encourage them to read on.

Blogging for business should always put your audience at its heart, and we recommend that you always start by building your buyer personas. This will enable you to come up with a blogging strategy that is really designed to “speak” to your potential and existing customers.

Don’t get too technical

We get it!! You offer a product or service that’s super technical, and you want to showcase your expertise by writing in-depth about it. However, again it’s a case of knowing your audience and tailoring your content to them.

A common mistake that we see in anyone who offers technical services is to write articles to a standard that only their peers can understand when the intent of the content is to reach or inform potential customers who have a lesser knowledge of “what goes on under the bonnet”.

For example – if you offer, say, software development for a CRM – potential customers want to know about what the outcomes will be, but you may need to tailor content to specific audiences. For example, you may have stakeholders who include, the CEO of a business, The CFO, and perhaps the director of IT. All of whom will have different priorities and questions when it comes to choosing a provider. Talking about which programming languages on a piece of content aimed at the first two aren’t going to get you very far – they’ll switch off! They want to know about outcomes.

The head of IT, on the other hand, it more interested in how it may work with existing systems, what it may mean for his department, and more technical aspects of your software.

That’s not to say that technical blogs and articles don’t have a place on websites, they do but think about who you are looking to reach with every piece of content and tailor your content marketing strategy accordingly.

Do – consider SEO

Creating great content is a major part of any good SEO strategy. Blogging gives you additional ways in which to rank for long tail search terms that don’t fit well with your other content or category pages, meaning that you can drive traffic to your website for people searching those longer terms.

However, to make sure that your post is optimised, you need to consider which keywords you wish your blog to rank for. Once you have targeted these keywords, make sure that you place them and semantically relevant words naturally throughout your text. This does mean STUFFING YOUR BLOG WITH KEYWORDS! Think about the user experience, and create something that is meaningful, but that your audience wants to read.

The structure is important too. Make use of headings and subheadings, anchor text to link to other content on your site and high-quality sources too. While SEO content writing takes some practice, get this right and you’ll increase traffic to your site.

If you’re looking to undertake keyword research take a look at the video below from

Don’t – Forget about user experience

While creating content that is optimised for search engines is important, in our opinion, user experience is more important. After all, so what if you rank number one for your chosen keyword is no-one then engages with your website. When thinking about your blog content, put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer. In addition to making sure that the content is relevant to your target audience, there are other factors to consider.

For example, is your text too simple or too difficult to read for your target market? Does the font make your eyes hurt (we see this a lot)! Are you using the best images to illustrate your point?

It’s also well worth thinking about what next steps you want your reader to take after reading your blog. Signposting relevant pages on your site is crucial if you want to turn blog readers into buyers, so do think about how the format of your blog page can drive traffic to other parts of your site, and increase conversion rates.

Do consider social

Sharing your blogs on social media can be a super quick way to increase traffic to your blog pages (and therefore your website). Blogging should always align with your social media strategy, as it’s a great way to make your blog content go further.

Here’s a great article on making a single blog post go further by repurposing your blog, making a versatile piece of content, that can be used across multiple platforms.

If you’re in the B2B sector, we strongly suggest that you consider using LinkedIn’s native article platform. While we suggest that you re-write your content to be unique for the platform, there’s no harm in repurposing blog content from your own website, with a slightly different angle.

Don’t be irrelevant

Remember, the purpose of your business blog is to feed information to your customers that is of interest to them but still related to your business niche. It’s easy to get side-tracked with exciting ideas that are personally of interest to you, but if the topics aren’t of interest to your customers, then the blog is irrelevant.

When considering topics for your blog, always look back at your buyer personas and think “is this relevant for them”? If it’s not, scrap the idea and move onto the next one. If you’ve really got the blogging bug and want to move onto writing about other topics, consider creating a personal blog elsewhere.

Do – Be unique

Taking inspiration from other articles on competitor websites is fine. Blatantly copying them is not. In fact, while there’s much discussion about the issue of duplicate content and how it can impact SEO, the thing is – if you copy your content from an existing site – Google will show the original content – not yours!

It’s also bad practice in general. After all, a potential customer has come onto your website looking for something new and original. They want to understand your business, how you think, what you offer. Not see something regurgitated from elsewhere.

However, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t check out the competition. The Skyscraper method, as touted by Backlinko’s Brian Dean can be an amazing way to unlock the potential of content, and create backlinks to your site, therefore improving the backlink profile of your website. Learn more about this here.

Don’t get bogged down

Coming up with great content on a regular basis is hard! You have a business to run and other priorities, so unless you’re a writing whizz, it can be arduous to keep coming up with content ideas, write the actual blogs, plus fiddling around with sourcing the right imagery.

If blogging for your business is starting to get you down, then consider hiring a content agency to help! The chances are that in terms of your time and effort, it offers far better value for money than doing it yourself.

Here at the Small Biz Expert, we provide blogs on a wide range of subjects for our clients, and can help you to plan your content strategy, so why not get in touch.

How Add A Partner To Ads Manager

If you manage several Facebook pages or Ad accounts, it’s wise to use Facebook Business Manager to ensure that your business information is secure, and does not get mixed up with your personal accounts. As a growing business, it’s likely that you may wish to use a social media marketing agency or other third party to manage your assets and adverting campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.

Using Facebook Business Manager gives you the ability to assign others to manage your Facebook marketing without having to invite them to use your own log ins , and without the headache of adding them as an admin.

Below we will outline how to add a partner to your Facebook Business Manager Account.

Step 1.

Log in to your Facebook Business Manager and click the cog icon - or business settings

Step 2.

On the left side click Partners and then click the Add Button

You Will need your business partner ID to Add to your account

You will now need to choose the assets you wish to assign to your partner (agency). If The Small Biz Expert is working on your campaigns, we will advise you of the assets required.

Just make sure to click Save Changes - and you’re all done!

The Small Biz Expert in the Press

Here at The Small Biz Expert, we love to share our hints and tips to help SME’s and startup’s to generate new business, retain existing customers, and be generally awesome!

With that in mind - we are often contacted to offer advice for a range of both online and offline publications. But we don’t want to keep it to ourselves - so take a look at our most recent coverage.

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Money Saving Tips - London Loves Business

How to save money on advertising with Charlotte Sheridan.

NatWest Content Live

Director Charlotte Sheridan shares her favourite book for entrepreneurs.

Referrals Strategy - AAT

Charlotte shares top tips to get referrals with AAT.

BBC Radio Oxford

Charlotte speaks to David Prever about potential issues surrounding social media and self harm.

What all marketers should know about Twitter in 2018

Twitter is often an overlooked platform by marketers. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube all take priority with the majority of marketers, and understandably so with those three having the highest number of users and therefore being where the majority of the online attention is. However, in this blog post, we’re going to show to you how and why you should probably be using Twitter more.

Who uses Twitter in 2018?

Twitter, as of 2018, has 330 million monthly active users, which is a 4% increase on 2017. It’s important to know who these 330 million people are and what they are using the social network for before shoving your product down their throats. 36% of people aged 18 to 29 use Twitter, more than any other age group, and 74% of twitter users say they use the app to get their news, more than any other social media platform (Reddit and Facebook are closest to Twitter with 68% of their users using the respected platforms for news purposes). This means that the majority of users of this mini-blogging platform are millennials and the majority of them use it to get their daily dose of news. If you are a news company and want to get more younger people reading your articles, or if you have certain blogs targeted to younger audiences, Twitter could be the perfect place to get exposure in front of the correct audience for your business without having to do specialised targeting.

Additionally, Twitter is one of the only platforms where you can send out multiple posts without annoying people! We all know how annoying people can be when they’re posting 8 selfies at once on Instagram or 15 posts on Facebook and our feed is full of the same thing. 

How can Twitter help your business?

Twitter is a very interactive platform. You can run polls to get your followers ideas on the best name for a new project or the best items for your brand’s next clothing launch. There’s nothing more valuable then when your customers feel a connection with your brand. This real interaction also makes twitter a great platform to deal with all of your customer queries and concerns. Use Twitter as your companies customer service desk.

Twitter Q2 2018 Earnings Report

In Twitter’s most recent ‘Q2 Earnings Report’, they announced an impressive 24% increase in total revenue from the second quarter of 2017 and a 23% increase in advertising revenue from the second quarter of 2017. Now lets dig deeper into the advertising revenue. In terms of geography, advertising revenue generated in the US got a laudable a 9% increase from quarter two of 2017, however international advertising saw a massive 40% increase in advertising revenue. This could be proof that Twitter is becoming a much more used social media platform worldwide and will be interesting to see how this develops over the course of 2018 and into 2019. 

“We're pleased more broadly internationally as well where we grew 40%. International is now over half of revenue, and we expect it to continue to grow faster than the U.S. even though the U.S. actually did accelerate this quarter from about 10% to 15% revenue growth.” - Ned Segal, Twitter CFO

 You can read Twitters Q2 Earnings Report here: 

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of twitter also had this to say about the report: 

“During the second quarter, we launched new tools to address behaviours that distort and detract from the public conversation and introduced new measures to handle spam, malicious automation and platform manipulation. We also acquired Smyte, a technology company that specializes in safety, spam and security issues to help us address these challenges faster. This is important work that complements what we're doing to connect people with interest and help them discover information. We've introduced new machine learning algorithms that organize the conversation around events and make it easier for people to find and follow topics, events and interests. We're also making these experiences more accessible by surfacing them on the timeline, in Explore and in search results, as you likely saw during the World Cup. These types of product improvements are contributing to healthy daily active usage growth, which is 11% year-over-year during the second quarter. The momentum on the platform is translating into success with advertisers, with total revenue increasing 24% year-over-year in the second quarter. We're receiving positive feedback from customers about our efforts to enhance advertiser transparency and improve the health of the public conversation.”

Overall, Twitter offers possibilities for businesses that no other social media platform does. It is much easier to have a real interaction with customers and is much easier to have a post go ‘viral’ and boost attention to your business. Everyone should be using Twitter, yet it is arguably one of the most overlooked digital platforms for digital marketers to use.

Get to the First Page on Google

At the Small Biz Expert, we get a ton of enquiries that generally start with that exact line – “I want to get the first page on Google”. Well, our first question when posed with this challenge is “For what search term” And this is where a lot of business owners go wrong.

Firstly, no-one, not even a Google employee can guarantee you the first page on Google for a specific search term, and realistically if you are going for a super competitive search term, this is not going to be an easy or for that matter cheap ride.

Let’s take a look at some of the issues with the generic “Get to number one on Google” enquiries and see why you should consider your marketing strategy as a whole.

So these are the answers that we often get when we ask our number one question.

“I want my website to show up as number one when someone searches my brand”

This is an extremely common request, and of course, not an unreasonable one (assuming you aren’t called McDonalds). However, being number one for your brand is all well and good, but have you considered whether people know about your business already, and if this is the only search term you are looking to rank for, well, how will someone searching for your services find you?

Let’s take an example. Say you are a property solicitors firm called “Howe and Partners” (totally made up – sorry if this actually you!) If your only goal is to be at number one for the search term Howe and Partners, and say “Howe and partners Solicitors”, how is anyone new going to find you?

Keyword research is key to getting your business found online, and we would suggest that our friends at Howe and Partners focus on keywords relating the their services, such as conveyancing near me, or property solicitor etc.

Getting a true understanding of what your potential clients are searching for online is absolutely key to making a success of your website.

“I want to rank number one for Payday Loan UK”

Ok.. So, in theory it’s possible that with a lot of work, a good amount of time, and a very healthy budget you can rank for these types of keywords, but you do need to be realistic. High volume, valuable keywords are not easy to rank at number one for, and it will take a lot of work. It’s not something that will happen quickly or without a healthy budget.

If you are entering a super competitive market, it is worth looking to gain traction with long tail search terms first making sure that you think about user intent.

“I don’t know what keywords to try and rank for”

We love this answer – it’s what we are here for! At The Small Biz Expert we use premium tools including SEMrush to analyse what keywords will work for your business. We work with you to identify keywords that will help you to find new customers looking for your exact product or service.

As experts in small business SEO, we have a wealth of experience in understanding the nuances that make small business marketing different.

I want to Rank Number one on Google in a week!

We will bow to the superior infographic from Crazy Egg (another in our toolkit!)

5 Things We've Learnt About Recruitment from Donald Trump

November 2016 seems like a land long forgotten as we steam ahead in 2018, the latest Trump disaster
being steel tariffs, a foolish endeavour as illustrated by President George W. Bush and President
Obama’s previous attempts to introduce them. A line about history doomed to repeat itself springs to
mind. While the world marvels as the US president tumbles from one scandal to the next, the overturn of
staff in the White House is unrivalled by any previous administration in US history, possibly any
administration. It’s been a few days / weeks (who can remember anymore and we’re not even 2 years in!)
since the Cheeto-in-Charge hired or fired someone but his methods have come under scrutiny again and
again. However, from watching this rapid turnover in the White House, we’ve managed to compile a list
of tips on how not to hire and fire people taking a few tips from the POTUS himself.

When hiring someone, check their references!

The sole point of a reference is to verify that your new hire is who they say they are and that their
work experience and skills aren’t just fiction on their CV. It’s always important to follow up on
this as even a five-minute phone call can give you a new insight into your new hire and potentially
learn whether they are the right fit for the role. Most of the time the reference may be little more
of a confirmation of your hire’s previous work experience but other times you may learn
something about your new hire that they wouldn’t have thought to say themselves – whether this
is good or bad, it’s still beneficial information to you. As well as this, if your candidate is
potentially lying about previous experience, it’s a good chance to learn this early before the new
hire has started and not having to start the hiring process all over again!

Google Employees Before Hiring

We live in an age where the majority of people have at the very least one public social media
account whether it be Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram. We all have those cringe status
updates written in the third person and those awful photos from a foam party back in 2013 but
there’s a big difference between these as opposed to actively posting hurtful or abusive content. A
quick google of your new potential hire may unveil something that could affect your business
positively or negatively in the future or expose something left out on a CV. If Donald Trump’s
presidency has taught us anything, people often forget that social media is the 21st-century town
bulletin board, except a bit more permanent.

Don’t Fire Someone on National TV.

Life isn’t an episode of the Apprentice. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news but never ever
fire anyone any other way than face to face, it shows cowardly leadership and poor
communication skills otherwise. James Comey, the former director of the FBI found out about his
firing from a news broadcast rather than from Trump himself and while it created a great opening
chapter for Comey’s book, it did not inspire confidence for the new administration. Earning trust
and respect in employees is a two way street and it’s important communication is clear and direct.

Get a Second Opinion

It’s always good to get a second opinion on most things, why should an employee be any
different? Whether you’re thinking of hiring or letting go of an employee, it’s always great to seek a
different perspective to your own. While you may have a clear idea of the candidate you want in
mind, it might not always be in line with your colleague's ideas. As the employer, you may do the
hiring, but you may not have a great idea of the qualities and skills required for the role if it’s not
someone you interact with on a day-to-day basis. Having two heads is always better than one and
getting a second opinion could open up a whole range of new ideas and qualities that you may
have never thought of yourself. Perhaps if Trump had asked for second, third, fourth, fifth
opinions on his numerous employees, he could have spared himself national embarrassment
multiple times over.

Don’t hire someone with a bad rep!

This one may be pretty obvious but when hiring ensure that your candidate isn’t going to make you unpopular for hiring them. For instance if you’re hiring a freelancer to create content, don’t
hire someone hated in your industry to work for you! While some may say there’s no such thing as
bad publicity and certain people thrive from bad publicity (like a certain President!) remember
these are notable exceptions to the rule, not The rule. Many companies spend a long time and a
small fortune repairing their image and trying to gain back lost business following scandals

How Much Should Google AdWords Cost for a UK Plumber 2018?

If you offer plumbing services in the UK, the chances are that you have considered Google Advertising for your business. However, it can be difficult when starting out to understand how much you should be spending on your Google Adwords budgets. 

Find out how much google ads cost in your industry

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Working Out AdWords Budget For a Plumbing Company

Firstly, it's important that you think about what a lead conversion is worth to you. As a plumber, you may offer a range of services such as emergency call outs, boiler installation or other ad hoc services. 

Think about how much each of those type of job are worth to your company. For example, say your call out charge is £100 and you include the first hour within this in which you tend to fix the issue, you can gather that a conversion is usually worth £100 to you on average. 

Therefore you need to think about how much you are happy to spend to earn a £100 lead. This will very much depend on your company type. If you are a sole trader, this may not be the best use of your budget, so you may instead want to focus on advertising larger plumbing jobs first instead of using Google AdWords to promote your emergency service. On the other hand, if you have a fleet of plumbers, this may be one of the best ways to get more business to your plumbing company. 

So, you have thought about how much you are willing to spend, it's now time to consider what 'keywords' are going to be suitable for your plumbing business. Let's say that you have decided for now to focus on emergency plumbing, and you are based in London. 

Ideally, it would be good to know what your typical conversion rates are. Conversion rates will be based on things like, how many visitors to your website actually convert to an enquiry, and then how many enquiries convert to a job. Looking at your Google Analytics will help you to understand this. 

For example say for every 100 visitors to your website page, you get 5 enquies, your conversion rate would be 5%. At this stage is it worth considering if your web pages are suitable for your advertising campaign, and what you can do to optimise your landing pages (the page to which your advert will link). 

You should also consider then how many of these enquiries convert to an actual job. For the sake of our maths - let's say 50% of enquiries result in a a job. 

Finding Keywords for a Plumbing Business

Ok, so for this example, we are going to assume that you are looking to advertise your emergency plumbing business in London. Taking a quick look at Adwords planner, we can see that the keyword emergency plumber in London has a suggested bid of a whopping £17.81. (Note that it's worth asking an AdWords expert to help you to source the best keywords for your budget). 

Therefore based on our calculations, this is how much one lead would cost you. 

1 click = £17.81

For every enquiry you will need 20 clicks - so that would cost £356.20

For each of these you would get 1 job - meaning that one lead would have a total cost of £712. 40! 

A bit too much for a one job call out of £100 right? 

Increasing conversion rate on AdWords Campaigns for Plumbers

You're probably reading the above and wondering why on earth anyone would want to use AdWords to advertise a plumbing service. 

Firstly, Google uses a range of factors when looking at how much you will pay for each click, and how often your advert will be shown.

You also need to ensure that your website or landing page is really optimised to convert. Our estimate of a 5% conversion rate can be hugely improved if the landing page layout and your service is in tip top condition. If we increased our conversion rate to 25% the same lead would cost you just £89.05. Combine that with reducing your cost per click, and the bid is looking a little more attractive. 

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Choosing Appropriate Keywords For Plumbers

It's also worth bearing in mind that I have chosen a very expensive keyword choice. Going back to our keyword list, we may want to consider bidding instead on local areas which you cover, or slightly different keywords such as 24 hour plumber in (local area) or adding words such as reliable or 1 hour. In reality, your Google Adwords campaign should be made up of a mixture of high volume search keywords, and others that, while more niche should be tailored to what you provide. 

The key to working out how much you should spend on your Google PPC campaigns is to do your research first. Many ads fall at the first hurdle as you are not sending the clicks to an appropriate page on your website, or because your ad groups are not tailored to the services which your provide. 

Google Adverting, when done correctly can be an excellent value for money platform for getting leads to your business, however if it's done badly it can be a very expensive waste of your marketing budget. If you're not sure how to use AdWords, it is probably worth calling in the services of a small business AdWords expert to help you to at least get your campaigns set up. 

At The Small Biz Expert, we offer expert marketing consultancy for trades, and can help you to both set up and manage your Google Campaigns, so get in touch with us for a no obligation chat about how our services can help you. As a Google search partner, we are experts in getting traffic for trades.

 Ready to start running your own Google Ads? Join our Google Ads Bootcamp

 

 

3 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Aren't Converting

As a small business owner you've probably considered Facebook as a tool for getting more customers. You got all excited, set up what you thought was a great advert, got a few clicks, and yet... no one purchased your product or service! 

So you, shrug your shoulders, say 'Facebook ads don't work for me' and go back to Google Adwords, the local newspaper, or your advertising platform of choice. But are you missing a trick? Did you miss some of the fundamental ways that ads work? Before you turn your back on Facebook ads completely, take a look  at our top 3 reasons why Facebook ads don't work. 

Your Facebook Ads Won't Work Well If You Don't Define Your Target Audience. 

This is something we see time and again here at The Small Biz Expert. You see an audience of 2 million and think - great! I'll go for that, without taking the time to define who your product is targeting. The actual point of Facebook ads is that they work so well as you can precision target an audience that will meet your exact requirements (in most cases). 

I will walk through an example with you. Let's say you sell car insurance that is tailored to high net worth individuals who drive supercars - extreme, but hey someone does! 

If you were the marketing manager of that company and were looking to run an offline advert which of the following would you try? 

Put an advert in a teenagers fashion magazine?

Stick a poster in the local shop in a low affluence area? 

Put an advert in a magazine targeted at high net worth individuals with a focus on cars, travel and business. 

Try either of the first two and you're unlikely to see any conversions! So why do the same with Facebook ads! You are PAYING to put an advert in front of the wrong audience unless you target your campaign. 

So, how should you target your Facebook adverts for this mythical insurer? 

Well let's start on the basis that you definitely need to target high net worth individuals. 

Facebook lets you target based on demographics and behaviours, so make use of this feature. 

Cool, I now know that I'm targeting both high affluence and very high affluence audiences. However, there are two things I also need to consider. Firstly - do they own a car! There are few options here - you can choose car owners, likely to buy a car, number of cars in household. But the key is to ensure that you are narrowing down your audience (not expanding it) so choose narrow audience, and for our example, I will go with luxury car owner. 

Lastly, I want to know if they are actually in the market right now for new car insurance - so let's add that too. 

I think we have created a pretty good audience for our fictitious campaign - and maybe you did the same too - but... shock... it's still not converting! What else could it be? 

Your Facebook Advert Didn't Have The Right Message

Advertising can be pretty subjective - however, there are some big no no's when it comes to Facebook ads. 

Firstly, go for a title that does what is say - and make the best use of imagery. You may love your logo - but if it doesn't really reflect what you do, you aren't going to drive clicks (and therefore conversions. Do we think the ad below is going to work for our premium brand? 

Probably not! Do think about the message that your advert is sending, and also the format. 

But you cry - I made a cracking advert - everyone loved it - my audience was super targeted, and yet... zilch. So on to our final Facebook ads mistake.

Your Advert Is Not Converting As You are Not Using Appropriate Landing Pages

This doesn't actually just apply to Facebook adverts, it's an issue we see across the spectrum! I often speak to clients who say 'Oh I'm not interested in landing pages'. Well, if you have more than one product or service, to some degree you probably do have some landing pages already. So what do we mean by a landing page? 

Say our supercar insurer also offers bog standard home insurance, mobile phone insurance for  Nokia 8210s (remember them!) and pet insurance for hamsters. The chances are that the home page will be about general insurance, with specific pages for the other types. It may not have obvious calls to action or be written with our HNW in mind. 

So you have two options - use your product page as a landing page (our supercar insurance page), or better yet, create a specific landing page which is tailored to your advert. If you have an offer, send people straight to it! Looking to get more sign-ups to grow your database - make sure you're using a page with an easy to access contact form! 

The key to successful Facebook ads is the planning, and like any advertising campaign, starting with your target audience and building everything around that. If you don't follow these steps, you may as well throw your hard earned marketing budget out of the window. 

As always, if you need help with your Facebook ads, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you create high converting campaigns. 

Estate Agency Digital Marketing Ideas

How To Boost Your Estate Agency Instructions and Sales online

For estate agents, property investment firms and developers, keeping up with trends in digital marketing is the key to winning instructions, contracts and of course, selling properties. However, in an industry that has traditionally focused on print materials and good old face to face communication, the ever-changing digital landscape actually offers a great opportunity to get ahead of competitors by exploiting tried and tested digital marketing methods that are employed by other sectors.  

Think outside the box when it comes to your property news and updates

While keeping your clients up to date in your company wins and successes, plus the latest information about house prices, rental returns and the market in general is great, think about what actually matters to homeowners who live in your local area. That's right, local news. Use what is going on in your local area to create great content pieces which focus on what matters to your customers. Is there a new restaurant opening that everyone is excited about? Why not treat a team member to a meal there and get them to write about it afterwards? What if there's a controversial planning application going through - trust me homeowners in the area are interested - talk about it! Changes to parking restrictions going on in your high street - trust me your customers will be Googling for all the latest info. By hosting this type of content on your website, you are appealing to the local community who are in most cases likely to be your audience. 

Harnessing Local Knowledge as an Estate Agency

Following on from the above - as experts in the area in which your development or estate agency is located, you have all of the information at your fingertips to tell the world (and the local press) exactly what the trends are in your town. Have you seen a sudden demand for a specific property type as the result of say, a local school receiving an excellent Ofsted rating? Tell the world, and the local press! 

Make Use of Long Tail Search Terms on Your Website

Ok, I've lost you already! What on earth is a long tail search term I hear you ask! Let me give you an example. I'm browsing the net and fancy taking a look at luxury property as I'm nosy like that. The chances are that I will type something along the lines of '£10 million house London'. The more general version of this would be something along the lines of 'Buy House, Fulham'. This is getting a bit closer, but is still a generic search term. However, if I am actually typing in 'Buy 2 bed flat under £500,000 with two bathrooms near Greenwich station' the chances are I have a serious intent. While generic search terms are very competitive (thanks Rightmove) going for the longer search terms are likely to see a good pay off. This becomes even more important when considering your vendors as an estate agent. I am not just searching for 'estate agent in Covent Garden', I'm looking for 'Estate agent fees, best reviews, Covent Garden'. By making sure that your onsite content structure is geared towards these types of search, you can increase your instruction rates by a great amount. 

Estate Agency Social Media Marketing

Estate agents - please stop just posting up your latest instructions! No one has decided to follow your page just to exclusively see what your latest properties are - they use Zoopla for that! However, by building a real online community, you can start to develop a trusted brand in your location. And yes, I do mean your location. Each branch in an ideal word should have it's own page - even if a lot of content is duplicated. And don't just post your own news either. Of course, you should make use of the content types mentioned above, but think about what matters to your audience. Tips from other sources (not competitors) such as home decor, local news, solicitors advice can make up a great deal of your social posting. 

You can even go one step further and build a group around what matters to your audience. For example, a landlords of Lambeth page could build an excellent platform on which people can share their experiences, and you can share yours. 

Using AdWords as an Estate Agency

Here's the deal. PPC on Google can be pricey, and unless you have the budget to carry it off, bidding on property terms can be very expensive. However, you should not give up on Adwords completely. Things like retargeting campaigns (those creepy ads which follow you everywhere) can be really useful for estate agents. You can also look at bidding on lower volume but less competitive search terms to help you to win at Adwords. My word of caution if you don't know what you are doing, start small, and if you can, enlist an expert - like us! 

5. Get Chatting

Don't have live chat yet? You really should. There are a great range of live chat plug ins that can be added to almost any website - and the best thing is that many offer free packages. Live chat is a great way to very quickly convert a browser into a customer, and also allows you to qualify a lead far quicker than you can over an email exchange. While we all love the telephone, many potential customers will prefer written communication in the early stages, and you can easily take them offline to a call if you wish. 

Use Google Analytics To Attract More Estate Agency Customers

Ok this one is a bit radical, but hear me out. When you purchase say advertising space on another website you get a full 'press pack' letting you know the exact reasons why you should choose their website to advertise your estate agency or available properties. They will tell you who visits the site in terms of age and demographics, how often, and how many of those click ads. You can do exactly the same for your clients - the info is all at your fingertips with Google analytics. While Google Analytics can seem daunting to the uninitiated, some of this simple info can be found on your dashboard.

Get in touch with us

At the Small Biz Expert, we offer a completely free initial 30 minute consultation where we can talk through all of the options that you can employ for your property business to get found online. We won’t try to sell you anything (that’s your job), we won’t talk jargon, but we will offer good, sensible advice.

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Estate Agency Free Consultation

When Should A Small Business Consider an SEO Agency?

SEO For Small Business

What is SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is basically undertaking activities that help your website (or a page of your website) appear as high as possible in search engines such as Google or Bing. 

On page SEO services

Google uses ‘bots’ to crawl the internet indexing web pages to make sure that they appear in the right place when someone types a search term into the Google search. With millions of possible results to trawl through, Google wants to make sure that it’s showing the user the most relevant result for the phrase or words that they have searched for.

To make sure that it’s providing the user with the best possible result, Google will use information from the pages on your website to index your site and categorise when it will appear when someone types in a term relevant to your business.

However Google bots don’t read pages in the same way in which a human would, so the way in which your pages are structured can help Google to understand this a little better, this is known as ‘On page SEO’ (more details here from the amazing Moz)

How your website is structured can make a big difference to how Google ‘reads’ your pages, and you want to make it as easy as possible for Google to index your web page for the right key terms.

Google wants to make sure that they are giving users the best possible experience, so will also factor in things like, the speed at which your page loads, how mobile friendly the website is (in fact this is key) and various other signals.

So should you consider using an agency to help you with your on page SEO? The answer is… maybe. If you have a fairly small site and are confident that you can make changes as outlined in the link above – why not try some few tweaks yourself

However, if it’s all sounding like double dutch – it may be worth calling in an SEO specialist to help you get on track.

Off page SEO Services

Ok, so you think you on page SEO I ‘on point’ but you’re still not showing up on the searches! What’s going on? With so many websites floating around on the web – Google may have to make a choice to order hundreds of thousands of websites that are all showing similar content. How do these robots choose?

Well, while the exact ‘recipe’ is constantly changing (and a guarded secret), Google uses a huge number of signals to decide which website has the most ‘authority’ and will therefore likely be the best for the person searching.

Signals include good quality links back to your website with decent ‘anchor text’ the click-through rate when your page appears on ranking and a whole lot more – for more info read this great article by Search Engine Land.

So should you look at off-page SEO yourself? Ok, we aren’t going to lie – this is one where the services of a good SEO agency will help (and the services of a bad SEO agency will actually do damage). Here at the Small Biz  Expert, we actually don’t offer ‘link building services’ we offer digital PR. No two links are the same, and a raft of bad links will likely result in a penalty. The best way to acquire quality links is by providing quality content, be it on your own site or elsewhere. Social media can be a factor, but for the purposes of this article – let’s park that for the moment.

If it's something you want to get started yourself, be aware building good quality backlinks is time consuming, so prepare to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in!

Is It Worth Using an SEO Agency

The answer is…. It depends. Firstly think about the benefit that higher rankings on your website will bring. For many small business owners their website is a showcase mainly used to support offline activities. In this instance, it’s worth thinking about how much return on investment you would get if you ranked higher in search.

Also, is your business at a stage where you can afford the investment in using an external agency. Just like any other service, the returns must cover the outlay for the service.

If you’re unsure whether using an SEO agency would be right for your small business, you can take advantage of our free SEO consultation. We will give you an absolutely no obligation, no sales pitch completely free half an hour of our time to chat about your needs. We are completely honest, and can tell you what may work for your business (be it SEO, social media, PR or something else) and are completely transparent about what you may want to do yourself, and what you may need help with.

Why do we do it? Firstly, we care passionately about small business and want to make sure that every small business has access to the knowledge that big business has. We do understand that starting out is hard, and budgets are tight, so we offer no nonsense, no jargon, straightforward advice.

Secondly (and more selfishly). While you may not yet be ready to use the services of a digital marketing agency, we know that by giving you a totally free helping hand will help your small business becoming a profitable one – and we hope that you remember us when you do! Our business is built on recommendation, so if we help you out, we hope you mention us when speaking to other business owners.

Why Am I Losing Followers On Social Media

Social Media For Small Business

Picture this. You meet someone for the first time, and they launch into a monologue about what they do for a living, how well their company is doing, and how great they are at running a business. At the end of the conversation, you realise that they didn't ask a single question about you and obviously couldn't care less about your interests. It tends to leave you with both a bad taste and feeling that, should you encounter them again, you would rather go hide in the loo than get stuck with them. 

Well, an overly promotional social media channel will do exactly the same! If all you are posting are thinly veiled sales pitches, your audience will get bored of you pretty quickly. 

Using Buyer Personas To Boost Social Media 

Instead, think about your buyer personas - sit down and really work out what is of interest to your audience?

For example, you run a shop that sells accessories for dogs. You've got a pretty good idea that your target audience will be dog owners, or at least friends of a dog owner - don't forget your secondary market if you offer something that can be sold as a gift!

Rather than just constantly posting pictures of dogs looking cute in your products, offer other content. Guides to grooming certain breeds, great news stories about dogs doing wonderful things, funny videos of pooches behaving badly - whatever is going to encourage your audience to visit your page! 

And while I have picked a fun topic (well I am a dog person), this does still apply if you sell, say, accountancy services. Think about what your audience are interested in, and provide them with content to match. 

Is it something I said? 

If you loose a lot of followers or likes in a short space of time, it's worth delving into exactly what you are posting. If you have posted something either controversial or in some cases, just voiced your opinion on a thorny matter. 

If this is the case, do think about how you want to tackle this in future. For example, if you mentioned a topic that people feel uncomfortable with - does it matter to you that they support your cause. If so, those who unfollowed or unliked are actually unlikely to ever be your target audience. 

However, if it's a case that it was something thoughtless and off topic take it as a lesson learnt. 

Make Sure That Your Social Media Drives Traffic To Your Site

However, having a great fan base on your social channels is great - but you do need to sell your stuff right? The key is to host at least some of the above content on your website. Blog or news pages are a great way to encourage visits to your site, without constantly posting links to product pages. Think about your content strategy in advance, what type of articles you are going to post, and when. 

The key to getting this right is again knowing your audience. But using what's going on in the wider world will help. Things like awareness days, holidays and newsworthy events should all shape the content that you are putting out. If you run a B2B service is there a change to legislation that your customers want more information about (am looking at you GDPR)? 

When all is said and done, while your social media channels are there to drive awareness of your brand, they are also there to help you to sell your product or service, so make sure that you are posting relevant, engaging content with the aim of making sure your customers know who you are and where to find you.