When planning your marketing strategy, it is likely that content marketing will play a significant part in your plan. Content is vital for building trust with your customers and establishing your brand and its values with potential buyers. Content develops leads, converts into sales and can even promote brand ambassadors. However, for content to work its magic, it needs to be compelling. So, how can your business create compelling content to engage your audience? Steps to creating compelling content 1.  Define your audience It may sound simple, but content will only compel if you target it correctly. Not all content is the same, and not everyone will be compelled by the same content. For a start, you need to make…

The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on 25th May 2018. It’s an EU framework which governs how personal data is stored and handled and so has far-reaching implications for businesses about how customer information is collected and managed. What is GDPR? GDPR replaces the current Data Protection Act and aims to improve the security of personal data. It is built on the principle of ‘privacy by design and by default’ which means that organisations must consider the impact that processing personal data can have on an individual’s privacy. Among other rights, your customers will have the 'right to be forgotten'. You can find out more on at the Information Commissioner's Office website, but in summary GDPR…

SEO requires a medium to long-term approach, especially in a competitive marketplace. We work with a number of brands which compete online with major high street retailers, helping to achieve Google page 1 organic search results and better conversions from their online traffic. For these clients, we've applied sound online marketing and SEO techniques on a consistent basis over many months, targeting less competitive search terms to bring in short-term revenue while continuing to work for those high value but difficult search terms over the long-term. It's not easy, but the results are worth it.  Three of our SME clients now appear for key, high volume search terms above the likes of John Lewis on the search engine results page,…

Earlier this month we attended the Spring Fair at the NEC in Birmingham – it’s a goldmine for many e-commerce retailers, with 20+ halls packed with product inspiration. Of course, e-commerce was high on the agenda, with back-to-back seminars and workshops about every aspect of selling online. While we were there, we took the opportunity to hear a speaker from Google’s Digital Garage. (Check out Digital Garage here, it’s a fantastic online resource for anyone who wants to boost their online selling and marketing skills). While much of the speech covered the basics, like using Google Analytics data to inform your digital marketing strategy, we were interested by how much emphasis was placed on mobile-friendliness. Why is ‘mobile-friendly’ so important?…

Google Adwords (and Bing Advertising) in the good ole days was easy to set up and monitor, but along with its success has come additional functionality and more acronyms to decipher. In this blog post we describe some of the terms as a starter for ten in understanding Google Adwords. PPC (Pay per click) Pay per click and cost per click (CPC) are the same thing and is the most common way to use Google Adwords.  PPC  and CPC are a description of when a customer clicks on your advert, goes to your website and you pay an advertising fee.  Other ways to use Adwords is through remarketing display ads or Google Shopping (seen on the right below) is controlled…