January is a good month to set goals. The start of a new year is always a good opportunity to think afresh. Perhaps you’ve already set, started work on (and ditched!) some personal goals, but what about your business? If growing your business is part of the plan for 2019, you’ll need to set clear and effective goals for your marketing activity. It’s all too easy to spend money on marketing and see little return. Each business will have different requirements from its investment in marketing. For some, marketing is about acquiring new customers and all efforts are focused on generating leads. Marketing, aligned to the business plan, needs to play its part in increasing the numbers, which may be…

We're always keen to pick up on any digital marketing tips so we jumped at the chance to go to the E-commerce Show North yesterday, with lots of exhibitors to speak to and talks to attend. Nothing like a day out of the office to meet new people and to pick up some digital marketing tips! I tried hard to be in three seminars at the same time, but it didn’t work. But here’s what I took away from the ones I did get to: Influencer marketing (panel session) There were lots of great digital marketing tips in this session, particularly for brands considering using influencer marketing to reach new audiences. Be clear on what you want to achieve. Influencers are…

When potential customers arrive at your website you know you have just a few seconds to hook their interest and encourage them along their journey to buy your products or services. So you’ve spent time making sure your website looks good and is easy to navigate, and you’ve done everything you can to tell the world you’re open for business. But have you? As consumers, we can’t always pinpoint what it is that makes us feel we can trust a company enough to buy from its website, it’s just a feeling we get. As marketers, we can’t afford to be vague, we have to know exactly what we need to communicate. As always, the devil is in the detail; there…

Duplicate content is an issue for all digital marketers and can adversely affect your rankings unless you take specific action.  Duplicate content means that the same or very similar content appears on different URLs, either within your own site or on 3rd party sites. The problem with duplicate content is that Google doesn’t know which of the duplicated pages is most important, so it will be confused about which page to show your potential customers and your search rankings can suffer.  And we all know what happens to businesses when they move to page 2 on Google… Duplicate content is a problem in particular for e-commerce sellers where products are largely the same. One way to avoid duplication is to…

On average, Google receives over 40,000 search queries every single second from over 1.2 billion unique users every month. With this level of potential exposure, it is essential that all businesses capitalise on the marketing opportunity of a free Google My Business account. The account is free to set up, and with lots of options available, you can make sure your account is completely optimised to increase your marketing potential. So, how can you update your Google My Business account for increased online presence? Here are our simple steps. Set up your account The first thing to do is create a free Google listing for your business. You can do this here. Complete the information: Google will ask you to…