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The Ultimate Guide to Marketing for SMEs

Are you a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) looking to make a bigger impact in your industry? Then you’ve come to the right place! Marketing is the key to reaching new customers, building brand awareness, and driving growth.

In this ultimate guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know—from social media to email marketing, SEO, and beyond—to help take your business to the next level!

Building a Strong Foundation

Brand identity

Brand identity is what sets your business apart from competitors. It reflects your values, mission, and how customers perceive you. Here are tips and tricks for building a strong brand identity:

Website Design

Your website is often the first impression potential customers have of your business. A well-designed site is crucial to success. Check out these top tips for creating an effective website:

Content Marketing

Content is king. Whether through blogs, videos, or infographics, quality content can drive traffic and boost engagement. Every page on your site should have essential content that adds value. Start here:

Reaching Your Audience

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer fantastic opportunities to connect with potential customers.

If you’re looking for tips to improve your social media marketing, check out these insightful articles:

Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to communicate with customers, nurture leads and drive sales. If you’re looking to master email marketing, this guide will help you succeed in 2024:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is essential to get right. Ranking higher on search engines can bring in more organic traffic, increasing visibility and lead generation. Implement these top SEO tips to get started:

Lead Generation

Generating high-quality leads is the key to growing your business. Whether you’re using social media, content marketing, or paid advertising, it’s important to be strategic. Learn more in this article:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC can drive targeted traffic to your website, but it comes with pros and cons. If you’re wondering whether PPC is right for your business, check out this guide:

Expanding Your Reach

Event Promotion

Hosting events, whether online or in-person, can help engage customers and attract new leads. Learn how to master event promotion with these effective strategies:

Design & Print Work

Don’t underestimate the power of traditional marketing materials like brochures and flyers. Consider these top tips when planning your design and print work:

Black girl in denim sitting at the table with stationery and touching computer screen. Indoor portrait of pretty young woman in headphones with tablet spending time in office.

Staying Ahead of the Curve: Top marketing trends

The marketing world is constantly evolving, so to stay ahead of the game, it’s important to keep an eye on emerging trends and adapt your strategies as needed:

Voice Search

Voice search is rapidly changing how consumers find information online. Optimising for voice search can help your business stay ahead of the curve. Learn more about this emerging trend:

Sustainability Marketing

Consumers are increasingly drawn to brands that prioritise sustainability. Incorporate eco-friendly practices into your marketing strategy to appeal to a growing audience that values responsibility:

Personalised Marketing

Customers respond better to personalised marketing experiences that cater to their individual preferences. Tap into this trend and see how it can benefit your business:

Interactive Content

Interactive content like quizzes, polls, and surveys can engage your audience on a deeper level. Find out how to use interactive content to your advantage:

Key Marketing Dates

Keeping track of key dates and events throughout the year can give your marketing campaigns a significant boost. Here’s a list of unmissable dates to generate buzz:

We hope that our ultimate guide has given you plenty of useful tips to help take your business to the next level. If you would like more expert advice or support, our friendly team is always here and happy to help.

For a free virtual marketing ideas session with marketing experts, call us on 01962 600 147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk

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B2B marketing strategy: What marketing methods should you be using in 2020?

Introduction

Every successful business in 2020 should have a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy will define the marketing channels you will use as a business to reach, connect and engage with your customers and prospects to generate leads. The marketing channels you use should be appropriately chosen to get the biggest bang for your buck and specific to your business and the sector you’re in, but also, your choice should take into consideration your goals as a business. Ask yourself what do you want to achieve through your marketing? Is it growing your customer base and expanding your audience? Is it to generate more leads? Or for customer retention purposes? Whatever your aim is, firstly you must have a good understanding of your market, where you sit in that market and who your audience is, in order to identify the right marketing channels for you.

Where do I start?

First-things-first, a review of your competitors will help you to establish your company’s positioning and determine where you sit in the current market. If the market seems very crowded and everyone (including you) looks more or less the same, offering the same products or services, you need to consider how to stand out (in a good way!) and offer something unique to attract your customers, or as we call it – a USP (unique selling point). Whereas, you might discover you operate in a gap in the market, in which case you have something unique that nobody else is offering.

When you have reviewed your competitors and established your position and any USP you might have, you can then identify your target audience. You may have multiple customer profiles that you wish to target for your business, based around different products or services. You will need to consider your audience’s business type, age, gender, location, sector, job role, interests etc., to have a better understanding of what marketing channels you need to introduce into your marketing strategy. Your audience will also determine the type of messaging you use and what your marketing should look like.

You should use your review of your competitors to assess what marketing channels and techniques other businesses are using, as well as to find out which ones they are using well and which are not so effective. For example: what is their website like? Are they publishing new content regularly? Are they using social media? If so, which platforms are they using and how often are they posting? Do they send a newsletter? Have they got re-marketing ads set-up? Do they have pay-per-click adverts on Google? And so on. This will benefit you when you come to planning your marketing strategy and deciding which channels and techniques you should be using or could be doing better on, as well as which ones to avoid.

What’s next?

There are a multitude of effective marketing channels and techniques you can use within the B2B sector to connect with customers and prospects, but before you jump into doing all of them at once, you should create a marketing plan and select the channels that are going to be the most cost effective and beneficial for the results you want.

A marketing plan will also help you to plan for the costs and resources associated with each component and establish whether you will need to hire someone or outsource a marketing specialist to help you. Remember, just because one competitor might be doing everything, this does not mean you should and doing so could be a major waste of your time and money. Find what works for your business.

Some examples of marketing channels to consider for your 2020 strategy

To explain further, we’ll be putting together a series of informative blogs focusing on different marketing channels you could consider, including website & content creation, all things Google (SEO, paid search and remarketing), email marketing & telemarketing, social media and last but not least offline advertising and direct mail.

Keep an eye out on our blog and follow us on social media to make sure you don’t miss which channels will be best for you, to help you deliver your 2020 marketing strategy!

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The TLC Business Annual Marketing Lunch 2020

Essential Marketing Insights for SMEs ‘How to get the most out of your marketing buck’.

It’s that time of year again for the TLC Business Annual Marketing Lunch, where we will be providing SMEs in Hampshire with useful insights, tips, guidance and advice around how to get the most from their marketing budget in the year ahead.

This year’s free annual marketing seminar will be held at the Holiday Inn Winchester on Thursday 13th February 2020 from 12pm-2pm. Full details of the event can be found below but if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Spaces for this event are limited, therefore you must book your place in advance to confirm your attendance.

You can book your place here.

Please note: this event is not eligible for other marketing or creative agencies.

Event details:

Date: Thursday 13th February 2020
Time: 12pm – 2pm
Location: The Monarch Suite, Holiday Inn Winchester, Telegraph Way, Morn Hill, Winchester, Hampshire, SO21 1HZ
Refreshments: Buffet lunch & refreshments provided
Price: Free

Topics we’ll cover:

– Social media – how to make it work for your business
– PPC (Pay per click advertising) – why it is an important part of your marketing mix
– SEO (Search engine optimisation) – the fundamentals
– Email marketing – is it still relevant?
– Content – what should we be creating?
– How to stand out from the crowd
– How can I find out what is working?

We hope to see you there!

 

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Listen to Josh’s interview on BBC Radio Solent ‘Ask the Expert’

Josh Spencer, Managing Director of TLC Business and Chartered Marketer, is interviewed for Ask the Expert on BBC Radio Solent, discussing all things Marketing!

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What does it mean to be a Google Partner?

The Google Partners program was established to certify businesses who have demonstrated advanced skills and expertise in Google Ads, such as marketing and advertising agencies or other third-party businesses who manage Google Ads accounts on behalf of other brands and businesses. The Partner badge is awarded to companies who Google have recognised as a legitimate partner.

How do you achieve Google Partner status?

Businesses can achieve Google Partner status by passing assessments and certifications in Google Ad,s available through the Skillshop and by meeting the Google Ads spending requirements:

 

  • Certifications

 

The Google Skillshop has six certifications available for the following components: Fundamentals of Google AdWords, Advanced AdWords, Display Advertising, Video, Mobile and Shopping Ads. Once you have passed the Fundamentals and Advanced exams you will earn your Google AdWords certification; passing the other four exams will entitle you to Google’s AdWords Specialists certifications. All of the certifications are valid for 12 months and must be re-assessed in order to retain your certification.

 

  • Spend

 

Businesses must meet the Google AdWords spending requirements across the managed accounts to show that the company has a healthy amount of ongoing activity.

 

  • Company performance

 

The business must showcase solid ad revenue growth for the company and clients and demonstrate that they have retained and grown their customer base.

When Google recognises that a business has demonstrated and met the standards of the above, they will be rewarded with the Google Partner badge. The badge can be revoked at any time though, as the business must continue to meet all of Google’s standards for partner status and certifications must be re-taken every 12 months.

What are the benefits of working with a Google Partner?

Achieving Google Partner status provides businesses with access to plenty of benefits from additional product and sales trainings, advanced account support, assistance with growth, promotional offers and other rewards.

TLC Business have achieved their Google Partner status with a specialisation in Search advertising. This means our team members have been recognised as certified Google Search experts and we have demonstrated our skills in managing and developing successful Google Search campaigns for our clients.

By working with a Google Partner, you can be confident that your business will be working with recognised Google specialists who are up-to-date with the latest Google Ads products. We also have access to a dedicated Google support team, special offers and additional training resources so that we can continue to develop our skills in creating, managing, analysing and optimising specific Google Ads tools.

How to certify if someone is a genuine Google Partner

A company who has been certified as a Google Partner will be rewarded with an official Partner bade that they can showcase on their website, in their email signatures or on business cards. But how do you know if a business is a genuine Google Partner? Well, quite simply a genuine Google Partner badge hosted on a website or email signature will link through to the official Partner profile which will list all of their company and individual specialisations and certifications.

Take a look at our fancy Google Partner badge here.

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Ways to improve your Search Engine ranking (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making changes to your website in order to improve your online visibility in a search engine’s organic results, otherwise known as unpaid or natural results. The factors which affect your website’s search engine rank have changed over the years, due to Google’s (and other Search Engines) continual updates to their algorithms; therefore, continually reviewing your SEO activities is crucial to ensure you appear prominently on the search engine results page (SERP).

Did you know that 75% of people don’t scroll past the first page of search results and 70%-80% of people skip straight past paid ads completely and to the organic results? Therefore, even if you are using pay-per-click (PPC) ads; which generally appear at the top and bottom of the results page and marked ‘Ad’ next to the URL, the majority of online users will ignore your ad and skip straight to the organic results, where you may not appear if your website is not optimised effectively.

 

How can I find out where my website is ranking?

If you want to see where your website is ranking on a search engine, we don’t recommend you perform a search of your business yourself as it is likely that you will not get an accurate representation of where your website ranks for a number of reasons:

  1. You are likely to regularly visit your website from the device you are using and therefore the search engine will recognise this and display your website as one of the top results based on your cookies and browser history.
  2. You may be carrying out the search from your office location and the search engine will show businesses closest to you based on relevance.
  3. If using Google search for example, you may be logged into Google using an account associated with your website or your Google My Business listing and therefore your website might show artificially high in the results.

To check your website’s SERP ranking correctly, there are a number of free or paid tools you can use. Our recommendation is Serpfox, they offer a free account for up to 10 keywords or paid plans from $10 a month. Other quick online tools which don’t require an account or subscription include Moz Rank and SERPChecker, but there are a variety of others available which also provide keyword idea tools and the ability to check your site’s ranking against your competitors.

 

What factors affect my search ranking?

There are a number of factors which will affect your website’s organic search ranking, some of which aren’t new and have been best practice for years, but others are becoming increasingly more important as Google continues to update their algorithms almost every day.

 

Keywords

A search engine recognises search terms as ‘keywords’ and will look for these keywords on your website to see if it is relevant for that search. The use of keywords for SEO has changed slightly over the years as it’s no longer feasible to throw a bunch of keywords onto your website in the copy or H1 tags. The basic rule is to choose one unique keyword per page to tell the search engine what that page is about. You can use free online keyword tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, WordStream or Wordtracker to find keyword ideas and their search volumes. Most tools will also show the PPC competition and cost-per-click (CPC), if you decide to use the keywords for paid search ads too. To benefit from full SEO, the keyword you have chosen for that page should be included in the meta data and on the website page itself (in the first H1 tag and at least once (possibly more) on the page text, ideally in the first paragraph). You can also include it in the page URL and alt tags. All of these placements will help tell search engines what your pages content is really about.

 

Meta Data

Meta tags are bits of text that describe a web page’s content; however, they don’t appear on the web pages themselves, only in the page’s HTML code. A search engine reads the meta data to find the topic of the web page and check for the relevance of your web page against a particular search term. Each page of your website should have a unique meta title and meta description. This will tell the search engines the name of your page and what it is about. To effectively write meta data for your website, your meta title and descriptions for each page will have one main keyword in it that is relevant to that page. The meta data is also the title and description which will display on a search engine’s results. For example, I have searched “SEO tools” in Google and one of the top organic results was this page link for Moz (see image below). You can see that the keyword “SEO tools” is in the meta title; therefore, Google has recognised that this is a relevant web page for my search term.

In order for your meta tags to display correctly, your title should be no longer than 50-60 characters and your description no more than 150-160 characters in order for Google to display your page listing without getting truncated.

Page URL

Search engines will also check your web page URL for relevance to the search term, therefore in addition to your meta tags you can include your chosen keyword for that page in the website’s or page’s URL to help improve your ranking.

Content

Updating your website regularly with new content will help to improve search engine results too. Content can be anything in the form of copy, blogs, video, resources, graphics, infographics and more. Video is also increasingly relevant and in demand by users; therefore, having embedded video on your website is a bonus for your SERP rank. Using keywords in your website’s copy such as blogs and case studies will also help to improve search results and you can also label your images and other media using alt tags, which work similarly to meta tags and give the search engine further information about your website’s content.

 

Mobile-Friendliness

Over 50% of web traffic in the world is now on mobile and mobile users are increasing dramatically year-on-year; therefore, it is vitally important for websites to be mobile-friendly. Google can recognise how well your website performs on a smaller device and will rank your website accordingly. It will check your website for its responsiveness, accessibility, loading speeds and user-experience on mobile. You can check if your website is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

 

Image source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241462/global-mobile-phone-website-traffic-share/

 

User-experience

In addition to mobile-friendliness, you should still ensure that your website performs well on desktops and tablets too. If your website has a lot of java-script, high-resolution images, video and links, these factors can affect a website’s page load speed; which will have a negative impact on your search rank. You can check how your website performs in this area using free online tool, GTmetrix; which gives you a score for your website’s page speed and will also provide you with smaller scaled images or ‘smushed’ images to replace those on your website, without compromising quality.

You should also check your website for broken-links in case you have changed any of your website’s page names or URLs historically. Old links from your website may still show up on search results or may be linked from other website and need re-directing, otherwise your website will show a 404 error page, which also negatively impacts user-experience. To check your website for any broken links, you can use the ‘Crawl Errors’ report under Google Search Console’s webmaster tools.

Another thing to consider which can impact your ranking is your website security. In 2014, Google confirmed that websites with an SSL certificate would get an added advantage in the search engine results and last year sites with a non-HTTPS status would be flagged with the warning message “Not secure” in the URL bar of the browser to show that it was unsafe. If your website is http:// instead of https://, you should consider purchasing an SSL certificate from your web hosting company. An SSL certificate will help to minimise the chances of cybercrime and hacking that is often targeted through security loopholes in web browsers. You should also check that you are using the most up-to-date version of your CMS or PHP. If you are using WordPress for example, in 2018 official guidance was released that you should run PHP 7 or higher, which not only provides improvements in handling errors and script problems but improves your website’s security and makes your website harder to hack.

 

Google My Business

Finally, if you haven’t set up your own Google My Business account, it is possible that Google has created one for you. This is the business and address listing that shows for your business. For example, when searching “Winchester restaurant” in Google search, I am given several listings of restaurants and a map. If you utilise this tool to its potential, it can have positive effects on your SERP ranking. You can edit your listing to include images, a description, opening hours, contact information, a link to your website, directions and reviews. A listing with positive Google reviews (all things being equal) is more likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results than a listing with poor reviews or no reviews at all. You can set up a Google My Business listing or request ownership of one that exists for you by creating an account here.

 

 

How TLC Business can help

TLC Business can undertake a variety of SEO-related activities for SMEs including a review of your website, creating an SEO strategy, setting up Google Analytics and Search Console, keyword research and analytics, meta-data creation, on-page and off-page optimisation and more. You can find out more about our SEO services (make this the link) on our website, or get in touch by emailing info@tlc-business.co.uk or calling 01962 600 147.

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TLC Business add SEO expert to the team

We are delighted to announce that TLC Business is now able to offer SEO and PPCmanagement services to our clients. The addition of SEO guru Tim Tavender to the TLC Business team now enables us to offer efffective, results-driven SEO services to ambitious SMEs, eager to make their mark on the web.
Tim is the perfect addition to the team, bringing with him a wealth of Internet Marketing Agency and first hand SME business experience, along with a great sense of humour and a whole host of amusing stories to keep us entertained as the day goes by.

TLC Business’ SEO and PPC services are tailored to the needs of ambitious SMEs that want to increase the volume of new business their website generates for them.

Our results orientated approach is delivered by drawing on knowledge, experience and techniques typically the reserve of large corporate organisations, now made affordable for SMEs.

To find out more about our SEO and PPC services and claim your free SEO report visit our SEO services page or call 01962 600 150.

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