Social Media, Networking, and Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Depending on the market you’re targeting, social media marketing can provide huge benefits to businesses utilising these channels. Social media includes such concepts as blogs, podcasts, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Flickr. As the saying goes, it’s all about location, location, location. Think of these social media channels as shopping centres. They already have hundreds of thousands of visitors every day. How can you use that traffic to increase your business? Particularly if your business includes any kind of ‘enthusiast’ audience, eg pets, cars, sports etc, a ‘discussion forum’ can attract people to your site to discuss on-line the topics that concern them. You’ll learn a lot if you listen and participate!

Search-Engine Optimisation and Search-Engine Marketing

These two phrases get mixed up regulary, or even combined. Even though they are intended to achieve the same end-result (ie driving more traffic to your website) they achieve this in different ways.

Search-Engine Optimisation (SEO)

If you sell any kind of product or service, you’ll be competing online with other websites who sell a similar product or service. Let’s take the example of electricians. If you go to Google and search for ‘electricians’, Google will tell you that roughly 68 million pages on the web refer to electricians in one way or another. If you’re an electrician, you’d want your website to come near the top when anyone searches for ‘electricians’ wouldn’t you? So would several million other electrician companies!

Search-Engine optimisation refers to the process of making your site as ‘friendly’ to search-engines as humanly possible. This starts with a good domain name and continues with well-structured text and carefully thought-out phrases, all of which are designed to make Google aware of what service or product you offer. Secondly, what are the phrases that prospective customers are actually using? These might not necessarily be the ones you think they are. For example: You might think of yourself as a ‘electrical engineer’, but if users mostly search on Google for the words ‘electrician’ they may never find your website! So an important step is to find out which key phrases are used when looking for your type of goods or services.

Finally, we may be able to help you to identify an additional keyword that helps your business ‘stand out’. For instance, saying that you want to be in the number one spot for “Luxury Accommodation Glasgow” may be a tough call. But “Luxury Hosted Accommodation Glasgow” might be easier.

Here comes the bad news, SEO is not a one-time effort. Your competitors will be doing the same thing, so you’ll need to refine your site regularly to keep it at the top of the search-results. SEO is not a ‘trick’ – you can’t fool Google for long. In the end your website needs to reflect honestly what your potential consumers are looking for.

Search-Engine Marketing (SEM)

If you operate in a highly competitive market, it’s likely that however optimised your site is, you may not appear on the first couple of pages in Google for some keywords. Adwords allow you to ‘bid’ for sponsored advertisements. These appear on the top and right-hand side of Google searches. The good news is that you’ll only pay each time a user clicks on the advert and goes to your site. Hence – it’s called ‘pay-per-click’ advertising and can be extremely cost effective. You can set daily or weekly budget limits and even turn the advert on and off in minutes.

For more information on any of the above please contact us.

We are urbanCREATIVE UK - a Glasgow based creative agency specialising in graphic design, web design, seo, brand creation, and social media marketing.
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