Digital Insights

The internet is a massive, disorientating space. There's plenty of competition, and it's easy to get lost in the crowd. This is why you need to define your target market or persona for each blog post, to be effective and to create ripples of interest in that big online pool…

Big data analytics – where businesses examine large amounts of data to learn more about the way they operate – represent a huge opportunity for all marketers. In a complex market, with customers diverted down various channels to arrive at your product, it's important to be able to gain a bigger…

If you’re investing in any form of inbound marketing that generates visitors to your website, you’re going to want as many of those visitors as possible to convert into paying customers. However, it’s unrealistic to expect that everyone will become customers straight away; some prospects need to be ‘warmed up’…

A website plays an integral part in all inbound marketing strategies. It’s where you send people to find out more information, to educate them and to ultimately turn them into customers. It does, however, serve as an endpoint to your marketing strategy. It’s where people go to read your blog posts, get your great educational content, find out about your company and become leads. Here are a few important features for a fully functional website:

Content marketing and lead generation are two disciplines that go hand-in-hand. If you don't have a handle on one, you're unlikely to see the best results with the other. Running a lead generation campaign without compelling content is like fishing without bait, while content marketing that doesn't take lead generation into consideration represents a major missed opportunity.

Bots were once the thoughts of creative minds who wrote scripts for sci-fi movies yet today are more “real” than ever before. The term ‘bot’ is getting used more regularly theses days and bots are starting to get used in many different scenarios.

This is a question often posed to our team and something we often shudder at. We reckon it's like asking whether a happy, life-long personal relationship can be guaranteed by going on a single date! We're comparing starting points here, and while getting more traffic might be considered to be a short-term possibility, how likely is a one-off communication to actually gain more proper leads and then more reliable customers on a constant basis?

SEO could be described as a modern take on traditional advertising. It is a lot more than that, in terms of how we communicate, but it's still valuable to take a moment to consider what advertising has always worked to achieve. Attracting viable, potential customers for a business to sell to.  A good example would be advertising for a traditional small-town furniture store. In the past, the company would almost certainly use local press. It's true they would occasionally highlight one-off events, such as sales and stock clearances, but would also wish to build both a reputation in their community and a familiarity with their products, services and attitudes.

In doing so, they would hope to gain more in-store traffic, and their sale ads might well achieve that, if perhaps only on a short-term basis. From this footfall, it would be the task of the people working in the store to assess which are the worthwhile leads, from among the jostling crowds, and then spend most time working to convert them. Success would mean a sale, but not, in real terms, a long-term customer (yet). Further advertising would encourage them to return - even to pass information to interested friends; thus generating more customers with potential.

We are now increasingly in a digital, more than a print, world. Your potential customers might be more interactive online than in-person. But, your SEO activities still need to identify who they are, and know exactly what needs to be said to attract their attention and interest. This means that your SEO content needs to be an ongoing part of your communications strategy; both reaching for new contacts, as well as strengthening current ones.

WordPress have quite a regular major update schedule (around four times a year with minor releases in-between). If your website is running fine and is doing what it needs to, you might think an update is not necessary.

If you have a company, a product, offer a service or you are just trying to create a digital presence for yourself, you best be blogging. If you are following best practices and avoiding blogging mistakes like the plague, you would see the awesome value that having a blog renders. In fact, blogging is one of the cornerstones of content marketing.  Does blogging consistently really matter? Well, yes it does.