Why is Advertising an Essential Feature of Your Business Processes?

In this post, we’ll discuss the following:

When you have started a business, it’s imperative that you make people aware of this fact. Marketing and advertising is essential to this process. Any type of business, whether you run online or offline, requires customers. By investing into a marketing and advertising strategy, you can improve leads, increase sales and ultimately, make a profit.

To do this, reaching new audiences and promoting your products or services is crucial, especially in a competitive market.

There are many different ways you may choose to advertise your business. Whether it’s television ads, editorial pieces in a newspaper, banners, leaflets, websites, or social media, each method of marketing has its own pros and cons and you must evaluate the best strategy for you.

Advertising can be tricky to get right, which is why we have provided five quick tips to help you get the best out of your marketing processes and maximise your chances of success.

RELEVANCE IS THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL ADVERTISING

One of the most fundamental aspects of marketing is to drive stronger and more meaningful connections between customers and brands. Everything you do must begin with the customer.

Today, customers are freely engaging with brands via multiple devices and touchpoints in real time. They are more connected and empowered than before, so you must provide them with the relevant information they need. By taking an omni-channel marketing approach, you meet the desires of your customers and answer their questions whenever and wherever they want.

The amount of data we can now gather about target audiences and customer journeys allows you to gather deep knowledge about your customer’s behaviour. Through data-driven techniques, you can gain great insights that should educate your marketing processes.

With so much information available, there is no excuse for creating irrelevant customer experiences.

ALWAYS COMMUNICATE YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Marketing is all about creating and satisfying your customers’ needs and desires. It’s important to relate to your audiences needs, but don’t forget to tell them why you can satisfy them.

Your business is likely to be in competition with many other industry leaders and businesses who are firmly established. Having a secure and strong brand position involves truly understanding your competition and your competitive advantage.

Ask yourself: what can you provide to your clients or customers that your competitors can’t? Once you can answer that question, let your target audience know the answer.

BUILD YOUR IMAGE

The world is becoming increasingly consumer-led.Everyday you will be exposed to hundreds of images, whether they’re adverts, brand logos, signs or symbols. They may come in many forms, shapes and sizes. The most effective adverts are those that remain consistent in their image and build a unique brand through it.

Ensure your advert and message have clarity, consistency and creativity to communicate strongly.

Your principles and identity should be built through an initial brand positioning review. Whether it’s the quality of your products or the tone and personality your business uses, you need to remain consistent with your brand.

This consistency is what makes a strong brand that is familiar to consumers and can significantly improve your bottom line. In fact, according to Forbes, consistency across channels increases revenue by 23%.

ARE YOU BEING SEEN?

It sounds obvious, but ensure your target audience will see the advertising platform you use.

Research your demographic – what do they do, how do they behave and what do they need?

If your target audience is younger and using social media platforms such as TikTok or Snapchat, investing into advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn means you wont be seen by the consumers you want to target.

Evaluate your customer personas and ensure you’re reaching the right people at the right time.

HAVE A REACTIVE BUDGET

Allocate a certain amount of money that you wish to spend on advertising and don’t cut corners – cheap advertising can be counter-productive to your brand image.

Ensure that the platform or advertising medium you use is specific to your target audience and then invest.

It’s also important that you don’t just simply allocate a set figure every month. React to the changes in your sales performances during various seasons or events of the year. To remain effective and efficient, a well-structured advertising strategy will help ensure your return on investment is maximised.

When deciding on where to allocate your advertising budget, think about utilising a variety of media and decide whether physical or digital advertising is more appropriate.

EDGE CREATIVE

It is important that you have measurement controls in place to assess the effectiveness of your advertising. A strong marketing and advertising strategy provides a number of benefits, one of those being the ability to find out what is working and adjust your marketing processes accordingly.

At EDGE Creative, we can draw upon research into your customers and their journeys and optimise your advertising and marketing processes to ensure success. Enquire today to find out more by emailing info@edge-creative.com or calling us on 0121 355 8092.

Guest Blogging: Why Your Business Needs It

In this post, we cover the following topics:

For any business, blogging is a hugely valuable tool when it comes to sharing ideas, demonstrating knowledge and, most importantly, driving visitors to your website. Guest blogging is a key strategy you can use to do all of the above.

Many businesses are likely experiencing a quieter period due to the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning it’s now more important than ever to use any downtime to increase the number of visitors on your website. If you’ve not considered guest blogging before, or if you’ve not yet got round to it, now is the time to get started.

WHAT IS GUEST BLOGGING?

Guest blogging is the process of writing content for another website. A guest blog is often written for another business within a similar or linked industry, and a successful guest post will use a topic that applies to both.

By writing a blog for another website, you can help to boost brand awareness by getting your content in front of a wider audience. Guest posts are also a key part of any successful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, as they can help your website to attract more traffic.

WHY IS GUEST BLOGGING IMPORTANT?

Guest blogging is an important way of building valuable relationships with other business leaders. It can also help you to drive traffic back to your own website.

If you reach out to another business to write a guest blog for them, they’re likely to want to submit a guest post to your blog as well. This can help you to build connections and save time on providing varied and engaging content for your own audience.

If you’re a start-up or if you’ve just launched a new website, this is really important!

HOW DOES GUEST BLOGGING HELP WITH SEO?

When done successfully, guest blogging can help to drive more traffic back to your website and even boost domain authority. Domain authority is a score ranging from 1 to 100, which predicts a website’s ability to rank in the results page of a search engine. The higher this score is, the better the website will rank.

By publishing high quality content on another relevant website and linking to your own in the process, you can potentially increase your domain authority. This can, in turn benefit your search engine ranking position, which will help you to drive more visitors to your website.

WHERE CAN I SUBMIT A GUEST POST?

There are plenty of ways your business can source guest blogging opportunities. A great place to start for B2B businesses is to reach out to contacts within your industry.

If you request to place a guest post on someone’s website, it’s a good idea for you to offer your connection a space to submit their content as well. This will help out another business, and will allow to build a stronger relationship with them.

For B2C organisations, you can build connections with other bloggers, influencers or other relevant businesses. There are plenty of groups on Facebook you can join to find other bloggers looking to submit a guest post. Once you build these connections, you can return the favour.

If you’re looking for guest post opportunities, we can support you with content marketing services. We can also help you weave your blogs into a wider and more in-depth SEO strategy. We’re also here to help with promoting guest blogs and getting your message to a wider audience.

Talk to us about submitting a guest post on our website and we can provide a free-of-charge consultation with a dedicated Account Manager or Creative Director to discuss your marketing strategy as a whole. Call a member of the team on 0121 355 8092 or email us at info@edge-creative.com to learn more.

“Why is Having a Website Important?” – How to Increase Leads, Sales and Your Bottom Line

When considering including a website in your business strategy, it’s important to think about:

Having a website is essential to increasing brand exposure, nurturing relationships with your customers and improving your bottom line. When you get it right, your website will generate more leads, more sales and most importantly, more money.

WHY IS HAVING A WEBSITE IMPORTANT FOR MY BUSINESS?

When looking for a new product or service, most people’s first port of call will be a search engine. In fact, Google processes over 40,000 search enquiries per second, averaging over 3.5 billion every single day. If you don’t have a website, you’re missing out on getting your business in front of your audience when they’re in the right stage of the customer journey. As such, they will probably take their custom, and money, elsewhere.

If you do have a website, you need to ensure that it is the best it can possibly be. Beginning with your website, your audience are passing judgement on your business and deciding whether they want to initiate a relationship with you. With an easy-to-find website with a clean design and responsive website features, you tick the first box in your audience’s mental checklist. By providing a smooth experience from the moment your audience clicks onto your website, you reflect the positive experience your business can provide.

HOW CAN I CREATE A GOOD WEBSITE EXPERIENCE FOR MY AUDIENCE?

The creation and management of a website has many elements that need to be considered. Firstly, the structure of your website must tailor to your target customer’s needs. For example, if you sell products such as jewellery or clothing, you are likely to need an ecommerce website that allows your business to connect with potential customers in a more streamlined way.

There are also a range of other factors you must consider in order to improve business reputation, increase sales and boost your bottom line with a website. Major design attributes such as the use of graphics, imaging, written content and navigation throughout the website are integral factors in providing a seamless user experience that urges your audience to convert into customers. 

Research has found that the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second when viewing a web page. Unless that 20th of a second is positive, your visitors will bounce off your website and straight onto your competitor’s. This is why grabbing their attention straight away is vital.

The type of website design you choose for your business will be dependent on your target audience, services or products and branding, however you should firstly set out some main goals. Do you want customers to enquire about your services? Do you want customers to make a sale directly? Once you have decided this, you can set out designing a clear-cut, professional website that is successful in achieving your wider business goals.

WHAT IS A DOMAIN AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

The first step to getting your website up and running is the purchase of a hosting service. A service provider will host your website for a small annual or monthly fee, and in return, your website will be available and accessible on the web.

Simply, a domain name is the address you type into your website browser address bar to get to a website. For example, ours is https://edge-creative.com.

A lot of companies offer lots of customisation and management services that allow you to access and edit the content of your website from your own computer via a simple username and password login. You may choose a relatively easy to manage, low-cost but effective package when you buy your website, or if you have more experience with the running of a website, you may choose something more complex. This again comes back to your main business goals. If your website is too plain or not user-friendly, your audience are likely to go elsewhere. However, if it’s too complex, they may struggle to find the information they require, and leave your website.

WHERE DO I START WHEN BUILDING A WEBSITE FOR MY BUSINESS?

The creation of a website can seem like a confusing and complex process, especially if you don’t know where to start.

At EDGE Creative, our developers have a keen eye for technical detail that will make a difference to both your visitors’ experience and your bottom line. From ensuring your website has fast load times to ensuring the navigation is engaging and effective, our developers have the right skills and creativity that your website needs.

We can draw upon research into your customers and their journeys to create responsive designs with easy navigation. Enquire today to find out more about building a website to improve your business’s processes by emailing info@edge-creative.com or calling us on 0121 355 8092.

Why is Omni-channel Marketing Important for Your Business?

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

In this modern age, marketing is undergoing some major changes. The idea of ‘pull’ and ‘push’ marketing, where businesses either push their products directly to the audience or try and gain loyalty to pull in customers, is adjusting. Today we are moving towards a more personalised way of engaging with consumers, through the vast array of channels and devices on offer.

With the outbreak of coronavirus and the government lockdown, more consumers and businesses are heading online, so making use of online marketing has never been more important. Today’s screen-addicted consumers have pushed marketing and advertising into a whole new digital realm. The effect of this digital surge is what is now known as “omni-channel digital marketing”.

WHAT IS OMNI-CHANNEL MARKETING?

Omni-channel marketing is a core strategy that brands use to engage with customers across multiple channels.

Marketers need to provide a seamless user experience across all channels relevant to the buyer’s journey. Businesses can now interact with their consumers in store, on an online website or app, through print ads and catalogues or through social media platforms.

The Office for National Statistics released their annual report for Internet access in Great Britain in 2019, stating: “among all adults, 84% had used the internet ‘on the go’ in 2019, using a mobile phone, smartphone, laptop, tablet or handheld device”.

A customer’s purchasing journey can now span across many different days, locations, devices and channels. It is therefore crucial that a consumer’s experience remains as coherent as possible, across all networks, in person and behind a screen.

So, if a consumer can engage with a brand at anytime and anywhere, how should your business prepare to accommodate this?

HOW TO IMPLEMENT OMNI-CHANNEL MARKETING

Putting Yourself in Your Consumers’ Shoes

It is helpful to regularly examine the experience you are offering to your customers by re-enacting your customers’ purchasing journey.

Place an order or search for specific information on your channels. Do you provide a seamless experience? Are there any issues or obstacles? By employing a marketing agency like EDGE Creative, we can do this for you. We can help you to achieve this seamless experience you need by examining and expanding on your current marketing strategies through high-quality tools such as Hotjar.

Utilising Data

Data is vital in helping you to understand your business and its developments. Data processing includes increased productivity and profits whilst providing you with reliable, accurate statistics. Investing time and expenses into gathering data will help you to measure your success in terms of the response of real people, over a specific amount of time.

You should also be carrying out conversion rate optimisation (CRO). This practice functions to improve the conversion rate in any advertising, marketing, sales or other business practice that has a goal of getting a person to take an action.

The process of CRO involves understanding how your visitors are using your website, what actions they are taking and what is stopping them from completing your goals.

At EDGE Creative, we have over 15 years’ experience in creating digital campaigns that encourage users to convert. Our expert team are pioneers in using remarketing to boost conversion rates, while raising your business’s reputation, visibility and bottom line.

Defining Your Target Market

A target market is the specific group of people who you want to reach with your marketing message. These are the people who are most likely to purchase your products or services.

Creating a customer persona is a method of segmenting your target audience. These are profiles based on the analysis and research of your existing customers, which help to build more of a detailed picture of how old your customers are, where they live and what their personal motivations might be.

If you have a wide audience demographic, you can create personas for the different products or services you offer. Building these personas mean that you can be sure to target the right person from day one, meaning your business no longer wastes money targeting people on the off chance they slightly fit your audience.

Defining your audience will ensure you are effective in your marketing efforts; it will not stop people from buying your products. Defining your target audience will eventually help you to tailor your future content across all channels. 

As a digital marketing agency, we have over 15 years’ experience in devising customer personas, which makes us experts in helping you to define your audience online.

Listening and Responding to Your Customers

More than ever people are now using multiple devices during a single transaction process. You should be responding to these interactions.

An example of this could be to preserve the items in a customer’s shopping basket across their devices. This way, if a customer logs off their mobile app and switches to desktop, the product will still be in their basket. Sending emails to customers reminding them of the existing items in their basket could also encourage them to confirm their transaction.

EDGE CREATIVE

At EDGE Creative, we have extensive experience in providing a first-class marketing service that creates an impact and retains your audience. We can support you and your business in designing tailored marketing solutions across both traditional and digital platforms. If you are interested in finding out how EDGE Creative can help you, get in touch by calling 0121 355 8092 or email us on info@edge-creative.com.

WooCommerce 4.0: What Does It Mean for My Website?

WooCommerce 4.0 will be the second release of 2020 and is currently scheduled for March 13th. As a major release, the update brings many changes which will dramatically impact how e-commerce businesses view their product sales. Some of the main changes you can expect to see are listed below.

ADMIN INTERFACE

One of the main features coming to WooCommerce 4.0 is the inclusion of the new admin interface. This interface provides a modern, JavaScript-driven experience for managing your store and includes:

A New Dashboard

The new dashboard allows you to easily and effectively customise your screen with specific performance indicators which correspond in importance to your store’s operation.

New and Improved Reports

There are a range of new reports which have been optimised for speed and have advanced filters that allow you to delve into your store’s data. This includes reports on revenue, orders, products, categories, coupons, taxes, downloads, stock and customers.

Through these reports, you can see which categories are selling the most in your store, identify customers who are the biggest spenders over the lifetime of their interaction with your brand and analyse which coupons from campaigns are being used.

WooCommerce 4.0 also brings an improved notification experience and new store management tools. The different changes drive WordPress towards a more powerful and reactive experience that makes use of the latest technology to improve the day-to-day running of your store.

EDGE CREATIVE

The release is due on March 13th and will revolutionise how you see product sales. At EDGE Creative, we will be rolling this update out on the relevant client’s website this month as part of their web care plan.

If you are interested in seeing how WooCommerce 4.0 can support you with your store sales, email info@edge-creative.com or call us on 0121 355 8092.

Element 26: 6 Ways to Get the Most Out of Video on Social Media

Video is changing the way businesses use social media to market to their audience. In this exclusive guest blog, our partner Element 26 outlines how you can get the most out of video to increase leads, brand recognition and ultimately, improve your bottom line.

GUEST BLOG BY ELEMENT 26

All the major social media platforms are prioritising video as a means to both engage and empower users.

Regardless of whether your customers are on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter or on any of the emerging platforms, business owners and marketing managers should be thinking video first in all their content plans through 2020 and beyond.

Don’t believe me, take a look at the content Linkedin are publishing on their own company page and you will get a sense of what i’m talking about. As you can see, their feed is made up almost entirely of video.

So, why are the social media giants prioritising video in this way and how does the end user benefit from this opportunity?

It’s pretty simple really, video keeps users active for longer and promotes deeper more meaningful engagement. According to Wordstream, ‘Social video gets shared 1200% more than text and images combined.’

Almost all of the social media platforms can divide their users down into two profiles:

  • The general user (consumer of content): those who use the various platforms to share and engage in content they’re interested in.
  • The business user (publisher of content): those who use social to further their mission, amplify their voice and find new customers.

In many cases the user can fit both of the profiles listed above, but the business user is perhaps the more intriguing because they will likely understand that social media can be many things.

There are three broad camps of video in social media:

Shared, Advertising & Live

Shared Video

Shared video is everything you post either to your company page or your personal profile. This can come in the form of short to-camera pieces or more polished pieces of branded content.

Advertising Video

Advertising video is anything you put budget behind to reach more people.

Live Video

Live video is content which you broadcast in real time. Similar to a webinar, Live Video is fantastic for real time engagement. At Element 26, we often produce live videos either from the set of our latest shoot or to provide educational insight in lieu of webinars.

6 WAYS YOU CAN GET THE MOST OUT OF VIDEO ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA

Storytelling

Video is a story based medium and humans are coded to respond to stories. Try to publish video content regularly and build a narrative your prospects can connect with. Ideally they should either see themselves in your videos (ie testimonials) or they should connect to a pain point you have identified.

Post Natively

All of the social media platforms support publishing video natively. Where possible, this means you should avoid taking YouTube links and then plonking them onto your Facebook page. Videos published without using the native tools receive secondary treatment from the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn, which limits their reach.

Don’t be afraid of producing different versions of your video for each social channel. We have produced a guide to do this which you can find on this link here.

Provide Subtitles

Users will watch video content on social media at various points throughout the day and it may not always be practical to watch your content with the sound on. You would also want to make sure your video content is accessible to as many individuals as possible such as those with hearing issues.

This is where adding subtitles is important. You have two options when embedding subtitles. You can burn them into the video so that they cannot be disabled or you can produce a SRT (Subtitle Subrip File) which can be uploaded alongside the video file itself.

Maximise Screen Real Estate

Each social media channel handles video differently and presents different opportunities for how your videos should be presented. For example, on Instagram it is usually a good idea to publish your video in a square frame size as this will mean your videos take up more space in the feed. This makes them more eye-catching for your target audience.

Snippets

When producing your video for social media best practice would be to publish snippets or extracts from your video instead of giving the whole thing away for free, especially if you’re providing valuable insight.

We recommend that you host the complete video on your website and use social media to attempt to direct the user there.

Whilst it is notoriously difficult to ask users to navigate away from social media to your website, the benefit of taking this approach is that the user is then closer to your calls to action and can be exposed to various related content which is aligned with your customer journey.

Personalisation

Targeting your video content to the end user is a really powerful way to get responses. All the popular social media platforms offer direct messaging functionality and we like to use this approach to put video messages in the inbox of the recipients we would like to speak with.

Do be careful with this approach though as there are matters of etiquette that should be observed, for example “sliding into someone’s DMs” on Instagram isn’t really the done thing whereas on Linkedin this is not only possible but encouraged.

Thanks guys, I hope you found this blog post useful and you feel ready to take on video in social media throughout 2020 and beyond.

If you found this blog useful, why don’t you share it with your network and connect with me on LinkedIn.

EDGE CREATIVE

At EDGE Creative, we have over 14 years’ worth of experience in delivering excellent social media campaigns to a variety of clients across a broad spectrum of industries. With our solid and established social and content team, we have been able to develop and refine all the finer details in our process. In order to find out more about how EDGE Creative and our partner Element 26 can help you revolutionise your marketing, get in touch by calling 0121 355 8092.

This blog is a guest blog supplied by Nathan Haines of Element 26.

What Did the Last Decade Teach Us About Social Media?

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

If anything defined the 2010s, it’s social media. The past 10 years saw the birth of social supergiants like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and the death of MySpace, Bebo, and Vine.

Now, in 2020, the social media landscape looks completely different to how it did 10 years ago. Facebook has dominated the social media landscape, adverts are everywhere, and influencers are running the show. But one thing remains as important as it did back then: authenticity.

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA

2010

  • Instagram launches, hitting 100,000 users in less than a week. It was so overwhelmed with traffic that its servers completely shut down.
  • Pinterest, a photo sharing website, also launches.

2011

  • Snapchat launches and introduces ephemeral content to the scene: images that disappear after a set amount of time.
  • Google launches Google Plus and later integrates this with YouTube – much to many users’ dismay.
  • Twitch, a live-streaming platform now hugely popular with gamers, launches.

2012

  • After continued growth throughout the years, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for 1 billion dollars.
  • Facebook also hits one billion monthly active users.

2013

  • Twitter goes public; however, Wall Street investors realise that the size of its audience will never compare to Facebook.
  • Facebook attempts to buy Snapchat, but the owner turns down the 3 billion dollars offer.
  • Vine, a popular short video platform, launches after being acquired by Twitter for 30 million dollars.
  • Instagram launches video sharing.

2014

  • Facebook buys WhatsApp for 22 billion dollars.

2016

  • Facebook, Twitter and Google are accused of spreading misinformation during the 2016 presidential election.

2017

2018

  • Facebook, Twitter and Google face pressure in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.  

2019

  • Google+ is shut down.

HOW HAS THE LANDSCAPE CHANGED?

Social media has become far more accessible than it was in 2010. With the switch to smartphones and the availability of internet, social media and app developers are catering to an audience that’s growing by the minute.

It also means that businesses have had to follow suit. What once was a useful and playful way to keep in touch with friends and family has also become an excellent tool for advertising, and with 90% of social media users reaching out to brands or retailers, it would be a shame to miss out.

With so many businesses, influencers, bloggers and tweeters out there, users of social media can find it hard to cut through the noise. After all, many of us join social media for genuine discussion and connection, finding things that interest us, things that make us laugh, and stories that we relate to. That’s why authenticity is key to successfully engaging with your audience and allowing them to connect with your brand.

90% of consumers say authenticity is important when choosing the brands they support. If your business wants to succeed on social media, you need to drive authenticity through everything you do. Authenticity encompasses sharing genuinely relatable (and relevant!) content, understanding your audience demographics, staying true to your brand message, being transparent and honest, and most importantly, connecting with your audience.

WHAT WILL THE NEXT DECADE LOOK LIKE?

Advancements in technology have drove the main changes in social media, with better smartphone cameras and augmented reality allowing people to upload high quality content in seconds.

5G technology is likely to advance social media even further, making way for more interactive content and immersive games. It is, however, hard to estimate whether there is space for another social media network or whether we have exhausted all social media channels. What do you think?

For support with your social media strategy, email us at info@edge-creative.com or give us a call on 0121 355 8092.

What Does the Google Bert Update Mean for You?

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

Google’s latest update BERT was announced a couple of days ago and will affect 10% of search queries. This makes BERT one of the biggest Google updates of the last 5 years. So, what does this mean for you?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and it’s all about search and intent. Google defines it as ‘a neural network-based technique for natural language processing.’ In simpler terms, Google has made significant improvements to understanding queries and intent.

WHAT IS THE GOOGLE BERT UPDATE?

BERT is all about understanding search better. Instead of analysing a user’s search query word by word, the new update means that Google will interpret the entire phrase. By doing so, Google can provide more accurate search results.

Previously, slight modifications or spelling mistakes dramatically impacted Google’s results. Now, with Google looking at the entire phrase, the results are more accurate than ever. Google has provided some examples of how looking at the entire phrase will impact the results:

BERT update

WHAT DOES BERT MEAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

Firstly, this is not an algorithm that penalises anyone. This means that your business doesn’t have to worry too much about serious penalties that will seriously negatively impact your SEO efforts.

The biggest thing to look for is whether there have been many changes to your traffic. The websites that will perform best following this update will be those which are largely content populated. Here’s a few examples of how a few of our clients have done in the last week compared to the previous:

Increase traffic

Looking at organic traffic alone, our client has improved substantially over the past 7 days when compared to the previous week.

Again, looking at organic traffic alone, the number of users, new users and sessions have all risen.

HOW CAN I STOP MY TRAFFIC FROM DROPPING?

If your traffic appears to be dropping, don’t worry yet! Google has a long history of rolling out updates, then tweaking them in the weeks after.

If you are worried about how your search position has been impacted by BERT, let us know. At EDGE Creative, we can identify the queries or keywords that are causing the traffic drop, run a comparison report and see which queries you have lost traffic for.

We can also assess traffic changes through determining what is ranking now and change or tweak your content to match what is now ranking. If needed, we can also create new content.

The BERT update may be one of the biggest in the last 5 years for SEO and as such, it’s important to keep your content relevant and up to date. If you need support overcoming common content strategy problems, or understanding SEO, we can help. Call us on 0121 355 8092 to see what we can do for you.

Find Your Voice & Mind Your Tone: How Tone of Voice Makes an Impact

How your company presents itself in the market can make or break your brand, and tone of voice is an important factor in this. When it comes to branding, how you say something is equally as important as what you say. This creative voice helps you connect with your audience and differentiates you from the competition.

Creating a distinct tone of voice is about creating memorable messages for your audience. In order to achieve this, you need to tailor your content to your target audience, connecting with them on a personable level. This can be attained through the creation of customer personas to really understand who you are talking to and how to reach them.

Personas are based on the analysis and research into real customers and helps marketers build a detailed picture of who your customers are. This includes information on their personal motivations and expectations, what kind of communication they prefer and what they value in a brand. For example, selling a teenager a pair of jeans compared to trying to sell a mortgage to a teaching assistant.

Once you’ve created your customer personas, you can work on defining your business’s tone of voice. Think: if your business was a person, what would they say? How would they say it? What type of language would they use? Having clear guidelines of the stance your business takes with language used is key in defining a brand.

ILLUSTRATES YOUR VALUES

A tone of voice embodies a brand’s personality and set of values.

Define your tone of voice by thinking about what makes your company unique. Doing so shapes your audiences’ expectations of how your brand will interact with them in the future.

Think: What does your brand want to tell the world? What would you like people to know about your business? Why was the company set up in the first place? These are the factors that will help you set the tone of voice of your business.

ILLUSTRATES YOUR DIFFERENCES

The tone of voice your business uses should be distinctive and unique. In spoken language every day, people have different accents and dialects. Some individuals have unique inflections, favourite expressions and different paces. These clear differences in language often portray unique characteristics of a person the same way your company’s tone of voice reflects yours.

Language and tone are significant factors in portraying your businesses unique features. To many consumers, most professional services and products offer the same promises, so making your business stand out is key. By focusing on emotional connection and showing personality to your target audience, you distinguish yourself and make an impact.

Think: How is the way you work different? What’s unique about you?

BUILDS TRUST

Certain brands stand above the competition in today’s ever-evolving market. This is down to branding creativity and business consistency.

Think of big brands with clear creativity throughout their marketing. A great example of this is Innocent Smoothies.

One of the most recognisable features about their brand is that the tone of voice is relatively informal and friendly. It doesn’t feel like they’re talking to a customer, but a friend. They stray from grammatical conventions, often avoiding capital letters and keeping their tone childlike and innocent with colloquial terms such as ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ used throughout their marketing materials.

This creativity makes them stand out, but the consistency in their messages creates trust.

There is a strong link between familiarity and trust. When consumers feel your tone of voice is familiar, it requires less effort to process mentally and so they are likely to feel more at ease around it. Creating a specific tone of voice plays a crucial part in this.

Think: How do you want to be recognised? What do you want to be known for?

In order to create this sense of consistency, all marketing materials and even the way you are represented by your staff needs to embody the same tone of voice. Creating tone of voice guidelines will ensure you have something to give employees to help them understand exactly what they need to convey when they represent your brand.

Ultimately, tone of voice is a fundamental feature to your branding strategy. At EDGE Creative, our content creators work to ensure all aspects of your marketing materials embody your business’s unique tone of voice. If you don’t have one, we can help you to create it. We have extensive experience in brand building and creating compelling stories for clients such as Busy Bees Benefits, Christopher Trigg and KLO Financial Services.

Find out more about how EDGE Creative can support you and your brand by calling 0121 355 8092 or emailing jessica@edge-creative.com.

Jessica Greaney

Content Creator

SEO Jargon Buster

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important part of any organisation’s marketing strategy. However, it’s a process that can often leave people feeling confused about how it works and the meaning behind some of the technical terms associated with it.

If this sounds like you, don’t worry our dedicated SEO experts have got you covered with this SEO Jargon Buster, which will help you grasp a better understanding of the process and how it can benefit your business.

In this post, we’ll cover the following SEO jargon:

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION?

When a user searches for a particular word or phrase on a search engine such as Google, your website competes against other websites to rank in the results related to that search query.

SEO is essentially the ongoing process of improving your website’s visibility and performance on these search engines for topics related to your industry, products and services.

Without implementing SEO practices into your marketing strategy, your online visibility will be low, meaning your sales and lead potential will be limited.

This is where understanding SEO jargon becomes very useful.

KEYWORDS

Keywords:

The words or phrases that are entered into the search engine.

SERP:

This stands for Search Engine Results Page and is the list of websites related to your search.

Search Volume:

The number of times a keyword was searched, it is usually given as a monthly estimate.

Short-tail Keywords:

Broader queries which tend to have high search volumes.

Long-tail Keywords:

More specific queries which tend to have lower search volumes.

Keyword Ranking:

A website’s organic ranking positioning in a SERP for a particular keyword.

Keyword Difficulty:

A metric used by SEO tool service providers to measure how difficult or easy it would be to rank a page for a particular keyword.

Keyword Stuffing:

The tactic of overusing important keywords in your content and links. This goes against SEO best practices and can harm your chances of a high ranking.

Keyword Cannibalisation:

When a website targets the same keyword across multiple pages.

Commercial Intent:

This refers to when the user is trying to learn more before making a purchase.

Informational Intent:

This refers to when the user is trying to find out more information.

Navigational Intent:

This relates to when the user is trying to find a specific website.

Transactional Intent:

This is when the user is looking to make a purchase but hasn’t decided where to buy from.

These are links from another website to your website.

These are links on a website, that don’t work because they point to a non-existent resource or page.

Links on your website that lead to other pages on your website.

Links on your site that go to another external website.

This relates to the process of acquiring backlinks to your website.

The value or authority a link can pass to its destination.

The number of links on or pointing to a page.

Guest Blogging:

The practice of writing and publishing a blog post on another website.


TECHNICAL

Technical SEO:

Technical optimisations are used to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages.

Google Algorithm:

These are a set of rules used by Google to rank results when a user performs a search.

Local SEO:

This is optimisation that helps your business be more visible in local search results.

Page Speed:

The amount of time it takes for a web page to load.

HTML:

Hypertext Markup Language. One of the coding languages used to build websites.

Hreflang:

A HTML attribute that is used to tell Google about alternate versions of a web page for different languages and/or regions.

HTTPS:

An encrypted version of HTTP that protects the communications between your browser and server from being intercepted and tampered with by attackers.

Crawler:

Crawlers scour the internet and are mostly used to discover and index web content.

Crawl Budget:

The number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your website.

Sitemap:

A list of URLs that search engine crawlers use to discover and index your content.

Robots.txt file:

A file that suggests which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn’t crawl.

Indexing: 

This refers to how search engines store and organise the information and the websites that they know about.

Deindexing: 

When a specific page or website has been removed from a search engine index. This can happen if your website violates search engine rules.

Website Authority:

A metric from SEO tool providers that measures the relative strength/popularity of a site. Other names include domain rating and domain authority.

Schema (Data):

Code that helps search engines to better understand and represent your content in the search results.

Meta Robots Tag:

Code that gives crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index your website’s content.

Rendering:

The process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.

Canonical Tag:

A HTML element that tells search engines which specific URL is the “original” version of a page.

301 Response Code:

A response code that tells search engines that the page has permanently moved to a new URL.

301 Redirect:

An instance of being taken from one URL to another one because the page has been permanently moved.

302 Response Code:

A response code that tells search engines that the page has temporarily moved to a new URL.

404 Response Code:

Also known as 404 not found. A status that says the page or resource can’t be found.


ON-PAGE

On-page SEO:

Optimisations you do on your web page to improve its ranking in search results.

Meta Description:

A snippet of HTML text, which summarises the content of a page.

Title Tag:

A snippet of HTML text, that is used to specify the title of a page.

Heading Tags:

A HTML element that is used to designate headings on your page in order of priority.

Duplicate Content:

Content that appears in more than one place on a website.

Alt Attribute: 

HTML code that provides information to search engines and screen readers to understand the contents of an image.

Anchor Text: 

The words that are hyperlinked to another page. This text provides contextual information about what the page or website being linked to is about.

URL Slug:

The part of the URL that follows the slash (“/”) after the domain name or subfolder.


OFF-PAGE

Off-Page SEO:

Off-page search engine optimisation practices are the factors you do outside your page to improve its rankings. For example, link building.

Social media marketing:

Using social media to a company’s brand, increase sales and drive traffic to a website.

Influencer Marketing:

A type of social media marketing where influencers endorse and promote services or products.


TOOLS

Google Analytics:

A free web tracking tool offered by Google to analyse how visitors interact with your website.

Google Search Console:

A free service from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in their search results.

Google Business Profile:

A free business listing from Google that shows up in maps and web search results.

Bing Webmaster Tools:

A free tool from Microsoft that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in Bing’s search results.

EDGE CREATIVE

We are an integrated marketing agency that understands the importance of SEO Strategy alongside a wider content marketing plan. If you are interested in finding out how we can incorporate an SEO plan into your marketing, get in touch by calling 0121 355 8092 or emailing info@edge-creative.com.

Want to see how you can improve? Claim your free SEO and Website audit.

Why Relevant Content Matters

Content marketing is arguably one of the most crucial elements of digital marketing that enables businesses to attract new customers by providing relevant content that answers their queries.

Over the past three years, 75% of businesses have increased their content marketing budget. Educational content can be expensive to create, but brands must continue to produce information to stay above their competitors in search engine results, and also to build authority and brand loyalty within that sector.

In order to make your content marketing strategy a success, relevancy is vital. Creating blog posts, articles and infographics that appeal to a wide audience is important, but if it doesn’t adhere to their specific wants and needs, you are not making the most out of your content marketing efforts.

In today’s modern world, the average consumer is inundated with content. As a result, they are constantly filtering out the content that is not relevant to them. Relevant content shows potential customers that you are catering to their specific needs at a specific point in their user journey. Everything else is noise and so will usually be ignored.

Content is available everywhere and anywhere on the internet. The saturation of so much freely available online information can become overwhelming and confuse users. By creating content that is relevant and informative, you show potential customers that you have something important to say.

RELEVANT CONTENT IMPROVES YOUR PERFORMANCE IN SERP’S

Once you have clicked on a search engine result, you tend to know fairly soon whether the page contains the content you are looking for.

With so much content freely available at the click of a button, we search quickly for indications as to whether the content is relevant to our search query. If not, we click off the page and start again. This all happens in a matter of seconds, and this high bounce rate will affect your overall performance in search engines.

What is SEO? Learn more in our in-depth blog post.

RELEVANT CONTENT POSITIONS YOU AS AN AUTHORITATIVE FIGURE

Creating relevant content on themes relating to your industry helps to position you as an expert within that field. A user is likely to have around seven touchpoints with your brand before they convert, so ensuring that you are visible at all stages of the user journey helps you to become a trusted authority within that sector. Having that constant visibility through content makes consumers more likely to want to do business with your brand because it becomes familiar and shows them that you do know your stuff.

There are a multitude of different factors that search engines take into consideration, such as your URL and page structure, but content is one of the most important elements to a good SEO strategy. Giving your users what they want ultimately drives more potential customers to your site, and when your content is relevant, search engines will recognise this and boost your rankings, which boosts your traffic and ultimately raises your bottom line.

At EDGE Creative, our content team use intricate methods to create content that is relevant to your audience and ideal customer. Whether you need blog posts, infographics or video marketing, our team of specialists can work together to execute a holistic marketing strategy that works.

If you want to revolutionise your content but aren’t quite sure where to start, request your FREE digital audit today.