We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you agree to our cookie-policy

SEO ENQUIRY

First, we need your contact details…

SEO ENQUIRY

Which SEO services are you interested in?

SEO ENQUIRY

Anything you’d like to share with us at this stage?
A brief, technical scope, supporting documents or anything else?

SEO ENQUIRY

How soon are you looking to kick off this project?

SEO ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working on this project?

SEO ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working on this project?

THANK YOU

Thank you for getting in touch with Yellowball!

We’ve received everything and one of our team will be in touch very soon with the next steps. If your enquiry is urgent, you can call us on 020 8064 1832 – we’re open 9am – 6pm Monday to Friday.

BACK TO HOMEPAGE
YELLOWBALL LITE

Unfortunately, you don’t qualify for a bespoke project, but there is good news!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

VISIT YELLOWBALL LITE

Step 1

of 6

WEB DESIGN ENQUIRY

First, we need your contact details…

WEB DESIGN ENQUIRY

Which web design services are you interested in?

WEB DESIGN ENQUIRY

Anything you’d like to share with us at this stage?
A brief, technical scope, supporting documents or anything else?

SEO ENQUIRY

How soon are you looking to kick off this project?

WEB DESIGN ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working on this project?

THANK YOU

Thank you for getting in touch with Yellowball!

We’ve received everything and one of our team will be in touch very soon with the next steps. If your enquiry is urgent, you can call us on 020 8064 1832 – we’re open 9am – 6pm Monday to Friday.

BACK TO HOMEPAGE
YELLOWBALL LITE

The end-to-end delivery of bespoke web project akin to the style and quality of our portfolio typically start from £25,000.

Based on your budget guidance, we’d recommend exploring Yellowball Lite – our flexible WordPress theme that is perfect for small businesses, startups, consultancies and charities. Learn more about Yellowball Lite and speak to one of our specialists on this dedicated site. It’s all the best from Yellowball, now fast, affordable and available anyone, anywhere.

VISIT YELLOWBALL LITE

Step 1

of 5

GRAPHIC DESIGN ENQUIRY

First, we need your contact details…

GRAPHIC DESIGN ENQUIRY

Which design services are you interested in?

GRAPHIC DESIGN ENQUIRY

Anything you’d like to share with us at this stage?
A brief, technical scope, supporting documents or anything else?

GRAPHIC DESIGN ENQUIRY

How soon are you looking to kick off this project?

GRAPHIC DESIGN ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working to on this project?

THANK YOU

Thank you for getting in touch with Yellowball!

We’ve received everything and one of our team will be in touch very soon with the next steps. If your enquiry is urgent, you can call us on 020 8064 1832 – we’re open 9am – 6pm Monday to Friday.

BACK TO HOMEPAGE
GRAPHIC DESIGN ENQUIRY

Most design projects at Yellowball are typically more than £500 and our agency-wide hourly rate is £145 plus VAT.

We’re probably not a good strategic fit for this project but you could try the freelancer networks at Fivver.com or upwork.com.

Step 1

of 5

PPC ENQUIRY

First, we need your contact details…

PPC ENQUIRY

Which PPC services are you interested in?

PPC ENQUIRY

Anything you’d like to share with us at this stage?
A brief, technical scope, supporting documents or anything else?

PPC ENQUIRY

How soon are you looking to kick off this project?

PPC ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working on this project?

PPC ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working on this project?

THANK YOU

Thank you for getting in touch with Yellowball!

We’ve received everything and one of our team will be in touch very soon with the next steps. If your enquiry is urgent, you can call us on 020 8064 1832 – we’re open 9am – 6pm Monday to Friday.

BACK TO HOMEPAGE
YELLOWBALL LITE

Unfortunately, you don’t qualify for a bespoke project, but there is good news!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

VISIT YELLOWBALL LITE

Step 1

of 6

GOOGLE ANALYTICS ENQUIRY

First, we need your contact details...

GOOGLE ANALYTICS ENQUIRY

Which Google Analytics services are you interested in?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS ENQUIRY

Anything you'd like to share with us at this stage?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS ENQUIRY

How soon are you looking to kick off this project?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS ENQUIRY

What budget guidance are you working to on this project?

THANK YOU

Thank you for getting in touch with Yellowball!

We’ve received everything and one of our team will be in touch very soon with the next steps. If your enquiry is urgent, you can call us on 020 8064 1832 – we’re open 9am – 6pm Monday to Friday.

BACK TO HOMEPAGE

Step 1

of 5

Mobile Menu
Mobile Menu

Award-winning work, focussed on results

Yellowball
Web Design

Air X

Yellowball
Web Design

City & Guilds

Yellowball
Web Design

Ballet with Isabella

Yellowball
Web Design

Tomatin

SEE All PROJECTS
Aug 2021
15 MIN READ

How to Market Your Business in Today’s Digital World

Nic Lapham

No matter how useful your services, how innovative your product, or how unique your business is, it’s not going to succeed unless you have one thing: happy customers. Like every industry, marketing and advertising constantly changes and evolves, from newspaper and radio ads to TV ads and billboards. Today, marketing is digital. And as with all things digital, the options are endless – to the point of becoming overwhelming. Here’s how to evolve your marketing strategy for a digital world, cutting through the flash and fervour to talk about practical online marketing tools and techniques for online advertising in our digital world.

Get to Know Your Customer

Understanding who your ideal customers are and what they need has always been an essential step in successful marketing, and this old-school tactic is even more valuable today in online advertising. Fortunately, it’s also easier than ever to collect data on your target market and build useful customer personas that will guide your digital marketing efforts.

In addition to thinking about your target market’s geographic location, income, age, needs, and challenges, consider where you’ll likely find them on social media, how much time they spend online, and what they use the internet for. For example, 30% of the UK’s female population is on Instagram, with the majority being under 24. TikTok’s majority population in the UK is smartphone users aged 18-24, while Facebook has 307 million monthly active users across Europe, including men and women between 25-34. Social media platforms then allow you to target users on their platforms who share the interests and characteristics of your ideal customers, so the detail and accuracy of your personas are key if you want to maximise the ROI of your efforts.

The more you know about your target market and target customer, the better you can tailor your content and make sure it finds them online.

Build a Business Website

Your website is your flagship store for your online customer base; a digital version of a brick-and-mortar experience. It’s where all the different elements of your online marketing efforts come together, bringing potential customers into your sales funnel.

As such, it should be attractive, informative, fast, and easy to use. While you can go the DIY route, it’s good to remember that this is the first impression every visitor will have of your brand and business, so it needs to have a strong, positive impact. This means using high-quality images, functional forms, SEO-friendly coding, useful features, and effective security. Our web design team has written up a couple of articles on how to get a good quality business website or website redesign, as well as a useful article on how to secure your website properly (LINKS).

Get on Google With Search Engine Optimisation

As the world’s largest search engine, Google should be the first target for your digital marketing strategy. With 87.7% of the market share in the UK and 5.6 billion daily searches worldwide, it’s clear that your business needs to get this search engine on its side. The best way to do it is to work with the Google search algorithm using search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to get as high up as possible in search engine results pages. This is quite a bit harder than it sounds and you can’t take any shortcuts – Google regularly updates its algorithm to counter any ‘cheats’ and penalise websites that use them, so it’s just not worth it.

Instead, we recommend that you use these tactics to get search engines working for your business:

  • Make sure that your website load speed is 2 seconds or less. Bounce rates (people rapidly leaving your website after only seeing one page) increase dramatically with each second that passes. From 2-3 seconds it jumps from 9.6 to 13%, and 32% of visitors will leave if it takes 7 seconds to load. 
  • Do in-depth keyword research. This is to find the terms that your potential customer base and target market will use to look for products or services like yours. These keywords should be used in your marketing website content in a natural, readable, and relevant way.
  • Tailor your metadata. When you type a search query into Google, you get a list of titles and descriptions linked to different pages the search engines feel are relevant to your search. This is the metadata, and each page on your website should have a custom piece of text that contains relevant keywords to boost SEO.
  • Make it mobile-friendly – Mobile devices have changed the way we research, shop and browse the internet, and your website must be usable on mobile devices. This year, mobile e-commerce sales are expected to account for an impressive 54% of all online sales around the world. In 2019, one-third of all shopping in the UK was transacted over a mobile device. Without mobile compatibility in your web design, you’re missing out.

Step 4 – Register on Google My Business and Online Business Directories

Online business directories give great SEO exposure and are a quick, simple, and often free way of getting your brand out there and in front of target customers. Your priority should be registering on Google My Business because of the obvious links to the search engine itself. Google My Business pages are free profiles that list your business in search results. The profile is pretty detailed and in addition to your contact details and address, you can list operating hours, add photographs, get reviews, and post information about what your business does. It should be an elevator pitch for your business that helps customers decide you’re the business they’re looking for. You are also given a position on Google Maps, which allows potential customers to click for easy access to directions.

In addition, we recommend that you sign up on other online directories to increase your visibility, creating elevator pitches for directories including Yelp UK, ABC Business Directories, Yell UK, Cylex, and Brownbook. You can also sign up to location-specific and industry-specific directories like All In London or Applegate, the UK Small Business Directory, or TripAdvisor.

When registering, remember to add as much detail and imagery as possible, and to make sure every detail is accurate, with the same address, name, and phone number. Keep a list of the online directories you register on, and update them as your services, products and brand evolves. If you move to a new location, don’t forget to update your details.

Create Your Social Media Pages

Social media has become very business-friendly in recent years, offering free profiles, competitive and highly targeted advertising, and even e-commerce capabilities. And of course, these pages and accounts create more exposure for Google search results too. This makes them one of the most important marketing channels for your business and a key part of your content marketing strategy.

When creating your social media pages, first target the most effective social media platforms for your brand and audience rather than trying to do them all. Facebook and Instagram are great social platforms for B2C businesses, for example, while LinkedIn remains a powerful B2B marketing and networking event space.

Social platforms are very powerful marketing tools and should be treated as the brand awareness and engagement powerhouses that they are. After all, almost one-quarter of shoppers in the UK are using social media to search for new products and businesses, especially in the valuable 18-34 year age group. Even in B2B, e-commerce is thriving, with £159.3 billion in sales in 2019 despite only 11% of B2B businesses having online retail capabilities.

Use top quality images, post regular content that your audience finds useful, and actively engage with your prospective customers with comments, competitions, discounts and more on your social platforms. For social media marketing to be successful, brands need to be engaging, consistent, and responsive on social media platforms – and while it is exceptionally cost-effective for a limited budget, the time you need to put into keeping this presence alive and driving conversions should be considered. Fortunately, there are digital agencies that specialise in full-time social media management, from content planning and development to posts and more.

Start the Organic SEO Journey

Using the keywords researched for the buyer personas and website content, businesses can craft bespoke content for their brand to publish online. This has the effect of regularly updating your website with new, quality content (an SEO ranking signal for Google’s search engine) and creating content that users can find in search results pages that will help drive organic traffic.

Organic SEO starts with your website design process. The text content of the website should be informative, in line with your brand, and contain target keywords that will help the search algorithm link your content with a search query. To add these keywords takes some copywriting skill, and you should avoid overdoing it, as ‘keyword stuffing’ can carry penalties for your SEO.

After your website has been launched, you can further your organic SEO strategy by launching and running a blog, which forms another marketing channel for your brand. This will be where you publish regular articles (blog posts) that are relevant to your products and services. Rather than being hard-sell brochures, these blog posts should help your customer base overcome a challenge relevant to your offering. If you run an eco-friendly appliances business, for example, you can write blogs on climate change, how to save energy in your home or business or various green upgrades for homes. The key to generating quality organic traffic through this content marketing strategy is to show a genuine interest in helping your prospective customers, building trust factors and goodwill.

With organic SEO, it’s important not to expect instant results from your blog posts. This is a slow and steady way to build your brand’s visibility and authority, and with evergreen, high-quality content, it creates a lasting effect online, creating multiple streams to drive website traffic over the long term.

Run Google Ads

Yes, it’s Google again! This time, we’re looking at paid search in the form of the most popular pay-per-click (PPC) ads – Google Ads. This should be implemented as a partner to organic SEO, driving immediate high rankings on Google search results for ads to complement the long-term benefits of organic SEO rankings on web content.

When you search on Google, you’ll get a number of results marked Ad at the top of the page. These are ad spots you buy from Google. You make the content (which should use your keywords again) and list the ad, and you get put at the top of search results pages for the keywords you bid on. Keywords vary in price, and you pay according to how many people click through to your website page, so it’s important to research this marketing budget thoroughly to get the most affordable but still effective advertising.

Despite this, it is still a very cost-effective marketing tool – far more affordable than prime time slots and with millions more in guaranteed traffic, making it ideal for limited budgets. Google also regularly adds features and extras to help make these ads more rewarding for businesses and customers, with advanced ad targeting, mobile ad placement, and video ads as well as performance analytics to track your results.

Track Digital Marketing Performance

Nothing speaks as powerfully as good numbers, and that’s where measuring the ROI on your digital marketing campaigns is essential. You want to know who is coming to your website, where they are coming from, their online behaviour, what content they liked (and what they didn’t), and whether your marketing efforts are getting conversions.

Regular monthly reports will help you refine future campaigns, pivot to new marketing opportunities, and develop more of the content your customers love. So, how do you generate them and what do they mean?

We recommend that you use Google Analytics (which is free) to monitor website activity, as it has great features and reporting mechanisms to capture a wide range of key metrics. 

Some metrics to monitor on Google Analytics include:

  • Bounce rate – The percentage of people who leave after only seeing one page.
  • The ratio of new to returning visitors – Measuring campaign effectiveness and customer loyalty.
  • Average session duration – How long a potential customer spent on your website.
  • Average pages per session – How many pages a visitor tends to view before leaving.
  • Organic vs. paid sessions – Tracking if your visitors arrived from organic SEO or paid ads.
  • Goal conversion rate – Number of potential customers signing up for an account or email lists, making a sale, downloading a piece of content, or even visiting a set number of pages. You can set your goals according to what you want your website to achieve.

Let Us Help You Get to Grips with All Things Digital 

At Yellowball, we want to bring your brand to the world – showcasing your offering online and building your business the future success it deserves. As a multi-award-winning digital marketing agency, we have the talent, expertise, and resources to take your business forward in the digital age, driving meaningful results through proven, market-leading search engine optimisation, web design, email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing strategies. Let’s bring more happy customers to your door, get in touch with us here.

 

Read: 10 Steps to a Reliable Website Marketing Strategy

BACK TO ALL POSTS

Let's work together

Ready to start your next project? Call, live chat or send us a message today. We're here 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday






    I would like to receive news and information from Yellowball