Blog

Landing Pages: Why you need them now!

January 25, 2016 By Concept

Are you using social media for your business? How many leads and conversions have you seen coming from social media to your website? Are you using landing pages to their greatest advantage?

A Landing Page is a webpage on your business’s website, different to your homepage. It is built for a specific purpose and accessible through a specific link. You might want to generate more leads or get signups for an event, and when you use the link to your particular landing page on social media, you can clearly see the traffic coming to that particular page and where it is coming from.

An effective Landing Page will focus on one goal or offer, and generally has:

a clear description of the offer or event
a few impacting visual elements (eg video or images)
clear benefits explained
a testimonial
a strong call-to-action.

Some further tips for a great Landing Page:

Keep the page clear, and to the point. Don’t make potential customers search for what you want them to see!
Be consistent across all digital channels with your current offers. Make your first impression as a brand completely professional — don’t confuse someone with mixed messages.
Follow through on your promises – if the offer states something will be quick and easy, don’t make it the opposite by making someone take multiple steps!
Incorporate a single call to action- avoid asking a customer to sign up for a newsletter, ‘like’ you on Facebook, and buy your product before you provide them with value.

A successful landing page will grow your business by allowing you to track your social media leads, growing your customer base, and provide another avenue to build your brand and give your clients value and great service. Let Concept Designs and Marketing help you with great landing pages today!

The Importance of Having a Marketing Plan

January 18, 2016 By Concept

Just as you would never go exploring without a map, you should never go into business without a marketing plan. This strategy document is integral to the success of your company. Here are the core reasons why.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

Having a comprehensive marketing plan in place will help you stay proactive. On the other hand, businesses without a strategy to follow often end up participating in ‘reactive marketing’, which typically amounts to throwing money away on marketing ventures that look trendy but aren’t particularly well suited to your company.

Improve Your Budgeting

When all your marketing activities are laid out in advance, it becomes much easier to factor your overall marketing costs into your business’s broad budget. This also assists with calculating ROI, as you can see at a glance how much revenue a marketing avenue needs to produce in order to break even or create profit.

Identify Timely Trends

Your marketing plan will help you recognise ebbs and flows in the calendar year. You can then take advantage of this information by focusing your advertising during busy periods and channelling those resources into building the business during quieter times.

Maintain Focus

A detailed plan makes it simple to identify your marketing outcomes and work with these in mind. With this strategy documented and formalised, you’ll find yourself more able to focus on your goals and targets.

Develop Better Content

Because developing your marketing plan requires foresight and advance planning, you’ll be in a stronger position to create high-quality, relevant content (particularly for your digital advertising and social media campaigns).

While there are many benefits to having a marketing plan, this isn’t something that can be done instantly. If you don’t have much experience in marketing, the concept may be quite overwhelming for you. Concept Designs and Marketing can help you develop this essential document and our team can help you implement each step of it as well. As part of this service, we also provide you with a 12-month banner print-out of your plan, so you can remind yourself of your targets and activities any time. Contact us for more information today.

Managing Your Facebook Page

December 14, 2015 By Concept

Facebook is an amazing tool to engage customers. What a powerful way to build your business! It’s probably been on your radar for a while now, and you know what you need to do. You know that the very first step is to set up a Facebook page for your business. This is where many people get stuck- where do you start? Do you see others in your industry networking, directly communicating with their customers and gaining new business, but you’re left wondering … how do you get it right and not waste your time in the process?

Here at Concept Designs, we see first-hand the benefits of Facebook for engagement with customers and gaining new business.

You can directly communicate with your customer base through responding to messages:

Receive real-time feedback with your page’s Insights:

Be connected with new customers in your local area and beyond:

Create Facebook updates to be published immediately, schedule posts to be published at a future time and draft posts to save for later:

Facebook pages have so many admin features to give you information about your customer base and to track people’s engagement.

We’ve also seen business pages set up by others that have struggled to increase business and have not been used to their full potential. It’s important to get the set-up of your page right from the start- the nature of social media means that any mistakes or incorrect information can be shared very quickly through your current and potential customers. Setting up a page incorrectly from the start will cause you grief, waste your time, and be a drain on your business’ resources rather than helping you increase your revenue.

At Concept Designs, we are masters of the Facebook platform, and would love to help you get your page right from the start. If you know what you want to say, but aren’t sure how to say it –or if you need help with content as well as the set-up process, we are willing and able to help you get it right from the start. Concept Designs, Facebook and your business- let us help move your business forward!

How Local SEO Is Different To Regular SEO

November 15, 2015 By Jenny Godfrey

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of working on your website’s content and link portfolio to increase its chance of being discovered online organically. In other words, if a potential customer looks for something related to your business on Google (or any other search engine) and they see a link to your website, this is a sign of good SEO.

But what is local SEO and how is it different from standard SEO? Here’s a look at what sets this service apart and a guide to determining which type is the best fit for your marketing strategy.

What’s The Difference

General SEO doesn’t care too much about a browser’s geographic location. If someone in Cairns finds your website on Google, that’s valuable. If a person in the US discovers you online, that’s great too. Think of this as ‘global SEO’ – it helps your website rank well for generic searches.

Local SEO, as the name suggests, is very much focused on getting your website onto the screens of people in your area (as well as any other areas you target). This could encompass a state or territory, a city, or even a specific suburb. The overarching aim of local SEO is informing Google and other search engines that your website is the ideal destination for people who search for your keywords in a particular place or region.

Which SEO Should You Target?

This depends entirely on your business model. If your main source of revenue is your physical shopfront, local SEO will most likely provide the most benefits. On the other hand, if your website has e‑commerce features and you can ship around the globe, more generalised SEO tactics are likely to work best. And if your business has a fair mix of both in-store and online transactions, it makes sense to use a little bit of both.

For example, a hairdresser with just one location on the Gold Coast should definitely turn to local SEO to reach people in the relevant suburbs. However, a hair product seller that delivers anywhere in Australia would benefit from a broader SEO strategy. If you’re unsure about which SEO model would best suit your business, please talk to us.

Local SEO Tactics

In addition to the common tools and approaches generally used for SEO, a digital strategy focused on local SEO will typically involve:

Adding your website to local directories
Creating business profiles for Google+ and Bing
Featuring a map and/or store locator on your website
Creating website pages and external links that target location-specific keywords.

Concept Designs and Marketing is pleased to now offer a local SEO service for our customers. Let us help you reach more people in the locations that are valuable to you.

Should I be advertising on Instagram?

October 22, 2015 By Jenny Godfrey

Are you looking over your social media platforms and wondering what’s missing? Or maybe you have considered some great options for advertising online and are convinced you have chosen the most appropriate channels to utilise. Whichever boat you are in, I want to take some time to inform you about advertising on Instagram and how this avenue could add significant value to your current advertising strategies.

Consider Facebook or LinkedIn; so, we can write about our company – formal and informal prose. We can share links, add an e‑brochure, and review our insights to measure effectiveness.

How can Instagram add value to my company?

I guess by now you’re wondering: so how can Instagram add value to my company? The number one benefit I want to focus on here is brand awareness and identity. I’m sure you would agree that most organisations thrive on building relationships with customers, right? Instagram advertising allows you to give your company a personality. It connects you with your customers. If consumers can see that the business they are dealing with has real people working there, they will feel a part of that community.

So, how does Instagram advertising work?

As you may know, Instagram is a photo- and video-sharing social networking site that allows you to upload images onto your current social media sites, such as Facebook. You can use your Instagram posts as a mini blog but give your readers enough information to begin a conversation about the photo (but not too much that it becomes boring). It is also important to put a call to action in every post so readers know where to find you. Also, take note of trending hashtags so you can include relevant ones to your blogs to help with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

If you want to find out more about Instagram advertising and the best ways to implement it for your company, feel free to contact us and let our team help you give your brand a personality.

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How Your Website’s Design Affects SEO

October 9, 2015 By Jenny Godfrey

The common myth that web design and SEO are unrelated is slowly dying away as more and more business owners begin to understand how the two are intrinsically linked. Here’s a quick overview of some ways your web design can influence your SEO results.

Keyword Spread

A popular trend in web design right now is single-page websites. While these certainly have benefits in terms of reader engagement and ease of navigation, they can also be quite problematic in regards to SEO.

While more traditional web layouts present search engines with a rich database of URLs with diversified keywords to crawl, this one-page approach tends to cram all a company’s keywords under one URL. This can quickly set off alarms for search engines. When designing or redesigning your company’s website, it’s crucial you work with an agency that understands how to balance fantastic aesthetics with practical SEO principles.

Mobile Friendliness

One of Google’s algorithm updates earlier in 2015 looked purely at the responsiveness of website designs. In what was coined ‘Mobilegeddon’, this update resulted in websites that displayed poorly on mobile devices falling away from Google’s top results for searches performed on these devices.

This isn’t just a wakeup call in terms of mobile friendliness, though. As search engines invest more and more into tracking how well users respond to different sites (as well as using this information to influence search result rankings), the importance of quality web design in general will only increase.

The Info Behind The Images

Great web design involves plenty of visuals. On top of catching attention, the images you use on your website can also enhance your SEO. How? Through image descriptions and alt text. By designating appropriate, keyword-inclusive descriptions to your images, you can further increase the search engine visibility of your webpages.

These are just three of the many ways in which great design and strong SEO can go hand in hand. If you’d like to find out more about how this all works, we’d love to have a chat. With experts in both SEO and web design, we can position your business to climb its way to page 1 and look fantastic at the same time.