The Good Marketing Guide 2019

54 | The Good Marketing Guide Tips On Leaving/ Creating The Best (First) Impression Damian Summers, digital PR specialist at digital marketing agency, Impression, shares simple tips for SMEs just starting out on how to get a head start. Customers want to trust the companies they interact with and where they spend their money, they always have, but that element of trust has never been more important than now. Google is increasing its focus on expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT) in the content it serves to potential customers, which means as a business, you should be creating content for your site that focuses on providing informative and actionable advice, written by those with the knowledge, your blog and product pages are a good place to start. As a growing business, budgets can be slim, so it might fall to an in-house marketing manager to begin implementing different tactics - at least in the short term. Simple steps can range from shouting about company wins. Have you just secured a major client? Or, launched a brand new one-of-a-kind product? Perhaps you have made a senior hire? Or, your team size may have doubled in six months? These are stories local business journalists will be interested in and will give real insight into your business, whilst in the first instance gaining you brand awareness. In a nutshell, once your budget increases, and marketing efforts develop, so will your content and PR creation and if you aren’t already, you can start using those PR efforts by creating topical content on your website, which could be survey or data-led research for example. Using this you can draft news stories that could be picked up by the press and featured with a link back to your domain citing the research, those links will feed into a broader SEO strategy, helping you to rank higher in Google’s search pages. Paid social media posts can also be a simple way to start pushing your brand and products in front of a targeted audience with fairly little advertising budget needed, but potentially a big return. All of this may seem full of jargon and hard to understand, but there are a lot of free events held by marketing companies that can teach the basics of where to begin with different disciplines, whether that be focussing on SEO, traditional or digital PR and paid media. It would be worthwhile signing up to these and learning the basics, at least then when your business does grow and you decide to create dedicated positions or outsource to an agency, you can feel informed as to what is happening in your marketing strategy. www.impression.co.uk Strategy