Southern Enterprise Awards 2021

112 | Southern Enterprise Awards 2021 Aug21422 Marketing budget is often the first thing cut when a business faces times of economic turbulence, however Smart Marketing Management enjoyed an excellent client retention rate during the pandemic. We find out more from Director of Sales Claire Price about the firm and what it has to offer. Smart Marketing Management (Smart Marketing) provides smaller businesses with a cost-effective alternative to employing a sales, marketing or communications professional. The services offered by the firm include website design and management, search engine optimisation, local PR and advertising, pay per click management, and appointment generation. Many of Smart Marketing’s clients are small to mid-sized businesses, predominantly situated along the south coast, which know they need new business but do not have the time or in-house resources to ensure a steady stream of enquiries. This is where Smart Marketing comes in. “We are very much a hands-on marketing agency, working as an embedded part of our customers’ teams,” explains Claire Price, the firm’s Director of Sales. “We take our time to really understand each customer’s business, so that we can offer maximum value. We’re also extremely results-focused. Many marketing agencies focus on copywriting and keywords; we are all about enquiries and conversions. You can have the top-ranking site on Google, but if your website is poor and doesn’t speak to the needs of your audience, resulting sales/conversions will be low. Our focus is as much on conversion as it is on driving traffic.” Smart Marketing’s two ‘flagship’ products are what really help it differentiate it from competitors operating in a similar space. These include its local search engine optimisation service (which helps small and mid-sized businesses get found online by potential customers, and then helps to convert this traffic into enquiries), and its Amazon management service. Claire tells us that the Amazon service in particular has really taken off in the last year and is quite a specialism. “We help businesses get started with Amazon, loading their products onto their system, and Most Agile Digital Marketing Agency 2021 then optimising product descriptions to ensure as many sales as possible,” Claire adds. Whilst there’s no denying that 2020 was an extremely difficult year for Smart Marketing, due to marketing budgets being one of the first things that many firms will cut in order to save money, Claire elaborates on just how lucky the firm was. “We are agile and have evolved well,” Claire enthuses. “While a couple of our customers reduced their monthly spend with us, we retained all of our client base, and actually won several new contracts towards the end of the year. We switched our focus to digital marketing services in particular, and introduced a new ‘local SEO’ service, which is geared to helping small businesses reach more potential customers online. This has proved extremely popular. We also moved offices right in the middle of the pandemic and recruited an additional full-time marketer,” she concludes. It is due to this resilience, plus its agility and adaptation to the changing climate, that has helped Smart Marketing stay afloat. It has also secured the title of Most Agile Digital Marketing Agency 2021 in the Southern Enterprise Awards which is a very well-deserved accolade. Contact: Claire Price Web Address: www.smartmarketinguk.com