The Importance Of Google Business Profile For Local Business Marketing

by Natalie Karr | 18 Aug 2020 | Digital Marketing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Small, local business marketing can be challenging – it can so often feel like your message is lost, in the ether of big-budget firms investing heavily in ad campaigns and influencer sponsorship.

Interestingly, the biggest of the big corporations has designed it’s own features to encourage small and local business marketing growth online without having to heavily invest in social media marketing – introducing Google Business Profile.

What Is Google Business Profile?

Google Business Profile (GBP) is the all-encompassing Google facility for small and local businesses, allowing them to carve out their niche in both their local area and with a wider audience online. GBP gives a local business marketing opportunity in the midst of its huge global presence.

When you google a business, if it has an office, shop or location, you’ll find a listing to the right-hand side of the top search engine results with its basic details: name, photo, address, phone number, other contact details, opening hours, link to website. This information is all populated from a GBP account and gives a premium overview of small business information.

Google Business Profile also increases your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This helps to boost your web presence, ensures your name and address appear on Google Maps when users search online locally, and gives the ability for those searching on Google to access reviews on your business. All of these features help drastically with online business growth.

How Much Does Google Business Profile Cost?

Unlike most local business marketing, GBP is completely free to use! Businesses are free to invest into paid search and other advertising practices on Google if they so choose to, but to claim and maintain a Google Business Profile listing, is free.

How To Claim Your Local Business Listing

Claiming your GBP listing couldn’t be easier. Simply go to www.google.com/business and sign up to a new account if you don’t already have one. Follow the instructions and fill out the relevant online form to start the process.

For security purposes, and in order to fully verify that you are the owner of the business you’re trying to claim on GBP, a postcard will be sent in the post to your primary business address. Once received, follow the instructions on the card to unlock and activate your listing.

Why Is GBP Important for Local Business Marketing?

Google is the search engine master, with over 63,000 searches completed per second every day of the week. The word ‘Google’ has become a verb, and it is now by default the easiest and quickest research option for people all over the globe – no matter their query.

To put it simply: where you don’t appear, your competitors will. With Google being the default search engine for most people, it makes sense for your small business to be front and centre of their related queries… and if you’re not, they’ll end up going to your nearest competitor.

Posting on Google Business Profile

Businesses don’t need to make much extra effort to post to their GBP. It is important to post regularly, but posts can be re-purposed from other social media channels. Just amend post text wording so the content isn’t entirely identical, and you’re good to go!

Google loves varied content, so when posting to GBP, be sure to mix it up. A good variety of updates and text, photos and offers will keep the algorithm happy and ensure your small business shines.

Local business marketing has come a long way since it relied on notices in parish newsletters, signs by the sides of roads and leaflets posted through doors. Now, business of every shape, size and type need to have an online presence and Google Business Profile is the ideal way to manage just that. A call to action can still encourage both potential and existing customers to contact you in the manner of your preference, but positions you as experts in your field and as ‘top of the listings’ when anyone searches for anything related nearby.

You may only serve and sell locally – but your customers may now come from all over!

5 Tips To Grow Your Instagram Followers

by Natalie Karr | 5 Aug 2020 | Social media, Digital Marketing

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As of August 2022, Instagram was the second most used and most downloaded app in the world, a position its held since its introduction of extra features back in 2010.

For businesses looking for growth on social media through exposure to both existing and potential customers, an active and engaged Instagram account is a must! When it comes to techniques and advice to grow your Instagram followers, you’ll find thousands of internet pages dedicated to loops and paid-for services, but many of these solutions could do more harm than good.

The real key to growing your following? Nail the basics.

Why Should You Look To Grow Your Instagram Followers?

Put simply, the more people that follow you, the more people are exposed to your content, and therefore your products and services.

While both Instagram followers and business growth aren’t linear, you should look to grow your Instagram followers to both assert authority and increase marketing exposure. The more engaged an account’s following is, the more likely the Instagram algorithm is to present and feature its content elsewhere to other targeted parties.

Optimise Your Instagram Bio

There isn’t much room in an Instagram biography, but it needs three basic things to inform your audience from the ‘off’: who you are, who you’re for, and where to get more info (key-worded accordingly).

The latter can be covered with a link to your main website or online presence, and the rest bullet-pointed for convenience. A common error made is for businesses to link to a third-party website optimised for smaller devices: but if you have an existing web presence, instead this should be replaced with an optimised page on your own website to increase your traffic.

An Instagram bio. is short, sharp marketing, with no room for ambiguity.

Increase Share Quality

The content your business shares on all social media platforms should be of a decent quality, but should also be tailored for the social media channel that it’s being shared on.

A key way to grow your Instagram followers is to ensure that your content is shareable and saveable – it must be perceived as valuable enough for others to want to highlight and pass on. If your business can position itself as an expert in its niche, those interested in that area will want to follow you for exactly that reason.

A mix of content is key here. Despite widespread criticism of the app’s direction in promoting video content, Instagram exec Adam Mosseri has insisted that Reels will continue to grow in their promotion and will be favoured by the algorithm’s programming. This means that businesses need to produce a good balance of photo, video and graphical content: to both please the behind-the-scenes programming of the app, and to present the desired audience with a variety of solutions.

Use Hashtags – Wisely

Each feed post on Instagram can have up to 30 hashtags, and each story 10. It’s always worth having a hashtag that is specific to your small business or product, but then research into hashtags relevant to each post to include them.

The Instagram app allows for hashtags to be utilised whether they’re shared on the initial post or in the first comment below; but realistically the standard caption works just fine unless it’s combined with long-form comment.

Ideally, choose a variety of tags with between >100k and >500k uses. Check each tag before you use it: not all acronyms may mean what you think they do! Where possible, include hashtags as niched as possible and any that may be topical to current affairs (but still relevant to the business).

Utilise Instagram Stories And Reels

Where your feed may seem branded and beautiful, Instagram Stories and Reels presents the opportunity for much more on-the-move and off-the-cuff personal social media marketing.

Use these to connect more personally with others, share customer content and to give an insight into behind-the-scenes activity that customers (both potential and existing) otherwise wouldn’t see.

Stories can be further optimised by the curation of a selected ‘Close Friends’ list. If there are particular accounts you wish to see your content, adding them to such a list makes the more likely to click through to it (the Stories will be featured in a different colour and placed higher up the exposure rankings) and allows for more tailored content to be used strategically. Don’t forget to keep your DMs open for customer contact!

Connect With Other Businesses

It may seem counter-intuitive to connect with your competitors, but actually, there’s business growth benefits to be gained from doing so. Follow them to keep an eye on their activity and followers, and to ensure you’re meeting your client’s needs just as they do (or better!).

Tagging other businesses and products in your posts will increase your visibility, and following other businesses will allow you to see what they are up to, and keep an eye on trends. Competition can stay healthy without being toxic.

What Not To Do To Grow Your Instagram Followers

The internet is stuffed full of offers for brands and influencers alike to buy followers, boasting that they’re real and ‘high quality’. In truth – they’re not.

These services are simply reams of bots, ready to clog up your follower count with accounts that are blatantly obviously false, will only skew your social media insights, and will result in the Instagram algorithm penalising you as a result.

Many businesses also use social media ‘loops’ to grow their Instagram followers, but this too simply falsely inflates the numbers. Loops are follow-for-follow groups whereby everyone involved agrees to follow everyone else. Realistically this only clogs your feed with content from accounts unrelated to your business, and gives you followers who, although real, will never engage with your content because it isn’t relevant to them.

The true measure of success on Instagram is engagement, and if you’re able to attract followers who actually really care and are interested in and value what you are posting, they will engage with your content. So continue to find this real, interested audience, and post for them.

Why SEO is Critical for Your Online Business Growth

by Natalie Karr | 18 Jul 2020 | SEO, Digital Marketing

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Small business marketing is often a case of having to pick and choose which strategies to implement and campaigns to operate within a tight budget and without a great deal of resource. Yet the real investment to be made in online marketing and business development is often a technical one – and that is, SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation to refer to it by its full name).

SEO can make or break a website, but what is it, how does it work, who ‘does’ it and how can you manage it? Read on for the full lowdown and to answer the most common questions that we get asked regarding online business growth.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation is the intensification of a website’s content for it to become as noticeable as possible to the automated algorithms of search engines – preferably boosting its profile to the top of search engine results pages (or SERPs, for short). With search engines bringing up hundreds of thousands of results for most words and phrases searched, identifying relevant information for users is key.

SEO is a marketing practice in its own right and should absolutely form part of any company’s digital marketing strategy for online business growth.

Why is SEO SO Important for Online Business Growth?

The world ‘google’ is as much a verb now as it is a name, and society is increasingly dependent on the search engines they can access through their smartphones and other tech devices to find information quickly and efficiently.

Businesses should view search engines as a marketing channel. Any person looking for a product, service or industry relevant to them should be able to easily access information on their brand; so that they can gain awareness of the brand and its products/services, and ideally, eventually, make a purchase.

SEO is important for businesses because as society moves more and more online, so do their buying habits. There are very few industries not yet with any online presence at all; and for those that do have some, businesses without any SEO will find that their brand is ranked below the search engine results displaying information on their competitors.

SEO is imperative amongst small business marketing and online business growth as it is something that can deliver an inordinate amount of results for a relatively small outlay of finance and resource.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by tapping into the automated programming within search engines that determines where to rank what in terms of the results individuals using the search see. This is achieved by ensuring that the algorithm recognises a website as relevant, appropriate, genuine and an expert in a specific niche. It should be able to judge the who, what, where, when, how and why about a brand… just from a millisecond automated scan of the content on its website!

Put simply: search engines are library catalogues. The programs that manage them are the librarians.

The exact ways SEO works change all the time as algorithms and programming develop and grow. The technology involved in search engine operation is always improving and so SEO is never just a job to be done once and never again – businesses serious about it should aim to continuously advance and enhance their efforts toward it.

What Benefit Does Good SEO Give a Business Over Poor SEO?

Good SEO increases a brand’s visibility in search rankings, so when done better than a competitor, gives competitive advantage.

Being top of the search rankings for a relevant search to your business isn’t just important – it’s damn near imperative!

Think of your own search engine behaviours. Do you scroll through pages and pages of results to find the info you want or do you just click through to the first few? Your business needs to be where people will see it, otherwise it will lose out to those who are.

What Do SEO Services Include?

Some marketers have training in SEO and can implement it and optimise a website and its content, however this training needs to be taken in a continuous cycle and the content updated with it. If you are going to invest in SEO services, we highly recommend working with an SEO expert.

SEO experts are consultants who stay up to date with the near daily changes and are able to use this knowledge to implement SEO into a site on an ongoing basis, for best results and online business growth.

Being an SEO specialist is a full-time job. SEO consultants have to ensure every part of a website fits with the current search engine algorithms. That includes, but is by no means limited to: ensuring all written content is optimised, ensuring the website page layouts are optimised and work across different devices, building backlinks to and from other websites to build authority, ensuring every page on a website is tagged and categorised correctly, ensuring every image on a website is tagged and categories correctly, and ensuring that all the ‘backend’ data of a website is optimised.

How Long Does SEO Implementation Take?

The development of good SEO isn’t just a job that can be done once and then not re-visited. The nature of the internet and search engine technology is that it changes all of the time, so it needs to be a continual focus for businesses who want to remain at the top of their game online (and at the top of the search engines!).

It’s impossible to say how long an initial review and ‘go over’ of a brand’s website would take, as it depends on two factors: how bad the website’s SEO currently is, and how much content is on the site. However, an SEO specialist will be able to advise on the initial work required and then recommend an ongoing plan to keep on top of the situation.

SEO specialists are worth their weight in gold, and seeking one out is one of the most effective marketing strategies a small business can invest in. Ranking ahead of the competition in a marketing method where people are already seeking out relevant information? It’s a win-win!

Woya Digital is a digital marketing agency focussed on your business growth! Our SEO packages are paid monthly with no upfront investment making our service affordable for any size business! Get your FREE SEO Website Audit Report NOW!

Data Privacy Day

by Natalie Karr | 28 Jan 2020 | Digital Marketing

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Data Privacy is a key issue around the world now as we increasingly rely on technology and incorporate it into our daily lives, sharing more of ourselves online than ever before. The information that others unrelated to you are able to access on you, is likely a lot more than you’ve ever considered – scarily so!

Yet unless you’re a big business or a high net worth individual, you probably do very little to manage your data privacy; instead relying on those companies you interact with, to do it for you. Introducing Data Privacy Day which we now have to create awareness around this topic.

What is Data Privacy Day?

Data Privacy Day is an (inter)national day aimed at inspiring dialogue and empowering a journey toward knowledge and action toward better privacy for both individuals and businesses. This means safeguarding their own data, respecting the data of others and in doing so, better enabling trust. There’s nothing to fear in the management of data privacy, but it’s a topic that’s definitely worth being aware of!

Why is DP Important?

For individuals, data is important because it’s often made up of your personal information – and the leaking of such info can result in identity theft, fraud and severely negative financial consequences.

The same can happen for businesses, but there are also legal consequences: there is a degree of privacy and security measures that companies must implement and manage as they handle data, be it their own or that belonging to others.

How Can Businesses Ensure They Keep Customer Data Safe?

Businesses have a responsibility to keep their customer data safe – however it’s also good business to foster trust with your customers! In order to best keep their customer data safe, businesses should strive to ensure they’re constantly up-to-date with the latest data privacy legislation and tools.

The enforcement and management of this as part of a cycle of continuous improvement, is something that can always be improved upon. This will allow firms to keep abreast of the latest developments in technology and data security.

Where Can Businesses Go for DP Guidance and Support?

Businesses looking to develop their data privacy procedures and policies should use Data Privacy Day as their first foray into the sector. You can access information and guidance through the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

There are also lots of data privacy specialists who are able to consult and offer tangible help with data security within businesses.

Woya Digital is a digital marketing agency made up of experts in our various fields. We believe in making business growth through digital marketing affordable for all businesses through our pay monthly marketing packages, with no upfront investment. Find out more about how we can support your business growth through digital marketing.

Get To Know Your Customers Day

by Steve OBrien | 16 Jan 2020 | Digital Marketing

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Life is busy for business owners and one day rolls into the next; so it’s important that we step back and take stock once in a while. We need to re-assess priorities and ensure our ship is continuing to sail in the right direction. It is crucial for business owners to be consistently and constantly aware of changing customer attitudes and appetites – so you’re able to adapt, pivot and continue to meet your clients wants and needs.

The purpose of Get To Know Your Customers Day is about doing just this – allowing us to promote business growth and customer understanding.

What is Get To Know Your Customers Day?

Get To Know Your Customers Day is a national day aimed at encouraging businesses to halt their usual work and touch base with their existing (and potential!) customers in order to address any issues, untapped opportunities and/or concerns.

This can feed into business operations, marketing and business growth.

When is Get To Know Your Customers Day?

Get To Know Your Customers Day doesn’t happen just once a year – but instead, every quarter! Usually held on the third Thursday of each quarter, it’s regular enough for businesses to keep on top of rapidly changing markets and attitudes.

Why it’s Important to Get To Know Your Customers

Customers are people, and their wants and needs change over time with changing circumstances, attitudes and appetites for products and services. Building up a trusting relationship with your existing customers fosters brand loyalty that can ultimately increase their value to you.

They’re also the audience you want to hear from to find out what they want, like or dislike – giving you distinct competitive advantage.

How Knowing Your Customers Can Impact your Marketing

The way in which you communicate to existing and potential customers is key to attracting them to start or continue on a relationship with your business. One of the things that can be gained from getting to know your customers is to find out how they would best like to be communicated with, and to identify the channels they use and prefer for communications.

You can also identify which marketing strategies are really impacting your target audience, and therefore focus on these moving forward. This allows you to tailor your marketing to best reach your audience where they are.

Knowing Your Customers Will Benefit Your Business

Really knowing your customers will affect every area of your business! Assure those that you’re interacting with that you want their honest, open feedback on EVERYTHING. Consolidate all the information you receive and work out how the results can best be applied to your business operations and strategy as a result.

Pivoting a business’ direction based on changing markets and client requirements is key to business growth and success, and is something that every business should be reviewing at regular intervals.

Woya Digital is a digital marketing agency made up of experts in our various fields. We believe in making business growth through digital marketing affordable for all businesses through our pay monthly marketing packages, with no upfront investment. Find out more about how we can support your business growth through digital marketing.

Small Business Social Media Marketing Strategy

by Steve OBrien | 23 Dec 2019 | Digital Marketing, Social media

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Social media platforms provide a fantastic opportunity for small business growth, however a considered plan is required to really optimise what they have to offer. We’ve put together this blog as a “Where to start” for business owners with their small business social media marketing strategy.

When it comes to social media marketing, the following quote perfectly sums it up: Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat – Sun Tzu

1. Establish Your Goals

You should know your business goals. Whether you manage your social media marketing yourself or have a marketing partner to manage it for you, you need to establish realistic goals that you wish to achieve through your social media marketing.

A business generally has one or more of these 6 objectives behind their social media strategy:

Drive website traffic
Create brand awareness
Build audience trust
Provide customer support
Attract leads
Increase sales

Once you know why you are doing what you are doing, you can do it better. Each post you publish will be as a result of one or more of your established goals.

2. Create Audience Persona(s)

Many business owners underestimate the value of audience persons. You should not start a social media marketing campaign without understanding who your targeted audience is.

An ‘audience persona’ or ‘buyer persona’ describes the attributes of your target audience in as much detail as possible.

Understanding the habits and behaviours of your prospects helps you find and create personalised content especially for them. Depending on the nature of your business, you may have to create more than one audience persona.

3. Select the Right Social Media Platforms

As of 2019, 7 social media platforms dominate. Each has hundreds of millions of active users, and its own unique strengths. For example, Facebook has more subscribers than YouTube; however it can’t beat YouTube when it comes to video content marketing.

You shouldn’t limit your business to just one platform, having said this, you don’t need to be active on every social media platform. Use your business goals and audience personas to identify which social media platforms your target audience are on, and also what your capacity is for consistent content creation and distribution.

4. Identify and Study Your Competitors

Studying your competitors will help you identify market trends, establish what is and isn’t working for their audience, and which platforms your competitors are on.

Take out time to thoroughly analyse what your competition is doing. Do not go out to copy what they are doing, but to do it better, and learn from what they are doing.

5. Set Up Your Social Media Accounts

You will need data from all first three steps to implement this step efficiently. While setting up a business profile on a social media platform is not difficult, there are ways to optimise how you do this. It’s worth doing a bit of research.

This step will include having logos properly sized and header images created, and completing text boxes with company information overviews. Much of the information should already be on your website – don’t feel you need to re-invent the wheel!

6. Plan and Schedule Social Media Marketing Content

Planning and scheduling are two different parts of content marketing.

In planning, you have to determine the content that is relevant to your business and attractive for your target audience. In scheduling, you have to plan which content to publish, and when. You also need to establish how many posts you are going to post each day, to each platform. This again will be determined by your capacity to create relevant content.

Consistency is an essential element of social media posting.

7. See What Works and What Doesn’t

Marketing is a continuous process, and you are guaranteed of constant changes and development. An important part of each social media marketing campaign includes gathering and analysing data and using it to improve upon the next one.

8. Run Social Media Advertisements

After you have succeeded in creating the initial presence of your business on social media channels, include paid advertisements. Organic social media reach has plummeted over the past few years, so an element of paid advertising is critical

Every platform offers paid promotion, and it should be a part of your social media marketing strategy. However, make sure you first fully understand your market and audience to get maximum return on investment.

There is more to each point highlighted above when structuring your small business social media marketing strategy, however you need to start with understanding the basics, and then work into the detail from here.