Features

A website can be a large investment for any business but it’s important to get the website design right. It needs to be practical to use, have a quick loading speed and look aesthetically pleasing too. Having a website that is hard to navigate around will actually put customers off, which is why you should have specific pages for certain information. Here are five pages every business must have to retain existing customers and keep bringing in new ones too.

Homepage

This is the first page the majority of your customers will see, whether you’re a product or service business. It will make the first impression so you need to keep it as simple as possible. That’s why the design of your website is so important. It needs to be unique to your business, amplify what you do and be functional at the same time. It should tell them how you can help them with your service or make their life easier using your product.

What to include: Keep it short and simple. You need to include some brief text to show customers what it is that your business does so try to include any mission statements, logos or slogans. They should be instantly able to recognise what industry you’re in and what you’re selling. Whilst pictures should be included, they should be smaller in file size. The slower a website loads, the more likely a customer will click elsewhere.

About Page

Here’s where you can start adding more text. However, too much text in one block will put people off. Make sure to break up any text using various heading sizes and bullet points. Including a back story of the business (especially for small businesses) can help to attract new customers too. You can also do a profile on the owner and any team members to show the people behind the business. When it comes to small and medium-sized businesses, people buy from other people!

What to include: Firstly, include a short summary of what the business does. A great way to tell people the background of the business is to use a timeline feature. You can incorporate photos and text in a widget to make it more interactive, rather than on a static page. Next, include a biography of the owner/s and any employees. You can always expand on this and link to a separate page for each staff member.

Products or Services Pages

This will be one of the bulkier sections as it’s what people are coming to your website for. However, it will vary depending on your business type. Product businesses should set up an online shop here with lots of internal linking to product listings. You could categorise your products to make it easier to navigate around.

Service-based businesses will have less but possibly more detailed pages here. You can have a landing page that talks about what you do in general and then internal links to more detailed information on each service you provide.

What to include: Keep the main page brief and add in pages to each product or service offered. You want to keep the information brief on the landing page so customers can pick and choose the products or services most appropriate to them. Include photos of products here too so people have a general idea of what to look out for. Service businesses can include testimonials from previous clients and examples of their work too.

Blog/latest News Page

To be seen online more and to rank higher in Google, you need to implement a solid SEO strategy for your business. Whilst SEO can be a minefield and is best left to the experts, an easy way to start is by providing informative articles on your industry and adding lots of internal links into them. Articles can be anything from company news and product launches to top tips and product guides. It can also help to determine the tone of voice for your business, whether that’s chatty or informative (most fall somewhere in between).

What to include: Product businesses should base their content around what they sell. You will need to brainstorm some ideas for this before implementing it though. Think about what frequent questions you get asked about your products, any topical news in your industry or uses for your products. All of these ideas can be written about in long-form content on a blog or news section.

Service businesses can show their expertise in their blog section. Write about any relevant industry topics, expertise on the services you provide and business news, such as milestones and behind the scenes.

Contact Page

What good is a website if you have no idea how to contact them? At the least, you should include an email address and links to social media. Larger businesses will have an address book of contact details, including phone numbers and addresses of other offices and stores. If you get a large amount of queries on similar topics, you could add in a frequently asked questions section here to avoid having tons of emails on the same topic.

What to include: A contact form is a simple way to have all queries sent to one inbox. Most of them are pretty standard with name, contact details and query details taken at once. If you have a physical store or head office, include address details and a map. Also, include any contact numbers, including any specific departments, so customers can send questions to the correct person.

Here, you can also include any links to your social media accounts. You should have links to them in your header and footer of all pages too but you can’t have those links in too many places if you want to build your business!

These five pages are the bare minimum every business website should have. The larger your business becomes, the more pages you will add. To begin with, keep it simple and easy to navigate. For more information on having a website designed for you, head straight to our services page.

Social media has grown into something akin to a monster over the past 20 years, becoming a platform for politics, hatred, and anger, a place to vent frustration, spread lies, and misinformation. Social media is powerful, a money-making machine for shareholders, vloggers, influencers, and brands.

However, social media is also a tool to sell products, spread good news, and celebrate life in general.

By producing eye-catching content and using such tools as Instagram Stories and the Facebook Market Place, anyone from the humble start-up to well-known brands can compete against one another on an even playing field.

Previously, small companies would struggle online with a low advertising budget. Still, today they are more likely to survive than they would on the high street, as social media platforms have helped them spread the word about their offerings.

People tend to be more influenced by what they read on social media than through casual conversations or what they watch on TV. It has become a monster, but what kind of monster is it? Good or bad?

Let us look at social media and its uses, whether good, bad, or ugly.

Sharing Information

Gossip has been with us since the days when we first learned to talk. People have shared information, valuable or invaluable, for fun or to be serious, good or bad, to help define who they are and to keep in touch with their audience.

As human beings, we crave attention and what better way to get that attention than on social media. It works for people, and it works for brands. It’s easy to access and post a comment to a worldwide audience at the stroke of a keyboard.

All of this has allowed social networks to grow and evolve. To feed their users appetites and to leave them demanding more. Social media has helped to shape our politics, our social issues, and views, reach out to family and friends far and wide and even make new friendships and relationships. It has introduced us to new products, new brands, new music, films and the famous and all of this has played a part in its ever-growing power.

Social Media Is Impactive

Did you know that nearly a quarter of the population is on social media? That is one hell of an audience for the brand, small business, politicians, the media, and attention seekers. The impact of a post can reach far and wide as it can build up a person or company or tear them apart. Any misdemeanour by a celebrity can reach millions of people through a single post or the simple use of a hashtag and can destroy their career in a matter of hours. Twitter spreads a news story faster than the established media.

Which Leads Us Onto News

Social media seems to be winning the war against traditional media. More and more people are turning to social media to find out what is happening in the world. Since the start of the internet, it has become easier for people to access news stories, unlike years before when you had to buy a newspaper to find out what was happening in the world or wait until the news came on the TV. With the advent of social media, anyone can be a journalist, break a news story with a simple tweet or post, or make or break a person or brand. Social media has helped make people more aware of what is happening in the world.

Marketing and Social Media

Social media has also become the go-to tool for marketers. The rise of digital marketing has been unstoppable, and brands or businesses without a social media presence are being left further behind. As we stated earlier, small businesses can compete with the big boys as they can more or less reach the same audience through digital marketing. With more digital companies springing up, pricing has become very competitive. At Smoking Chilli, we have marketing packages to suit all budgets.

There is an endless world of possibilities when it comes to reaching your target market on social media. It is very uncommon for people not to check their social media pages at least once a day. It is used for education, communication, and decision-making.

Social media is impactive, helpful, informative but can also be destructive and affect mental health.

We have seen celebrities such as Jesy Nelson of Little Mix who succumbed to the daily pressure of being in the public eye and open to abuse on social media affected by mental health issues. We have seen our footballers suffer racist abuse because of a penalty miss. Yes, social media is powerful for various reasons, for good, but there are issues.

So don’t be put off by social media. If it is treated well and with respect, it will return the favour. For small businesses, social media can be very impactful and helpful and put you in touch with your audience. It is an excellent marketing tool for targeting audiences related to your business.

If you need help with your business, social media, or digital marketing, drop us a line, and we will discuss how we can help your business grow.

Pay Per Click or PPC as it is more commonly known is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay for each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. Essentially, it is a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to drive them to your site organically (non-paid).

There are various, different types of Pay Per Click advertising models with the most common type being the paid search ad as an example Google Adwords. These are ads that appear when people search for things online using a search engine like Google – especially when they are performing commercial searches, meaning that they are looking for something to buy. This could be anything from a search on a mobile for a place to eat, to a local service, to a gift for someone or a higher end item like a car. All of these types of searches will trigger a pay-per-click ad.

With pay-per-click advertising, the business running the ad is only charged when the user actually does click on the ad, hence the term ‘pay per click’ or ‘PPC’. You set up your campaigns by writing ad copy and selecting relevant keywords and choosing a suitable landing page on your site

Various other forms of Pay Per Click advertising can include display advertising and remarketing.

There are 8 different types of pay per click ads

• Search ads
• Display ads
• Social ads
• Remarketing ads
• Google shopping
• Local service ads
• Gmail sponsored promotions
• Instream ads – Youtube

So How Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work?

In order, for the pay per click ads to appear alongside the search results as example on Google, advertisers cannot just simply pay more than their competitors to ensure that their ads appear more prominently and frequently than their competitor’s ads. Instead, ads are subject to what is known as an Ad Auction. This is an entirely automated process that Google and other search engines use to determine the relevance and validity of advertisements that appear on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

How Keywords Work in Pay-Per-Click Advertising

As the name implies, the Ad Auction is used to select the ads that will appear on your pages and determine how much you will earn from those ads. In a traditional auction, interested bidders will state the maximum price they are willing to pay to buy a specific item. This means that advertisers must bid on the terms they want to activate or to display their ads. These terms are known as keywords. Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is all about. In terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), they are the words and the phrases that people type into their search engines when looking for content. This is also known as also ‘search queries’.

Need help with your PPC campaign?

A well-managed PPC campaign can immediately generate traffic, which leads to extra conversions. The traffic will be of high quality because the user has entered a term very closely related to what you offer. We aim to attract visitors who have a problem or need, that your company can solve.

Contact our team and see how we can help you.

These days social media has become an important inbound marketing strategy for any small business and an integral part for any marketing campaign. Creating high end content and invaluable content and ranking well for it on the SERP (search engine results page) is all well and good, but being able to share that content to the right customers straight away and getting those customers that are interested in your brand, product, or service back to your site is a whole different ball game.

Interacting with consumers on social media is becoming an important marketing strategy for small businesses and by using social media it can help you in a variety of different ways such as:

• Building brand awareness
• Increasing your customer base
• Connecting with current customers

So let’s take a look at some of the important reasons as to why social media for small business is a good thing and should be an integral part of your marketing strategy.

Communication

Communication with your customers is important to your small business or any business for that matter but it is always great to have all communication bases covered and this includes social media. Mailing addresses, a phone call, an email, and a contact form on your websites are all well and good, but if the customer has a quickfire question to ask or wants to share the good news about their order arriving or how great it is and even recommend you to other people they tend to go straight to a social media platform be it Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. The real-time advantages of social platforms is that they allow your business to engage with your customers in a quick and timely manner. You don’t have to be on every platform as there will be some platforms that are advantageous to your business, but it is very helpful to have a few active accounts where you know your customers are and can be found.

Understanding

Do you know who your customers and potential customers are? If you don’t know, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can be a great way in helping you collate date and find your target market. With analytical tools found on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as examples, can help you find out more about your audience, what posts they react to, what times they are active and how many times they click through to your website. Understanding their ‘habits’ can define your online marketing strategy and ultimately increase traffic to your website.

Keeping A Step Ahead

Whilst any small business shouldn’t mimic every move that any of their competition may make, you should keep in mind and be fully aware of where they are at and what they are doing that maybe you are not or maybe you could improve on. If your competition as an example is more actively engaging through social media with their customers, they may have built a distinct advantage over you as having a good communication as we know is key to boosting a good reputation and business profile.

By simply having an active social media presence and profile, you are actually doing your business a massive favour and increasing your businesses visibility through search result pages. As we said earlier in this piece, you don’t need to plaster or bang on about your business on every single social platform, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube etc to show that you’re visibly active. Go to the sites where your brand’s voice will be amplified and at its strongest and be able to engage with your customers whilst still getting your brands message across

Need help with your business social media accounts? Contact us and let us help increase your digital presence