BUSINESS CLINIC

Marwick Marketing director, Christian Thomson, has some marketing advice to help keep SMEs healthy in the months ahead.

DIGITAL MARKETING

Even after ten years of leading the team at Marwick Marketing, I’m still amazed at how quickly digital marketing changes. Our team of 22 digital marketers spend 25% of their time on courses, training and staying up to date on the latest digital marketing channels to help our clients be at the cutting edge of digital marketing.

I’m thankful to Business Cornwall magazine for being able to share my personal top four opportunities for business owners and marketing professionals to adopt in the coming months.

TikTok Videos - 10 minutes

With over a billion users, TikTok is going head-tohead with YouTube with longer-form content. It recently announced account owners can now upload videos that last ten minutes. The hope is it will unleash even more creative possibilities for our creators around the world. This is great news for savvy businesses that already use TikTok as a content marketing platform. The largest demographic group on TikTok are females aged 16 - 24 years old - making it an ideal platform to advertise to this specific demographic.

Google My Business Messaging’ Google Ads Experiments

This is one of the most underutilised digital marketing areas I’ve seen in Cornwall based businesses. As business owners we all understand how powerful Google Ads can be - and not just search ads but display ads, remarketing ads, YouTube ads and Google shopping ads, which all fall under the term Google Ads. A/B testing is super important to lower your costper-click, increase conversions and lower your cost-per-conversion. However you don’t want to be testing new targeting, new bids, new ads and new keywords in your live account as it will cost you. Instead you can use Google Ad Experiments. You can create a custom experiment from your original campaign and compare how your experiment performs against your original campaign over time. The experiment shares your original campaign’s traffic (and budget) and lets you test changes to your campaign so that you can make more informed decisions on which tactics give you a better return on investment.

Be at the cutting edge of digital marketing

My second tip for digital marketing in 2022 is turning on Google My Business Messaging’. Most companies in Cornwall understand the importance of having a complete and up to date Google My Business listing - however only a small percentage are utlising a new feature called ‘Google My Business Messaging’. This free instant messaging service allows customers to contact you directly from your listing. A recent study shows that 67% of people would rather message a business than call a business by phone. So turning on and using Google My Business Messaging is a smart move.

Google Ads Image Extensions

This is one of my favorite new features in digital marketing over the last 12 months. If you use Google Ads in the search format you will be familiar with extensions to your adverts.

For example phone number extensions, call out extensions, rating extensions and additional webpage links. Google Ad extensions increase your digital real estate at the top of Google. The new image extensions will help make your ads more visually appealing, which will encourage visitors to click on them.

By adding an image to your Google search ads you’re able to showcase your company’s product, brand, team or simply your company logo.

Expect an increase in your CTR (click-thoughrate) if you implement this new feature.