Defining your audience may from some companies be a relatively easy process however for startups or businesses that have not been operating for a long time it can be incredibly difficult.  In fact, in some cases, it can be one of the most important things that a startup or small business decides not to do. I have seen countless companies spend years building products and running general marketing activity without having a clear sense of who their ideal customer is. On the other hand for some small businesses, defining your audience might seem very simple. If you are a bricks and mortar business that is located in a specific part of the UK you might feel your potential audience is in part clearly defined by the people that you have in your close geographic area. However, this is a simplistic definition of your audience for most businesses. Unless you are selling an everyday commodity like vegetables or soft drinks that most people have the money to purchase at any point in time, income, age, interests, skills and a hundred other data points are going to have an impact on how much someone wants your product or service and as a...

When it comes to writing your strategy we would start by working out what your goal is. What are you trying to derive from your digital activity that will help your business? For some businesses it is online sales or online bookings. For others it is leads, enquiries or phone calls.  There can be more than one goal. However, we would recommend setting goals that can be clearly measured (for example leads generated or sales completed) and making sure that they are strongly linked to the growth of your business. So while the amount of likes generated on Facebook or the number of times a video has been viewed, can be helpful for judging the efficacy of activity it is hard to trace these back to your monthly turnover and therefore the effects that they are having on your business. Some may argue that a lead completed or even an online sale does not directly correlate with growth. However they do have a strong direct impact. Once you have set your goal this can become the cornerstone for evaluating activity going forward. Later in the guide we will teach you how to setup conversion tracking. This will allow you to...

What is Alt Text or “Alt Tags” Alt text (or as they are colloquially known Alt Tags) are small pieces of text description that are associated with images in html and explain what a specific image on a website depicts. <img src="image.jpg" alt="this is alt text" /> They were originally created to make the web more accessible, by describing images to those who cannot see them. This includes people using browsers that don’t allow images but primarily sight impaired people who are using screen readers to convert a website’s content into audio or braille. Why is Alt Text important in SEO There is still little evidence to suggest that Google uses any form of image processing to infer what an image might be about. Instead Google is still heavily reliant on the content of alt text to understand what the images on a website are about. As a result it is important that we provide this information in alt text so that images that might be providing a user with important information on a website are understood better by Google. Best Practices Keep it readable. While alt text does provide us with an opportunity to inform Google about what our...

As shown below a search engine result is made up of three different elements: The URL of of the pageThe title of the pageThe meta description Meta descriptions are our opportunity to tell Google what content should appear below the title of a page on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP). It is both a change to encourage a user to click on our listing over the listing of others and also an opportunity to provide Google with information about what the page is about. Most SEO experts now believe that Meta Descriptions are not a ranking factor for Google, in other words having a meta description will not impact how well your page ranks for a particular keyword term. However they are still really important as a well written meta description will impact how likely someone is to click on your listing which in turn will impact your click through rate. In my opinion saying that Meta Descriptions are not a ranking factor is a little misleading. Yes it is not possible to draw a straight line between having one and an increase in how well your page ranks for a search term but it is an excellent opportunity...

When it comes to writing your strategy we would start by working out what your goal is. What are you trying to derive from your digital activity that will help your business? For some businesses it is online sales or online bookings. For others it is leads, enquiries or phone calls.  There can be more than one goal. However, we would recommend setting goals that can be clearly measured (for example leads generated or sales completed) and making sure that they are strongly linked to the growth of your business. So while the amount of likes generated on Facebook or the number of times a video has been viewed, can be helpful for judging the efficacy of activity it is hard to trace these back to your monthly turnover and therefore the effects that they are having on your business. Some may argue that a lead completed or even an online sale does not directly correlate with growth. However they do have a strong direct impact. Once you have set your goal this can become the cornerstone for evaluating activity going forward. Later in the guide we will teach you how to setup conversion tracking. This will allow you to...

Growth Hacking and Growth Marketing are specialisms that were developed out of frustration with the traditional marketing world. Small businesses and startups were tired of paying marketing agencies to promote their products and services only to see no quantifiable results often after significant financial outlay. Growth hackers approach the problem of marketing differently, looking for quick wins that exploit flaws in the way that social media and other digital platforms (such as Google) work in order to gain visibility and conversions for companies that would otherwise cost them orders of magnitude more. Growth marketers carried on in this tradition, focusing on optimising the return on investment that was being gained from marketing activities rather than spending time and money on unmeasurable or ineffective activity. With a growth strategy we want everything to be tied back to its effect on growing the business. Yes brand awareness and engagement are important but above all else we want to do things that are going to have a measurable effect on your bottom line by achieving the goals that we set out. This also affects the way that we approach campaign roll out. Although the rewards of running a multichannel campaign maybe be higher,...

The original version of this guide was published in December 2020 however the content is regularly reviewed by our team and new elements are constantly being added. We want this to become an open source platform for small businesses internationally so are committed to improving and enhancing the content over time as marketing and the tools used to market change.

When we first start working with clients, often the first thing that we do is work on defining their proposition and brand and then building their website. However this guide specifically avoids talking a lot about this process. This is because there is a huge amount of variation in the process and requirements when approaching these elements. Different companies need their website to do completely different things and defining a companies proposition and brand is a creative process that is more art than science, we might come back to talk about these elements in more detail at a later date but for now we wanted to focus on the nuts and bolts of setting up a digital presence and starting to connect with your customers online. 

Zephyr is a digital growth agency. We help small businesses and startups transform their businesses digitally, defining their digital profile, connecting with their customers online and in doing so creating digital marketing funnels that can power their business.  We wrote this guide because we wanted to share our knowledge of how to grow small businesses with small businesses across the UK and beyond. We wanted to allow all those who don’t have the funds or inclination to employ an agency to still be able to set up the basics of their digital profile and to compete against bigger, better resourced competitors. That being said, if you are interested in us doing the heavy lifting and helping you digitally transform your business then please do not hesitate to get in contact. While we have tried to make the guide as detailed as possible, it only covers a fraction of the strategies that our team can carry out.

We will be adding to this guide each month, so feel free to check back or subscribe to our notifications to be kept up to date as we add to it further.