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With something like financial services, where consumers and businesses alike are understandably sometimes sceptical or resistant to change, adoption can sometimes be slow, so communications and marketing in this space is of huge importance. It’s not just brand and product awareness that marketing aims to increase, there are often key educational factors too, where fintech requires people to actually change how they do some things that may be lifetime habits, and that isn’t always an easy sell!

In this blog, we take a look at examples of fintech marketing trends and campaigns that have made a real impact on their target audience and the fintech market, then explore what we might be able to learn from them.

Starling Bank – Set yourself free/Set your business free

Starling Bank, the fast-growing challenger banking brand, has had several really strong and successful marketing campaigns over the past few years, but we’ll focus on their ‘Set yourself free’ campaign, launched in 2021, and followed by ‘Set your business free’ in 2022.

The reason for choosing these connected campaigns is because they successfully hit both the consumer audience and SMEs, which make up a large proportion of their customer base.

Starling has been using the ‘flying’ analogy since their early days in their marketing and communications, so it’s no surprise to see flying to symbolise ‘freedom’ again in these campaigns, in the context of a common complaint or issue relevant to that specific audience.

The customer standing in a long queue at a bank, signifying wasting time and inconvenience, which are problems that the fintech brand claim to solve.

Then in a small business context, where a painter and decorator, a dog groomer and an entrepreneur are ‘set free’ by award-winning Starling because of their account with no monthly fees and free UK bank transfers.

This mobile-only banking solution might lack the long-established trust built up with high street banks, but as a challenger brand, aiming at both consumer and business customers, their marketing messages do cut through and show why they are different. Small businesses have been underserved by traditional banks for a long time, with monthly charges common, along with fees for carrying out most regular business banking activities. Starling choosing to celebrate their lack of physical branches might be bold, but it seems to be working! By the end of 2022, Starling Bank surpassed half a million business customers, holding an 8.9% market share (up from 5.6% in 2021), which is huge for such a new company (established in 2014) in a sector that is notoriously tough to break into.

ManyPets UK – Pets care for us

Insurance isn’t very exciting for most people, but when you introduce some cute animals into the mix, it instantly lends itself much more to marketing. ManyPets (formerly Bought By Many) is known for being a bit of an interrupter to the pet insurance landscape, by offering digital solutions and assistance for pet owners, including free video vet calls, as well as offering some product features not often found in the sector, such as cover for pre-existing conditions. In the summer of 2022, they launched a campaign across multiple platforms (on and offline) that was all about pets being therapy for us humans.

There was a range of TV ads showing a person on the therapist’s couch and a pet doing very little from their chair (i.e. just being themselves) and still helping make things a little better.

They also surveyed customers to generate data to support the campaign, but wisely (given the small sample size), pitched it as ‘our customers think XXX’ rather than trying to pass it off as strong data.

Giving names, doggy faces and therapeutic attributes to pets also formed part of their marketing activity, such as this Facebook post. Anthropomorphising as a marketing tactic is nothing new, but this plays nicely into what many pet owners already think about their furry friends. Pets are part of the family after all.

This campaigns wasn’t 100% online though. Bus shelter ads and other transport ad types were used to grab attention for those busy commuters going back to the office and missing their pets after so much time spent at home with them in recent years.

This campaign works because it confirms to lots of pet owners what they already know; their lives are richer, mentally as well as physically, for having pets as part of it. A pet insurance brand telling us that they understand this is likely to be very appealing to pet owners when insurance renewal time comes around or if they get a new furry addition to the family. All of this without any talk of product features or benefits – it’s aiming for a heart decision as much as a head decision, which is unusual in financial services.

PensionBee – Believe in the Bee

Pensions aren’t the most exciting subject matter for most people, so PensionBee do have a bit of a challenge on their hands with their marketing strategy. However, the power of the pun is strong when it comes to marketing, which really helps! Whoever named this fintech brand definitely knew what they were doing!

Believe in the Bee was a 2022 campaign that included a cameo from Brentford Football Club (AKA The Bees), that went out across TV and social media. Their ads include a variety of different people at a range of life stages, signifying that their product is for everyone; certainly not just those near retirement age. There is a definite slant towards a younger audience. There is also a significant educational angle to the messaging, because pensions can feel like a daunting topic and PensionBee think that they provide the answer to this with their digital solution.

This campaign does an excellent job at including some of the key information without going overboard, such as mentioning the fossil fuel-free pension option, making it clear that money can’t be withdrawn by the under 55s and stressing the convenience of everything being online. While it doesn’t exactly change the world, it’s a campaign that certainly ticks plenty of boxes in terms of effective communication around what can be a complex subject and that is something essential when it comes to brands in the fintech sector.

Marketing strategies for fintech companies

With the UK fintech industry expected to double in size by 2030, an increasingly crowded marketplace will mean that brands in this space will have to be even more clever when it comes to their content marketing strategies, SEO and Digital PR campaigns.

Video content and TV have featured strongly in these examples and we would expect that to only increase in the future, because videos explain through sound and visuals at the same time, which is important in topics that benefit from being broken down into more manageable chunks of information.

With so much more growth on the horizon for fintech brands in the UK, we’re excited to see where marketing in this industry goes over the coming years.

If you’re a fintech brand looking for digital marketing support to take your business to the next level, our team of proven experts would love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.

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Traditionally, blogging can sometimes be seen a bit of a mismatched tactic for ecommerce brands. Blogs are generally considered to be a ‘soft sell’ kind of marketing tactic – turning top of the funnel visitors slowly into customers by answering their questions, solving their problems and gradually moving them onwards in their buying journey. This kind of content in ecommerce is sometimes moved down the priority list as a result, being overtaken by more direct sales-driving marketing tactics. However, blogs can have a definitive role to play in generating conversions too, so the key is to ensure that your ecommerce content strategy incorporates blogs that connect with potential customers right at the key decision points of their journey, not just those at the very top of the funnel.

1. Ensure your ecommerce blog strategy is focused on intent-led search terms

In order to do effective keyword research for ecommerce, you need to understand who your customers are and what problems or pain points they need to overcome (and when) to become a customer. This knowledge helps ensure that your keyword choices are based on the most relevant searchers and those at defined points in their journey towards a purchase. As part of a wider SEO strategy and services, this means your site can have higher organic visibility for those looking for relevant information and answers to their questions. For example, a fashion brand might want to raise awareness of and sell more from their new range of florals. However, creating general blog content about florals and why they’re so great is unlikely to cut through the noise and start delivering high levels of traffic that is ready to buy. Instead, focusing blog content on overcoming some of the reasons why people might avoid buying florals is offering a solution to a known problem that customers have. Finding questions that people ask about florals can be a great place to start with for blog ideas.

2. Use a combination of reactive/seasonal/trending content and evergreen content

Creating blog content about seasonal events or things that are trending or in the news is great and can drive significant traffic to your site for a short period of time, but this needs to be balanced out with evergreen content topics that have search volume all year round and can drive traffic over a sustained period of time; sometimes even for years to come. The florals fashion theme can be a good example of this. Connecting florals-related blogs to summer weddings/parties etc can be useful, but people won’t be looking for that content all year round, so make sure you include evergreen topics too, such as those questions seen above. It’s not an either/or situation; getting a blend of all of these types of blogs can help you achieve your marketing goals.

3. Your choice of CTA REALLY matters

Having a clear idea of what you want the reader of each blog to do after they have read your content is essential. This is what will help them move along their journey towards making a purchase more quickly than they otherwise might. If the blog post is aimed fairly high up the funnel, expecting the user to jump from a lifestyle-themed blog post right into a purchase is likely to be unrealistic in the majority of cases. However, directing them to some related content that is aimed slightly further down the funnel could well result in them staying on your site for longer and moving them along in their buying journey. You might instead want to get them to sign up to marketing emails to get exclusive offers etc so you can market to them again further down the line through this channel. You have to understand your customers well to be able to judge the right point to ask them to ‘buy now’, ‘shop now’ or similar but you can get clever with CTAs too. For the fashion brand florals blog, you can see if they want to ‘build your look now’ and send them to the florals category page. Actionable words can be a useful device and making your CTAs stand out design-wise is also important.

4. Update existing blog content to maximise results

It’s common to always lean towards new content creation with your ecommerce blog strategy, but there can be gains to be made for a much smaller amount of time and resource if you update and expand existing content to achieve the same goal, when appropriate. There are many potential benefits of repurposing existing content for ecommerce SEO purposes, enabling pieces that have some search visibility to increase this, or to give the content a fresh appeal for other audience segments too. This works best when the crux of the topic is great and still highly relevant, but perhaps the content isn’t quite reaching its full potential currently. Maybe it had a traffic spike when first published but doesn’t send sustained traffic. Perhaps there are slightly different keywords with volume now that have emerged since the original piece was created. There can be many ways in which to improve an existing blog and make it a better resource than anyone else offers on the subject. Improving an existing piece also means that you gain benefit from any search engine authority that page already has, rather than starting from scratch. Incorporating an audit of existing blog content into your strategy can help you find the right blend of creating new pieces and improving existing ones, to get the best possible results from the resource you have.

5. Rework ecommerce blog content for other channels to increase reach

Using your branded ecommerce blog content in email newsletters and linking to the posts once or twice on your social channels is good practice in general, but it’s unlikely to make a huge impact on sales in this basic form. Instead, consider how the blog content (which we already know is super-relevant to customers and solves a problem they have – regardless of the channel they find it on) can be quickly and easily reformatted to better suit specific places where your audience are. Taking the florals example again… TikTok and Instagram present an amazing opportunity to not just talk about how to style florals in different ways/contexts, but actually SHOWS how to style them in ways that customers can easily replicate. Turning the key points of your blog text into visual and video content will appeal to a whole different section of your potential customer base and can be a real convincer if they haven’t quite made a buying decision yet. This doesn’t only work for fashion brands. Whatever you sell, turning your blog content into something more visual can be of real benefit to the buying journey and help you reach a wider audience than blogs alone. Whether it’s tech product demos or fixes, home storage hacks, dog food nutrition explanations or gardening tips, using a range of different formats for different platforms and channels can add an extra dimension to your ecommerce marketing strategy and results. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your ecommerce brand with digital marketing and content strategy, get in touch using the form below.

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• Ranking in search engine results for relevant terms
• Increasing conversions
• Attracting links from relevant, high-authority websites
• Getting engagement from readers
• Tangibly moving potential customers forward on their buying journey

We’ve identified four key steps to supercharge existing website content so that it starts delivering ROI.

1.     Identify the potential in existing underperforming content

The first stage of any content revamp project is always going to be identifying the specific pages, blogs or content assets that aren’t performing as they should be. For some legacy content, it might be that there was no specific content strategy in place when it was originally published, so it doesn’t have a clear objective or play a definitive role in the user journey. For other pieces, it might be that it used to perform well and no longer does, or simply isn’t focusing on quite the right area for the target audience. Alternatively, it could be performing pretty well, but there is potential for even more to come from it.

Identifying which pieces ‘should’ be doing better isn’t always straightforward, especially if you weren’t involved in its creation originally, but here are a few metrics that you can look at to discover content that could benefit from being updated or reworked.

Look at what the page is ranking for currently

Take a look in Google Search Console at your individual pages and their average rankings for queries. Any pages that currently rank somewhere between positions 5-30 could potentially be improved with some small tweaks. They are clearly hitting some of Google’s ranking factors in order to be in the positions that they are. However, for some reason, aren’t deemed the best available option by Google.

Look at pages that get decent organic traffic, but low engagement and/or conversions

Take a look at all pages in Google Analytics. Depending on the purpose of a specific page, it may or many not be a page that you would expect to bring conversions. That won’t always be a direct sale. A conversion could be getting a user to sign up to a newsletter, to fill out a contact form, or to download an asset. However, more top-of-the-funnel type content, such as many blog posts, are not really intended to convert as such, but simply to move people along in their journey towards a conversion at a later time.

Therefore, engagement levels can give good clues as to whether these pages are doing all that they can to meet the audience needs. Looking at the bounce rate and average time on page (compared to other pages on the site of the same type) can help show if people are finding the page engaging and useful, and if they are visiting other pages on the site after this one. Pages with lots of landing traffic but poor engagement metrics can be prime candidates for looking at for a potential content revamp.

2.     Look at why the content is not already delivering ROI

Finding low-performing pages is one thing, working out WHY they aren’t performing is another matter and isn’t always straightforward. Sometimes, search behaviour changes over time in a way that couldn’t have been predicted. However, some of the areas that can give you helpful information about why things aren’t working optimally right now include:

Are you targeting realistic keywords?

It’s worth reviewing the keywords you’re targeting with the existing content and whether top rankings for that term are actually realistic for your business at this point in time. Who is actually ranking well for the term now? If you’re competing with Wikipedia pages, government websites, educational faculties or official bodies of any kind, the chances are that you’re never going to top them. If you’re a smaller or newer brand with fairly low online authority, competing on generic and highly competitive terms simply isn’t realistic at the moment.

Instead, look at keywords that closely match user problems, answer common questions or reflect their intent at a certain point of their user journey. These will usually be long-tail terms, but they often still have a good level of monthly search volume and are likely to attract highly relevant users, with more chance of converting because their search intent matches the content you deliver to them.

Check your on-page SEO for underperforming content pieces

Following SEO best practice for content is a good way to ensure you’re doing everything you can to stack the deck in your favour in terms of ranking signals. You can find the full list of on-page and technical SEO essentials here, but some of the key principles include:

• Placing your primary target keyword in prominent locations on the page, such as in the title, meta description, main heading (H1) and in the text of the first paragraph
• Using primary target keyword in relevant image alt text, if images are used on the page
• Using secondary keywords in H2 and H3 headings, with all target keywords and variations used naturally throughout the text on the page
• Never stuffing keywords into a page to try and appeal to search engines.

Check your page title and meta description are compelling enough to encourage click-throughs

If you have a piece of content that gets a high number of impressions (shown in Google Search Console) but comparatively few clicks, it might be that your page title and meta description, which are the parts seen by users in search results, simply aren’t strong enough to convince people that they need to click on your listing.

See what the competition are doing in their page titles and meta descriptions and do something different to them that helps make your result stand out.

Check if the content is as useful as possible

Does the content of the page live up to the promises made in the title, headings and subheadings? Is it as in-depth as it should be on the subject topic? Would it benefit from more examples being added? More visuals? Some statistics or expert quotes to give the piece more gravitas or credibility?

Check whether the content feels up to date

If your content contains statistics or time-sensitive references, it can easily start to feel out of date if there are more recent figures available, or once the event or date it mentions has passed. For example, a blog title that contains a specific year is only really relevant and interesting for a limited time. So, your blog called ‘Five ways to use Chat GPT for SEO in 2023’ might get the benefit of trending traffic for a while, but by 2024, it’s no longer nearly as appealing to click on. Even more the case if other people have written more comprehensive and up to date content on a similar subject in the meantime.

Updating a piece to include more recent stats, examples, events and references, especially on a subject where things move really quickly, means that you can change the title if needed (but don’t change the URL), and even the meta description, to reflect the new information you’ve added and ensure it looks current if seen in search results and when people land on the page.

At the same time, check whether any links in the content to external websites are still active and relevant and if there are better places now available to link to, you can change them. Check that internal links on the page are also as relevant and helpful as possible, using descriptive anchor text. Also check that there are other pages on your site linking to this content, where relevant, using anchor text that relates to your primary keyword.

3.     Update the underperforming content

The extent and nature of the updates you need to make will have been outlined by your manual review of the quality and relevance of the piece as outlined in the previous step, along with the essential SEO principles. It could be extensive changes that are needed, such as a total rewrite. However, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to build on what is already there to make it into a much more engaging and helpful piece, which delivers a good experience for the visitor and directly answers or responds to a specific need of theirs.

Making your content the best possible resource on the given subject can take time, but usually not nearly as much time as starting from scratch. Make sure that the updated content meets all of the criteria for Google’s Helpful Content Update.

4.     Republish, spread the word and monitor results

It’s important not to change the URL when you update a piece of content. The existing URL has been live for a while and has been indexed by search engines, may well be ranking for some relevant terms already and may even have links pointing to it from other websites. That said, you may want to update the page title and/or H1 and indicate that the content has recently been updated.

There are various thoughts in the SEO industry about whether to update the publish date on a blog post if you update it. If you see a page of search engine results, it’s natural for the user to click on results that show more recent publish dates. If you make substantial changes to a piece of content, it makes sense to acknowledge that it’s been updated and on what date, as this information could be of importance to potential readers. The decision is ultimately down to you. At No Brainer, we will usually keep the original publish date but ensure that it’s made clear that the page content was updated on a specific date.

While the likelihood is that the vast majority of your updated content visitors will come from pure organic search, it does absolutely no harm at all to spread the word that your content is a new and improved version. Sharing to your social media followers or including a link to your updated content in email newsletters to your subscribers can help more people to see it and can even attract links.

Keeping track of when the updated piece was published will give you plenty of before vs after data in the future, and using the same metrics as you used to determine whether the content needed improving in the first place can help show how much better performance is.

Updating content isn’t usually a once and done process. It can be an ongoing way of ensuring that your SEO performance is bringing in the best possible return and content can and should evolve over time to meet the needs of your evolving audience. Some elements are likely to stay evergreen, but some of the details are likely to change somewhat, so keeping pace with this is essential for continued relevance.

If you’d like help with your content marketing and SEO strategy, we’d love to discuss how we can work together. Get in touch using the form below.

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We look at some of the key areas that can help achieve the best possible results and return on financial services marketing activity.

Understanding audience needs and challenges

As with any marketing activity, having a clear understanding of these things is fundamental before you start work:

• Who the content is for
• What the audience’s need or challenge your content is trying to help with or resolve
• The outcome(s) that you want the content to achieve with your audience

Knowing your customers and their user journey when it comes to looking for financial products and services like yours is the foundation that everything in your marketing strategy should be built upon, so getting this right is key.

A really useful exercise is to map out every stage of their journey in terms of what your audience might search for information on (keyword research), what questions they might want answering and what barriers there might be to making a buying decision.

You may have several different important customer segments who all have slightly different journeys and informational needs, but spending time on getting this as accurate as possible now will absolutely pay off later, with much more targeted and intentional content activity being planned and implemented.

Using Google’s YMYL and E-E-A-T principles for content planning

Google certainly loves an acronym!

YMYL is ‘your money, your life’ and refers to topics that could have an impact on readers’ financial stability, health and wellbeing, which Google can treat differently when it comes to the way they rank web pages in their results.

Their full Quality Rater Guidelines outlines whether content falls under YMYL or not, but also says that if someone would seek experts on this topic to prevent harm, and inaccurate information could potentially cause harm, it’s likely to be considered YMYL. Financial services content can certainly fall into this camp.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, which should be the pillars of all online content for a financial services brand (and across all sectors). While ensuring your content follows E-E-A-T principles isn’t a ranking factor in itself, it helps Google to determine whether a page is high-quality and therefore worthy of ranking well for relevant searches.

Bearing these two sets of principles in mind, along with other SEO best practice, when planning and creating content can help ensure that the foundations are right in order to achieve the best possible organic rankings, along with making sure that other SEO fundamentals are followed.

Building trust through credible, expert-led content

While of course the way that content appears to search engines is important, it’s even more important that it sends the right information and communicates appropriate messages to potential customers.

By positioning your brand content as expert and ensuring it comes across as credible, you’ll build trust with your audience and they’ll be more likely to convert as a result.

There are many ways to do this, but some of the most critical are by giving specific pieces of content authorship details. The author of a piece of content should have the necessary experience and/or qualifications, as well as deep knowledge on the topic, to be seen as an expert in that subject.

As well as the previously mentioned Google guidelines to help measure content quality, another guest at the content party is their 2022 Helpful Content Update. This was an algorithmic update that provides some criteria by which the search engine deems content to be worth ranking well.

Ensuring that the individuals writing your content adhere to these guidelines can be a challenge, but it’s always worth briefing in these factors in to subject matter experts and checking the content they produce against them before publishing.

Demonstrating thought leadership

Going hand in hand with subject expertise is thought leadership content.

In the financial services sector, becoming a go-to for the media on certain subjects can be an invaluable boon for marketing success and brand awareness. Providing expert comments on relevant current events, or even TV and radio interviews on some financial matters, isn’t out of reach for any financial services brand.

A good starting point for this is to build thought leadership content on the brand website first, whilst also making the most of any opportunities for guest posting on reputable trade industry websites and relevant interviews or podcast appearances. A good agency that provides an expert media relations service can help to facilitate this and build a thought leadership brand alongside the company brand.

Get trust signals front and centre on content and branding

We’ve already mentioned how important trust is with the financial services sector. Potential customers need to trust that you’ll deliver what you say you will in order for them to convert, and many trust signals are not things they might consciously notice.

Simple steps such as the below can make a big difference to how your content is perceived and trusted:

• Adding customer testimonials to online content
• Adding independent review star ratings to key places in content e.g. Trustpilot star ratings in images or prominently on landing pages
• Adding branding to all your visual content so it’s clear that you created it
• Adding any recognisable industry affiliation badges to online content e.g. showing that you are FCA authorised

Appearing professional doesn’t mean you can’t have and communicate brand personality

Due to the regulatory requirements for the sector, financial services brands are often very conservative when it comes to their brand voice and the tone used in their content. While communicating in a professional manner is important to help build trust, applying this to all content and marketing tone can mean it’s hard for any personality to come through at all, which can limit your ability to stand out and be memorable to potential customers.

Finding the right balance so that you have a clearly identifiable brand personality, but still maintaining the essential factors that indicate you can be trusted, can be a challenge, but it’s not impossible.

A great, and rather extreme, example of this is the life insurance brand, Dead Happy. Taking a subject and financial product that most people don’t really want to think or talk about and building a brand around looking at it in a different way is bold, but has really worked for them.

You don’t necessarily need to take things that far, but it’s proof that being FCA regulated doesn’t mean that having a brand personality isn’t an option.

Having clear comprehensive guidelines for content that complies with regulations

‘Compliance’ is a word that strikes fear into the hearts of content creators and marketers in the financial services industry, but many of the redrafts and amendments that end up having to be done can be avoided if the groundwork is done first with a robust set of guidelines that all content needs to stick to.

More than just some brand guidelines, a full comprehensive guide can incorporate a wide range of different examples, along with dos and don’ts, to make it clear what is compliant and what isn’t for content creation purposes. In such a heavily regulated industry, getting things right first time can save a significant amount of time and resource.

Being sensitive to the current economic situation

The UK is currently going through some very challenging times that are expected to continue for the foreseeable future, with most of the population feeling the squeeze to some degree or another.

Regardless of whether your target audience is likely to be significantly affected by this, it’s important for brands to ‘read the room’ and take into account that financial topics can be a sensitive subject at the moment.

Some of the measures to take could include:

• Being empathetic (but not patronising) in marketing messaging and advertising
• Being transparent with customers if your own pricing model needs to change

See more marketing advice for brands during the cost-of-living crisis.

While content marketing in the financial services sector can have challenges, with some planning and a strong strategy in place, it can be a highly effective way to drive more relevant traffic and conversions, working in combination with other channels such as SEO, digital PR and social media.

If you’re a financial services brand and want to know how we can help your business grow, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch using the form below.

The post Eight key content marketing tips for financial service brands in 2023 appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

It’s not just coming up with ideas themselves that can feel like swimming through treacle sometimes, it’s coming up with ideas that meet a specific defined audience need, have ecommerce SEO potential, can contribute to sales and tie in with your wider marketing aims that can feel out of reach at times. There are lots of areas to consider if you want to create the most effective content possible.

We’ve put together some quick and easy-to implement tips to help you get your ecommerce content idea mojo back as soon as possible.

Look at current high-performance content for some inspo

What’s the most popular blog on your ecommerce website or what’s the most successful piece of campaign content you have created? Take a look at it again and ask yourself these questions:

• Why does it work? (For example, review the structure (MS Clarity or HotJar can help inform this), note the length and depth of content, how many images does it have – and are there any trends that can be taken away i.e., are they people-focused?)
• If you were to create it again, what would you do differently or how could you make it even better?
• Can any of this content be reimagined for your purposes now? E.g. if it works well as a blog post, could it work even better as a video? Or is any of the information now a bit old? Could you update it to make it more relevant to today’s audience?
• How it’s driving traffic, and what is it ranking for on organic search (and how that then aligns with its structure)

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel if you have some content already that can be built on, used again or improved.

If your new content needs to be a totally different topic, you can still take inspiration from the ways in which the successful piece seems to resonate with the audience and incorporate the same principles into your next content idea.

Look at other people’s great content for even more inspo

You’ve looked at your own good content, but what about pieces or campaigns you’ve seen that are done by someone else, even outside of your ecommerce niche? If you can’t think of any that you’ve stumbled across recently, try searching for ‘best examples of ….’ And see what you find.

Ask the same questions as you did for your own content – try to work out why it’s successful and how it could potentially be done in a different way to be even better. Besides doing a quick Google, using tools like BuzzSumo or Semrush can help identify and drill into top performing content.

Obviously, you can’t simply steal someone else’s work – but you can be inspired by it and use this to spark your own ideas and how you can offer uniqueness and added value. You always need to bear Google’s Helpful Content Update in mind and make sure that new content you develop meets these guidelines.

Get a change of scenery

Whether you’re working at home, in an office or elsewhere, sometimes your lack of inspiration for content ideas can be somewhat tied to the place where you are. Getting a change of scenery can often be all that’s needed to gain a fresh perspective on things.

It might mean going for a quick walk, especially if you can escape to a green space, looking up at things around you or even looking at an interesting skyline or building if you’re in an urban area. Ten minutes of people watching in a busy shopping street can lead to some new inspiration.

It might mean going to sit in a café for half an hour with a notebook and not using the internet at all for a while. Even a change of room or desk can make a difference and start things moving again creatively if you’re limited to where you can go.

Look to your customers for topic inspiration

The whole point of content marketing is meeting an audience need through content, so going back to your customers for ideas can be a good place to start.

This probably won’t mean personally ringing them up for a chat, but is much more likely to involve seeing what they are asking or saying about you on social media, through review sites or on customer feedback forms. Social listening tools are great for this, as well as checking out top review sites like Trustpilot.

If people are complaining about something, is there a piece or even series of content you can produce to alleviate this problem? If they are happy about something, is there an educational piece you can create about it to help spread the word about your brand and products?

Find someone to help you brainstorm new ideas

If you’re working on your own and could do with someone else’s input, finding another head or two to put together could make all the difference.

This might be over video call if you’re working remotely, over a chat engine if a call isn’t possible or in person if you can. Just 10 minutes of throwing some ideas around between you can be enough to spark something that gets you enthused.

Tip: Ensure you’re armed with all the facts and data, as well as the objective of your meeting, and a brief agenda to make it as productive as possible.

Write in whatever order works best for you

Content creators sometimes get a bit stuck on the narrative arc or spend fairly ridiculous amounts of time working on an introduction, when it would actually be more effective to write the middle bit first, then worry about the rest later. The idea you’ll most likely be excited about isn’t usually the intro – it’s the crux of the piece, so start with that and come back to everything else.

That said, others might work best when they plan out a piece in order first. The key is understanding what works for you as an individual and going with it.

It might take a while of trying different methods to get there, but it’ll mean much more effective content creation in the future once you get a good grasp on the processes that help you deliver your best work.

Once you have some ideas…

Do a quick sense check exercise on your favourite ideas before investing any more time into them

Using a content brief template to run a quick sense check can be a great way to ensure your idea has all of the elements and angles needed to be effective as part of your content plan and wider marketing strategy, without needing to go into all the details at this point.

Are there relevant intent-led keywords with any volume that your target audience are likely to use? What point of the buyer journey will it be? How can different channels use this content, or another form of it, to amplify it as much as possible?

Running your ideas past someone else can also be really useful at this stage, but keep it brief and top line so you don’t spend ages going over the nitty gritty when it’s not necessary right now.

Start creating. Don’t put pressure on yourself to get it spot-on first time. You can always refine things later on but the sooner you get started on it, the easier it usually becomes to see what needs improvement.

If you’d like some help with your content marketing strategy or any creative marketing or PR campaign, our team would love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.

The post How to overcome ecommerce content marketer’s block appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

You need to understand which parts of your strategy are performing well on a granular level and which might need some improvement, and various stakeholders will need to know not only the top line stats and facts, but will also often require accompanying insight so that the information is meaningful to them too.

Getting your SEO services reporting right can be tricky at the best of times, and never more so than when updating the C-suite (CEOs, CFOs, CMOs and CTOs etc.) with the information they need to know. With such a highly measurable marketing channel as SEO, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of metrics that you could potentially report on, but too much information can be worse than not enough.

When reporting to the C-suite specifically, you’ll need to include only the data, insight and context that is meaningful to them in their role, which will enable them to make future business decisions and strategy based on what you provide.

Getting buy in for SEO in the first place is one thing, but ensuring that the company board/executives understand the value of the channel on an ongoing basis through your reports is quite another.

In this article, we look at some of the challenges that SEO professionals face with reporting SEO to the C-suite and how to overcome them.

Determining the key metrics that matter to your C-suite

One of the main issues when reporting on SEO to the C-suite is that not everyone will have the same level of existing knowledge and understanding of SEO and other digital marketing channels.

They work together towards business goals but the kind of results that make you happy as a marketing professional might not have the same impact on them. Asking them what they want to know doesn’t always work either. If they don’t have a good working knowledge of SEO, they might not realise the impact potential that the channel has, so it’s often just down to you to discover the most important information to communicate in your reports and it might take a few tweaks before you get to a place where everyone is getting what they need from you.

While the nature of your business will play a major role in the metrics that really matter in your individual situation, we’ve summarised some key areas that can be very beneficial to report on to business executives, including:

1. The revenue driven by SEO

The ROI (Return On Investment) of SEO is something that is always going to be the most important consideration for some of the C-suite.

How the revenue driven by organic traffic (Direct as well as Assisted Conversions) compares to the money outlaid on this channel activity is of course an essential area to report on.

This information obviously needs to be communicated alongside a commentary and with wider context of the strategy, as every SEO knows that results don’t come overnight. It’s not realistic to expect organic revenue to increase from day one of an SEO strategy being implemented – but managing expectations and having a growth forecast in your report that you can start to measure revenue against can be a good way to show that progress is being made from the first few months onwards.

2. The impact of SEO on brand awareness and online visibility

While organic revenue is usually the most important thing to the C-suite, it isn’t the only benefit of SEO by any stretch of the imagination.

Ensuring that you also report on metrics that show brand visibility and awareness growth can also show some of the additional value that SEO adds to the marketing mix.

Frustratingly, brand awareness isn’t as straightforward to measure as many aspects of digital marketing, but some of the areas to track that tend to correlate with more people knowing about the brand include:

• Look in Google Search Console at the ‘brand’ keywords being used. The number of different keywords being used as well as the impressions and clicks produced by these searches can be a good indicator of more people taking an active interest in your brand.
• Look out for direct traffic growth shown in your analytics platform. This can show if the number of people going directly to your site via their browser rather than using a search or clicking on an add etc. is increasing over time alongside your SEO activity.
• Look at referral traffic too. If more people are clicking through from links on other sites then this often correlates with more people being aware of and trusting your brand enough to do so.
• Check the link profile of your site for new links earned that you haven’t specifically targeted as part of your SEO or Digital PR People deciding to link to your site and mentioning your brand even if you haven’t had any contact with them can be a good indication that your influence and authority is growing. Of course, these types of links gained can also be a performance indicator for organic search and content marketing too, if they found the content that they linked to through using a search engine.
• You can also look at Google Trends to see if there has been an uplift in searches

3. How the SEO strategy is engaging your target audience(s)

It’s important to develop a SEO strategy that takes the full user journey into account and how their searches change over time as their intent also evolves.

Including information about performance broken down by journey stage (search intent) in your reports can be a great way to highlight the importance of each step along the path towards conversion and the role that plays in the eventual return.

You can do this by grouping same-stage content in your analytics platform to see how searchers are engaging with it and whether it’s successfully moving people onto the next stage. By segmenting organic traffic into groups that reflect your audience personas (using Google Analytics, as an example), you can analyse and report on their on-site behaviour, as well as looking at attribution and the role that organic search plays along with other channels, all within the context of the people you’re trying to reach because they are the most likely to convert.

C-suite executives don’t just care about current performance, they are also always looking into ways to grow the business in the future and other opportunities to take things forward.

Ensuring that your reporting is segmented can not only show performance for your current target, it can also give early warnings if your market evolves or responds to trends.

4. How SEO is working with the other marketing channels

SEO has often lived in its own silo in many businesses, but the reality is that it can play a huge role in multiple channels and contribute to the wider success of the business.

As an SEO professional, reporting on this can help back up the importance of SEO in the whole mix, and illustrate how working with a joined-up strategy across channels can give a better ROI than if they all work in isolation.

Some of the areas you can report on include:

• How SEO and PPC are working together to dominate top positions for key search terms (you can also show efficiencies made between the two channels to help demonstrate improving ROI)
• Any backlinks gained from SEO plans that include digital PR activity
• How PR activity incorporates organic optimisation e.g. an optimised landing page for a campaign report
• How content created has delivered SEO results alongside social media engagement and email campaign conversions

Other elements to consider including in your C-suite reports

Most regular SEO reports will also need to include a very top line overview things including:

• The SEO activity carried out since the last report and what the objectives for this was/is (and how this related to business goals)
• Results of this recent activity
• Results that continue to come in from previous activity (reiterating that SEO is a long-term strategy that continues to add value and snowball over time)
• Technical SEO progress that has been made e.g. site speed improvements made (and the impact this has had on results)
• Recommendations for future SEO activity and how that relates to the company’s goals

Platforms or tools used in SEO C-suite reporting

The best format of your SEO reports for the C-suite can be difficult to pin down because you’re trying to please several different people with different views on what is most important.

However, it’s always essential that any data should be presented along with insight or commentary so that everything in it ties back to the bigger picture of the success of the business, rather than being taken in isolation.

A great tool for this is Google Looker Studio (GLS) – previousl “Data Studio”, which enables you to take data from lots of different sources and add a combination of results visuals and text, along with things like presentation slides if you need them to give further explanation.

It provides elements of automation (many reports will use live data and update automatically) but always needs to be sense-checked and for fresh analysis and insight to be provided every time a new report is to be presented. It’s a great way of pulling everything together, presenting meaningful data and developing a ‘single source of truth’ for the business.

Keeping your surface reports simple and top-line is important, but enabling executives from the C-suite to dig further into the results that they are interested in can also be very useful, which is another thing that GDS does really well.

You will want to customise your report to your needs, but a good place to start if you don’t have an existing GDS report to tweak, is to use a template like this one from Semrush. Always keep in mind the audience for this report – you know them better than we do! What format and communication methods will best keep them engaged so that they take in the important information?

If you found this article useful, you might want to take a look at our blog on what to include in SEO reports and essential KPIs for measuring ecommerce SEO performance.

If you’re looking for help with your SEO strategy, get in touch using the form below.

The post The Best SEO Reporting Solution for the C-Suite appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

The popularity of Black Friday sales has dropped significantly in recent years, with many industry watchers having said that Black Friday has been losing its relevance with shoppers. Spending across the UK is estimated to drop by more than £850 million (18%) this year.

But why is this happening? Is the rise of e-commerce to blame for the demise of Black Friday, or is there another cause to blame?

The Decline of Black Friday

New research conducted by Finder reveals that Brits are predicted to spend an average of £189.59 per person across Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year. This figure shows a 31% reduction from 2021, where shoppers spent an average of £275 per person. Overall, Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending in the UK is estimated to decrease from £6 billion in 2020 and £4.8 billion in 2021 to just £3.9 billion in 2022.

In 2022, 46% of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers have said they intend to make their purchases online only, while just 10% will shop in store exclusively. Despite this, the average spend of those shopping in-store is expected to be higher than those online, with in-store shopping set to reach approximately £174 per person, compared to £167 per person online.

In-store spending has dropped significantly this year compared to last, with the average shopper spending around £96 less. This represents a 36% decrease from 2021, where the average in-store shopper was expected to spend around £270 each. Online-only shoppers have also reduced their spending this year by 19%, with the average online shopper spending around £40 less online than they would have in 2021 (£207).

Shopping Trends

Searches for Black Friday by the million across the past 5 years.

The data shows that after 2018, searches for Black Friday are more prevalent between October and November than November to December. We can also see a huge decrease in searches since 2018.

Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is a marketing term for e-commerce transactions that occur on the Monday after Black Friday and was created by retailers as an incentive to encourage more people to shop online.

This chart provided by Google Trends displays the difference between Black Friday searches and Cyber Monday searches. From this graph we can see while searches for Black Friday (blue) have decreased drastically in the last few short years, Cyber Monday (red) sales have never reached a comparable number of searches as Black Friday. This data suggests that searches for e-commerce are an unlikely opponent for those of Black Friday.

Marketing Tactics

There are many brands who participate in Black Friday in their own unique way. In 2021, Pretty Little Thing put their own spin on Black Friday, creating ‘Pink Friday’ – a content marketing strategy that lasted weeks running up to Christmas rather than just the one day. At various points, the retailer was noted selling clothes less than £1. Needless to say, the promotion was a huge success for sales.

Amazon is the world’s biggest e-commerce retailer and unsurprisingly, storms the Black Friday supremacy. Known as the unofficial ‘King of Black Friday’, Amazon reigns over Black Friday every year with amazing sales, deals that run for eight consecutive days, and impressive bundles. In fact, it was Amazon that introduced Black Friday to the UK, integrating the holiday to the British retail scene.

How to stand out

With so many brands participating in Black Friday campaigns, retailers must create an eye-catching and unique promo code. River Island stepped up to the mark by creating an attractive and colourful deign. On top of discounts on products, the retailer also offered free delivery on orders over £75. The offer of free delivery encourages the consumer to make additional purchases they might not have made to qualify for services like free delivery.

Last year, Zaful implemented many marketing strategies when facing the Black Friday holiday, and to great effect. Offering promo codes, conditional discounts, and an additional discount for students. Offering several discounts at various price points created a dynamic where the consumer felt as though they had many opportunities to save money, and therefore created a longer overall engagement time with the company’s site.

What do the experts think?

When considering whether Black Friday is still a noteworthy occasion or has in fact been made redundant, we wanted an expert’s opinion. We spoke to Chris Slade, expert consultant at Wunderman Thompson Commerce.

“While the cost-of-living crisis and the expected recession are likely to make this Black Friday a more muted affair than years past, it is far from redundant, and retailers should prepare to see a lift in traffic and sales. End of year peak shopping is always an eagerly anticipated period for shoppers looking to splurge – whether that’s on items they’ve been putting off buying due to financial pressures or gifts for the holiday season.

“Providing real ‘value’ will be a major theme this year, and retailers will need to emphasise how deals and offers can save them money if they are to tempt more cautious shoppers. Price competition will be a factor as well, with the expectation of more ‘last chance’ and ‘limited stock’ deals aimed at triggering purchases through ‘shopping FOMO’.

To better understand Black Friday from a retailer’s perspective and discover how they will be engaging with the holiday, we spoke to Liz McGreevy, Co-founder of sustainable fashion brand Re_Threads.

“We at Re_Threads will be opting out of Black Friday, instead looking to honour the craft that has gone into our products and the message we portray, which is to invest in quality to buy less.”

“Our feelings are people having less money due to the cost of living will be a reason to harness the offerings of Black Friday. But brands will look to those who are looking to do things differently, those looking to give back, instead of taking, and those investing in quality long lasting products to help reduce their carbon footprint.”

“The cost-of-living crisis paired with the environmental crisis we are facing as a planet; it feels like the Black Friday concept is the antithesis of where we should be heading as both a business and also as stewards of our planet.”

The popularity of Black Friday has been on a downward trajectory since 2019 and is estimated to continue to decline. Although Black Friday is no longer as popular as it once was, it could still be considered ‘a thing’ with a high online engagement rate and predictions for spending. Despite the fall of Black Friday, the traditional holiday has seen triumph over searches for Cyber Monday.

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