SpeedieConsulting

1 A Company Blog

A blog is a great way to quickly and easily get your message out there or to respond to key trends in the marketplace. Using a Blog platform can allow anyone to post content from within your organisation. Best of all, the most popular blogging platforms are free to use. We always recommend Wordpress as it is heavily supported by a host of developers and programmers. Using a blog can also allow you to automate some of your other social marketing activities such as sharing your knowledge on the major social sites such as Ecademy, Linkedin, and Facebook.

2 A Forum

A forum on your site allows your visitors to pose questions, interact and share their experiences. It may be that the forum is only open to clients but a forum can add real value to your site and keep people coming back again and again. You can use a forum as a support section on your site.

3 A Newsletter

Sending out monthly or weekly content to your clients is a great way to keep them informed and educated, not only about your business and products but also about how they can be saving money or investing. The focus here is on two things. One to educate your clients and secondly to get them back to your site to complete a new business enquiry form.

4. More Content

Adding more content is a great way to attract back clients and be a magnet for new visitors. The fresher and more up to date your website is, the more likely the major search engines will revisit and therefore will give you more opportunity to attract business. Ideas for new site content includes: Guides, Articles, News, FAQs, Interviews and more…

5. Online Tools

With the Internet has come the love of online tools. People love online calculators and quote engines and such like. In fact, it seems to be that in the finance and insurance world, it is a given that visitors expect to see such tools.

Tools such as savings calculators and mortgage affordability calculators are great tools to educate site visitors on what they can afford or at the very least give them a ballpark figure which you can use to work with once they get in touch.

Summary

The five elements above are all low cost options that can either be bought in or developed in house. Each element can work in isolation or in combination but each has a proven track record online for driving more traffic to a website. Maybe under the current economic climate, companies should focus more on developing their existing websites and enhancing these as a marketing budget cost rather than spending on the more expensive advertising options.

A new service goes live today that offers those in the finance and insurance sector a constant stream of content for their websites, blogs, and newsletters at a price to suit all budgets. Many websites lack content and this is one of that major keys to driving more traffic and business on the Internet.

Costing just £60 for 30 articles a month, this new limited subscription service provides a range of monthly articles which can be used by insurance and mortgage brokers, and financial advisers to populate their websites with quality content which in turn will help generate more traffic.

A free ‘taster’ ten samples of content are available at: www.thecontent.co.uk

Jason Hulott, director of Speedie Consultants, the finance and insurance content provider, says: “The new service is a fantastic way for the small broker to level the playing field and be able to compete online. By leveraging a limited membership and an online delivery system we are able to reduce the individual cost to the broker.”

He adds: “We are excited about this new service as it means that we can now provide our content service to a larger number of companies who want to drive more business to their website. This service allows companies to add quality content however they like. It also provides them with enough content to build a blog or provide a newsletter for their clients.”

The membership – which is open to 50 clients only in order to keep the content exclusive – comes complete with several marketing and promotion guides.

For more information visit: www.thecontent.co.uk

Micro sites or mini sites are a good way to take a profitable offshoot of your main business and build a totally focused site of around 5 – 10 pages.

What are the benefits of this? Well micro sites allow you to branch out and create something totally focussed on a single topic. For example , an IFA website could include Pensions, Investments and Insurance products. On one site it will be difficult to rank highly for all three easily.

Yet a single site on Life Insurance could help attract more traffic and rankings. It also gives you two bites of the cherry when it comes to web rankings. We have clients that have multiple page one rankings both for their main website and their microsite.

And with the popularity of Content management systems such as Wordpress, it is easy to create a second or even multiple mini sites for your business. Simply register more domain names and add a second web host, and away you go.

Instead of cutting marketing spend, lots of companies are reducing their Pay Per Click budgets and investing in Virtual Real Estate (VRE) by building a range of targeted themed mini sites. In this way they are investing their marketing spend in the future not just the right now.

Why not enquire of your webs designers or web marketing company what it would cost to build a series of mini sites?

It could be just the thing to separate your from your competition. Need ideas for mini sites. They could be product specific (a critical illness website), geographic (Kent IFA website) or even profession based (Pensions for Teachers).

Hopefully this will give you a kick-start for thinking about what you can do. And once it is build, start incorporating some of the marketing techniques you will be using for your main website. You can find a ton of them here: Wake up Your Website

Having microsites is a great way to build up your companies VRE and drive more traffic. The cost upfront is offset by the fact that once build and marketed, you have something driving you traffic for as long as you like.

Good luck!

Content writing is still one of the major part of what we do and I am always surprised when new clients first get involved with us that we see a distinct lack of new content being added to their websites. Some of it hasn’t changed in years!

It is almost as if the activity stops when the site gets uploaded for the first time.  Now some of this is due to the age old “our web designers have gone and we can’t update the website ourselves” chestnut.  Other reasons include the fact that no one was told that fresh constantly updating content would be needed so no content management systems were needed.  Hey it keeps the costs down. But when you look at the responsibility of a corporate website, whose job is it to look at the content.

It normally falls to the SEO company that  goes in when the website owners start to realise that they are not getting any traffic or exposure.  The SEO company then says the immortal words , “well you need more site content”.  They then go on to say that they need a CMS to be able to manage and add content.

Oh if we had only known this before!  Well now you do.

Adding Content to a site is like adding another sales man to the sales team.  The more unique content you have on your site, the more chances or opportunities you have to get that page listed in the search engines.  Once done, you can then move on to the next piece of content, happy that the content you added yesterday will work for you as long as it is online.

Compared to PPC, Content marketing is a pay once, potentially drive traffic forever solution.  In fact, we are seeing this influx of new customers as they look to  build more lasting sources of traffic that offer a better ROI in the long term.  PPC is a great testing platform, or good in the finance and insurance space if you have deep pockets but for the average broker it can get quite expensive.

If you are finding it tough going at the moment with your ad spend, maybe divert some of it to adding more content to your site or even build a few targeted mini sites.  These are easy to do and using a platform such as Wordpress or Joomla, you can have a great functioning content management system with all the bells and whistles you need.  What’s more they are free open source solutions- so cost won’t be a factor!