Dani Barnes | Learn with Bigg

Digital Marketing

What Are The Best Strategies for B2B Marketing?

Marketing your products or services to other businesses is no easy task. While we are all familiar with the experience of being marketed to as a consumer, which in theory gives us the knowledge to effectively market to other organisations, the reality is that selling to businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C) are two very different processes.

If you’re new to the B2B marketing space, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed while you’re still learning the ropes. Fear not, however, as in this blog we’ll help you get to grips with all of the B2B basics, and before you know it you’ll be crafting effective campaigns for your business.

B2B Marketing: What’s It All About?

B2B simply stands for “business-to-business”, which is a form of marketing in which businesses sell products and services to other businesses, rather than to customers (this is referred to as B2C marketing instead, which we touch on below).

The purpose of B2B marketing is to make other businesses aware of your brand name, as well as the value of your product or service, to convert them into customers. There are, as we’ll explore in this blog, a vast number of ways that this can be achieved.

B2B Vs. B2C Marketing

As mentioned above, B2B and B2C marketing are extremely different, from their strategies to their audiences and how they interact with them. First up is B2B, which targets the needs, wants and problems faced by an individual who is purchasing something on behalf of a business. As a result, the business itself becomes the customer.

Some key examples of B2B marketing include:

A co-working space that hires out office spaces for remote working teams and freelancers.
A manufacturer attempting to market and sell their products to a distributor.
A digital marketing agency that offers paid advertising, content writing and other marketing services to businesses and organisations (like Bigg!).

B2C marketing, on the other hand, targets the needs, wants and problems faced by consumers who are making purchases for themselves.

Some examples of B2C marketing include:

A high street shop that sells clothing, shoes and accessories.
A music or entertainment platform that sells streaming subscriptions.
An e-commerce website that distributes products from manufacturers to customers.

For all of their differences, however, B2B and B2C still share certain traits, and some businesses even implement both strategies in a hybrid fashion to cater to a wide consumer base. For instance, Amazon is world-renowned for primarily serving the needs of the average customer, but they also have a B2B branch: Amazon Business.

On the flip side, wholesale retailers like Booker and Costco are designed to sell their products in bulk to other businesses (such as those in the hospitality sector), but in some instances can be used by individual customers for personal use.

B2B Vs. B2C Marketing

B2B MARKETING	B2C MARKETING
Targeted at other businesses	Targeted at everyday consumers
Informative content	Entertaining content
Smaller, niche audience	Wider audience
Uses industry jargon	Uses simplified language
Longer buying cycle	Shorter buying cycle

Key Strategies to Implement

Now that you’re clued up on the fundamentals of B2B marketing, it’s time to talk strategy. While some of the strategies we discuss below are considered preliminary steps, others are ready to be implemented straight away. Let’s dive in!

1. Identify Your Target Audience

All successful B2B marketing campaigns start with finding out who your customers are and what they’re looking for. After all, just because you’re offering a valuable product or service doesn’t automatically mean that patrons will flock to your business.

As such, you need to find out what drives the demand for your product or service and how you can stand apart from the competition. During this stage, you should be answering the following questions:

Who are you marketing to? What are their age and location demographics?
What are their pain points and how can your business solve them?
Is your audience similar across the board, or do they fall into various niches?
Do they differ from the companies your competitors target? Why?
Where can they be reached – both on and offline?

To know exactly how to sell to your audience, your B2B marketing should be centred around an in-depth profile of the people you’re marketing to.

2. Run a Competitive Analysis

An SEO competitor analysis can be a powerful tool for deciding which marketing strategies to prioritise in a B2B campaign. Use this process to scope out which businesses are also targeting your audience and what they’re currently doing to reel in customers.

You may want to identify the following:

Do they have a website that is friendly for both desktop and mobile users?
Do they have a social media presence? If so, which channels?
What are their product offerings, and what sales tactics are they using to sell them?

Gaining an overview of these points will give you a better idea of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses and the threats they pose. Once you understand the space they occupy on the market, you’ll be better equipped to compete with them.

3. Leverage SEO Keywords

Prospective B2B buyers need to make sure that they’re making informed decisions and tend to conduct heavy online research as a result. Because of this, having organic content that ranks highly at every stage of their buyer’s journey is a big deal. Otherwise, you may run the risk of not even being considered as a potential vendor.

One way to improve your site’s ranking is to use content marketing on your website. Content marketing helps to position your business as an industry expert to both search engines and users, and has proven to be an invaluable tool for B2B businesses looking to drive organic search traffic.

By publishing educational, engaging content that highlights your products and services, you not only showcase your niche expertise but also help users make more informed decisions.

4. Invest in Paid Advertising

You should absolutely consider budgeting for a paid spend on social media and search engines as part of your B2B marketing strategy. If done correctly, these paid marketing services can work wonders for your ROI.

Learning to successfully advertise on social media means that you can target your audience on channels they already spend time on. After all, the decision-makers at the companies you’re marketing to are all human at the end of the day; it’s highly likely that many of them enjoy a social media scroll as much as the rest of us! As such, you can use the advanced features on today’s biggest channels to advertise to them.

Paid search also allows you to effectively reach your audience, but unlike organic search, it allows you to skip the queue’ and appear at the top of search results, without having to invest time in SEO. Instead, paid search presents your prospects with exactly what they’re looking for, at precisely the moment they’re looking for it.

5. Don’t Forget About Reviews and Testimonials

Amongst all of the more technical aspects of B2B marketing strategies, it’s important to not lose sight of the power of customer reviews and testimonials. These are invaluable resources for establishing credibility in the eyes of potential customers who need to know whether your products or services can meet their needs.

Reviews and testimonials can also play a part in aiding your digital marketing efforts, as they can be used to help your business outrank competitors and optimise your organic and paid ad click-through rates.

Let Bigg Design Your Next B2B Strategy

Bigg is a Bristol-based digital marketing agency, focusing on devising results-driven, innovative strategies for clients. Using a comprehensive range of digital marketing services – including paid advertising, SEO, content writing and more – we strive to grow your online presence and increase your profitability month by month.

If you’d like to benefit from expert advice from an agency with a track record of vastly improving clients’ rankings, get in touch with us today.

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Snap Fitness Enjoys Digital Gains with Bigg Strategy

Globally-renowned gym brand Snap Fitness achieved exponential growth on their online channels thanks to the digital marketing services of the team here at Bigg. To find out more about our process, keep reading!

The Client

Snap Fitness is a 24/7, results-driven gym brand with an emphasis on “feel good fitness”. With over 60 clubs open in the UK alone, as well as 2,000+ locations globally, it is regarded as one of the world’s premier fitness franchises.

Combining 24/7 access with flexible monthly contracts, bespoke personal training programmes, diverse equipment and a mood-boosting environment, it’s no surprise that in March of this year they reported a 17.15% increase in club members in the UK and Ireland since the beginning of 2022.

Bigg results for Snap Fitness Gym.

17.15% growth in club members

£0.75 CPC
An average cost per click of £0.75

6.30% CTR
Average click-through rate of 6.30%

115,000+ impressions
Consistent monthly impressions of 115,000+

380+ conversions pm
Consistently achieving 380+ conversions a month

The Brief

With 46% of fitness consumers now reported to be heavily influenced by social media when it comes to making choices regarding their physical wellbeing, it’s clear that businesses in this sector need to pay close attention to what’s trending online.

As such, when it came to devising a strategy for Snap Fitness that suitably responded to the increasingly digital nature of the health and fitness industry, we were tasked with the following challenges:

Generating a consistent stream of high-quality leads and online registrations on a monthly basis for Snap Fitness gyms across the UK.

Implementing focused pre-sale campaigns for forthcoming gyms, spanning across a three month period, with the objective of generating more than 1000 leads within a limited timeframe.

Boosting the volume of recurring monthly sign-ups, with special attention paid to gyms facing churn issues.

The Strategy

Utilising our full suite of digital marketing services, our team provided extensive support to achieve these aims.

Through engaging social content and community building, we drummed up excitement and anticipation for upcoming gym openings, which secured more pre-sale sign-ups.

Actively interacting with customers through various digital channels – taking the time to answer queries, concerns and feedback – also helped to enhance brand credibility.

Finally, we ensured that valuable and relevant content was shared on digital platforms to drive the brand’s position as an industry expert and thought leader in their sector.

Our work for MSG, a Snap Fitness franchise group, helped them to scale from 3 gyms to 25 across the UK through paid advertising and social media campaigns.

The Results

We are extremely pleased to report that our strategy has yielded the following results for Snap Fitness:

An average cost per conversion of £10.12
Consistently achieving 380+ conversions a month
An average click-through rate of 6.30% (to put this into perspective, the average Google CTR is 2.5%)
An average cost per click of £0.75
Consistent monthly impressions of 115,000+ across a UK-wide targeted audience radius around gym locations

We could not be happier about this recent success and want to thank Snap Fitness for choosing us to help grow their brand!

Snap Fitness Gyms. Paid ads. Google Ads & Social ads

Ask How Bigg Can Help You

If we can take anything from Snap Fitness’ latest triumphs, it’s that maintaining a consistent online presence with tailored content is the best way to maximise your profits and drive online traffic. At Bigg, we combine this principle with our digital marketing expertise to devise bespoke campaigns that get your business noticed by a wider audience.

Our client-base hails from a diverse range of industries – from health and fitness to technical services and lifestyle – so you can rest assured we have the tools at our disposal to generate growth no matter your background. Want to follow in Snap Fitness’ footsteps?

Get in touch to find out more about what we can do for your business.

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How to Create an SEO-Friendly Site Structure

If you’re preparing to launch a new site or would even just like to improve your existing one, there’s no understating the importance of creating a solid website structure from the get-go.

While this can seem like a daunting task, it is certainly one worth donating time and effort to. After all, the more organised and logical your site structure, the more likely you are to see great results in terms of user experience (UX) and search engine rankings.

In this helpful guide from our search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, you’ll learn exactly what “website structure” means, why it is so important for SEO, and how to achieve the ideal structure for your website. Let’s get started!

Understanding Website Structure

Before you can really understand how best to structure your website, you’ll need to get to grips with the basics of what “website structure” actually means and why it is so important for SEO.

What is Website Structure?

Website structure, sometimes referred to as site architecture or information architecture, is essentially the way in which a website’s content is organised, categorised and interconnected. It defines how the various parts of a website fit together to create a coherent and logical framework that is easy for its users to understand and operate.

A well-designed website doesn’t just benefit users, though – it also makes it easier for search engines to navigate through and understand a website’s pages and content. This means that websites with a clear and SEO-friendly structure tend to perform better in search engine results, leading to increased organic traffic and visibility.

Here is a simple example of how a website can be structured in line with best practices:

Website structure (architecture) example

The architecture of your website needs to be logical to allow search engine crawlers and human visitors to find what they’re looking for easily.

Key Components of a Website’s Structure

A website’s structure consists of various key components designed to help organise and present content in an easy-to-use and logical way. These significantly affect how both human users and search engines navigate their way through a website, so it’s important to get them right. Here are just a few of the essential elements:

Navigation Bar
Hierarchy
URL Structure
Categories and Tags
Breadcrumbs
Sitemaps
Internal Links

To learn more about what these components do, why they’re important and how to perfect them, keep reading!

The Importance of Website Structure for SEO

There are three main reasons why website structure is an important part of SEO.

The first and most obvious reason is that a well-planned structure hugely improves user experience. In fact, according to this report by CareerFoundry, 88% of online consumers claim that they’re less likely to return to a site that was confusing and difficult to navigate. By ensuring that your site provides a positive experience for users, you increase the chances that they will return to your site and maybe even become loyal customers.

A good site structure also makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index your site, which is the first step to ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPs). If the structure of your site doesn’t make sense, search engines might struggle to understand the purpose of individual pages and be unable to determine when and where they should appear in SERPs.

Lastly, by structuring your site well, you can ensure that similar pieces of content are distinguishable from one another and don’t compete with each other in SERPs. This is because users and crawl bots will be able to better understand how your site is organised and the intention behind each individual piece of content on it.

Best Practices for an SEO-Friendly Site Structure

In order to achieve an organised, logical and easy-to-understand site structure, you’ll need to follow a few SEO best practices. Let’s take a look at some of the key strategies to consider when designing and developing your site structure:

Plan, Plan, Plan

Before you actually start building your website, it’s vital that you take the time to plan how it will be structured. This involves organising your content logically and establishing how different pages and sections of your site relate to one another. Here are some of our pro tips to get you started:

Define Clear Categories and Subcategories – Break down your content into clear, well-defined categories and subcategories. For instance, if you run an online makeup store, your categories may be ‘Face’ and ‘Eyes’, while your subcategories could be ‘Foundations’, ‘Primers’, ‘Eyeliners’ and ‘Mascaras’.
Use Keyword Research – Conduct keyword research to identify relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for. These keywords should then be incorporated into your chosen categories and subcategories in a way that is appropriate for your content and audience.
Create a Hierarchical Structure – Develop a hierarchical structure, with the Homepage at the top, followed by primary categories, subcategories, and individual content pages. This will provide a clear path for users and search engines to follow.

Internal Links

As mentioned, internal linking is a crucial element of an SEO-friendly site structure, as they are what connects one page of your site to another. They serve several purposes, both for SEO and UX; to maximise results on both fronts, follow these tips:

Distribute Link Authority – Internal links help to distribute link authority throughout your website, which can help boost the search engine ranking of the linked page.
Use Descriptive Anchor Text – The text you use to link between pages (anchor text) should be descriptive and relevant to the content you’re linking to. Avoid generic phrases like “click here”.
Prioritise Important Pages – Add internal links to high-traffic and high-authority pages to direct users toward other important content, such as product pages, cornerstone blogs, or landing pages.
Create Contextual Links – Link naturally within your content, making sure the link’s context fits seamlessly with the topic. This provides maximum value to users and encourages them to actually click on the links.
Avoid Orphan Pages – Pages that don’t have any links pointing at them are called orphan pages. It’s important to avoid this, as search engines navigate through a site via its links , meaning any pages that aren’t linked will be very difficult for them to access and therefore are unlikely to rank.

Here is a diagram of how search engines discover pages to help you visualise how your site should be structured for SEO:

User-Friendly Navigation

An essential aspect of an SEO-friendly website structure is user-friendly navigation. Users should be able to easily find what they are looking for without getting lost, confused or frustrated. To achieve this, you need:

Intuitive Menu Design – Create navigation menus that are clear, intuitive, and prominently displayed. Menu items should have descriptive labels, and you should try to avoid complex dropdown menus if possible.
Limited Depth – Keep your navigation menus relatively shallow. In other words, users should be able to reach their desired destination within just a few clicks. Not only does this improve UX but also makes it easy for search engines to index your site content.

Optimised URLs

SEO-friendly URLs should be descriptive, contain keywords, and make it easier for search engines to understand a page’s content. Steer clear of URLs with excessive parameters or symbols (e.g. “?id=8375z”), as these can be confusing for users and unappealing to search engines. Opt instead for clear and descriptive URLs that contain target keywords, such as “website.com/site-structure-how-to-guide”.

Optimise your site’s URLs for SEO success

Mobile Responsiveness

As mentioned earlier, it’s important to ensure your site structure is mobile-friendly given that so many people now access websites on the go. This involves implementing a web design that adapts to different screen sizes and devices. Responsive sites tend to be prioritised by search engines, so this is a crucial step for achieving an SEO-friendly site structure.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can confuse search engines and limit the success of your SEO efforts. Ensure your site structure prevents duplicate content by implementing:

Canonical Tags – If you have similar content accessible through multiple URLs, you can use these to specify the preferred version of a page.
301 Redirects – You can redirect duplicate or outdated URLs to the correct page through 301 Redirects, consolidating ranking value and preventing duplicate content in the process.

Page Speed and Performance

Page speed is a crucial element of SEO and UX, so it’s important not to overlook it. Optimise your site structure for fast loading times by

Compressing images to reduce load times
Minimising HTML, CSS and Javascript files to reduce rendering times, and
Using Content Delivery Networks to distribute your site’s content across multiple servers.

Test your site speed with a free tool like Pingdom:

With a fast website, Google can crawl multiple pages at once. The longer they take to crawl your pages, the lower you’re likely to rank. Therefore, it’s important to test your site speed with a free tool like Pingdom.

Analytics and Monitoring

Our final pro tip for ensuring an effective site structure is to regularly monitor your website’s performance and your users’ behaviour using analytics tools like Google Analytics. The data provided by such tools can help to identify issues, opportunities and areas for improvement, which will subsequently offer both SEO and UX benefits.

Create a Site Structure That Succeeds With Bigg

As you’re now well aware, website structure has a huge impact on the success of your SEO efforts and plays an important role in UX too. It also directly affects how much traffic your site receives and your overall online success, so it’s certainly worth going the extra mile to get it right.

Ready to elevate your website’s performance and conquer the world of SEO? Choose Bigg as your trusted digital marketing partner, and let us transform your online presence with our wealth of SEO experience and knowledge.

At Bigg, we understand the vital role that an SEO-friendly site structure plays in driving traffic, improving user experience, and achieving higher search engine rankings. With years of expertise in the digital marketing landscape, we’re well-equipped to help you craft the perfect site structure that aligns with your business goals and objectives.

Don’t miss the opportunity to unlock your website’s full potential. Contact us today to get started on your journey to SEO success with Bigg. Your ideal site structure is just a click away!

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Benchmarks for E-Commerce Conversion Rates: Understanding Industry Standards

Launching an e-commerce store as an exciting side-hustle? Or perhaps you already have a thriving online e-commerce platform and want to see how you measure up to competitors?

Considering the sheer number of online shoppers, understanding your customer needs and how your platform stacks up against rivals is more crucial than ever.

Setting expectations and benchmarking e-commerce conversion rates is a fantastic way to understand industry standards in 2023 and beyond, so let Bigg guide you through the objectives to strive toward.

Significance in the E-Commerce Landscape

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely already asked the important questions: ‘What is a good e-commerce conversion rate?’ and ‘What does the conversion rate indicate?’- but the answers are far from simple.

In basic terms, businesses typically label actions that measurably impact their online business as ‘e-commerce conversions’.

This could represent a simple interaction (for example, each time someone shares their contact information) but, more often than not, it represents a transaction or an instance in which a product has been purchased.

These conversions are often used as key performance indicators to review the effectiveness of a site or individual page, with a funnel-based view of the conversion process (see below) being a great way to visualise the various steps a potential customer may take throughout.

E-commerce sales funnel stages

1. Awareness stage
2. Interest stage
3. Decision stage
4. Action/ Purchase stage
5. Retention / post-purchase stage

As you can see, the process is very rarely as simple as a prospective buyer immediately following up on their interest in a product or service; there are in fact several stages to navigate.

An Introduction to Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of measuring performance by comparing established results and data points, with e-commerce businesses using these helpful benchmarks to measure success through comparison.

Many online business owners set their performance based on industry benchmarks.

For example, if you’re attempting to sell to a market with a low overall conversion rate on average, a seemingly good conversion rate may still be lower than the average across all markets.

Ideally, your conversion rate will remain steady or even increase as you become more established. If it is low or suddenly drops, this could indicate a number of things, from offputting delivery costs to unenticing product pages.

Success Across the Board

Overall, across all markets and product types, average ecommerce conversion rates are universally accepted to be around 2.5% to 3%. That being said, if you aren’t yet reaching this figure, it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re failing. As a general rule, if your conversion rate sits below 0.5%, you likely have room to improve, and if it’s above 3.3%, you have a very good conversion rate indeed.

The fluctuation in averages between product types and markets can vary wildly, as demonstrated by this worldwide study hosted on Statista.

Observing data from the first quarter of 2023, conversion rates on e-commerce sites were typically highest in the food and beverage sector, at 3.1%. This stands in contrast to the conversion rate for businesses specialising in home furniture products – just 0.6% on average.

The proportion of e-commerce website visits that result in a purchase varies significantly amongst the demographics of website visitors too.

There is plenty of variation between devices, with visits conducted via desktop computers resulting in a noticeably higher conversion rate than those on tablet or on smartphone.

These variables prove that the idea of a universal benchmark for e-commerce conversion rates is a myth, though this isn’t to say you can’t compare against direct competitors selling similar products and services.

The Golden Standard

Most businesses measure their e-commerce conversion rate at regular intervals, and setting objectives to regularly review targets can help to understand trends.

Whereas weekly monitoring can help you to identify if there are any major dips or spikes that might indicate something on the site is broken, a quarterly review can open up opportunities to make larger strategic differences in the conversion rate. This can include rebranding, introducing fresh readable content or even redesigning the user experience altogether.

Observing conversion rates can prove increasingly useful as you break them down further, identifying different types of visitors. This may include, but certainly isn’t limited to, identifying groups with different intentions and different relationships with your site.

A first time visitor who has been directed to the site via social media may be less likely to purchase a product than an existing registered member of your site, for example, so it is important to make this distinction when browsing conversion stats.

Improving Conversion Rates

When looking to improve your conversion rate, it’s important to consider everything from traffic sources and product price points to purchase type and location when browsing customer conversion rates.

Average E-commerce conversion rates by channel/source

By doing this, you may very well spot a recurring trend that makes finding a solution much easier. Ultimately, a keen eye is required to truly optimise strategy, enhance the user experience and achieve greater success in your online ventures.

Increase the profitability of your e-commerce platform month-on-month with results-driven digital marketing from Bigg! Our experience working on such campaigns is just what you need to reach the right target audience and boost your conversion rate. With us, you stand the very best chance of online success.

If you’d like to arrange an initial chat with one of our experts, don’t hesitate to give us a call or email us at hello@bigg.co.uk. We’ll be happy to talk you through our services and identify the best course of action for your business!

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Mastering Content Optimisation: Unleashing the Power of Effective Content

Are you putting a lot of effort into your website’s content, but aren’t reaping the benefits you thought you’d be seeing? Chances are you’re not optimising it effectively.

It’s all well and good creating well-written, informative content, but in order to rank in results pages, engage customers and increase conversion rates then you need to approach your content in a formulaic way – we know this may sound unnatural, but trust us, it works!

So, what are the basic tips for content optimisation? We’ll walk you through them as we discuss the following:

How do you optimise content for SEO?
How do you optimise content for site visitors?
How and why you should measure the success of your content.

With our helpful tips, you can rest assured that you’ll be seeing better results in no time.

What is Content Optimisation?

Content optimisation is the process of refining and improving the content on your website so that it better achieves its desired goals.

For example, this could be you wanting blog posts to rank higher on Google results pages, to turn more site visitors into customers or to increase shares on social media.

There are three core elements that you should be looking to improve as part of your content optimisation:

Visibility
Engagement
Effectiveness

Why Content Optimisation is Important

Content optimisation is vital for achieving your wider marketing goals. This is predominantly because it allows you to better rank on Google results, which in turn will increase your visibility, position your brand as an authority, drive more traffic to your site and increase leads and sales.

SEO: How to Optimise Your Content for a Search Engine

Search engine optimisation, better known as SEO, and content marketing work hand in hand when it comes to improving your site’s ranking in the results page on Google and other search engines.

There are some key factors that influence how your web pages rank in these results pages that you should consider when generating content.

Integrate Keywords

Keywords are vital to content marketing. These are the words and terms that someone may type into the search bar of Google, which then provides results based on where these keywords turn up on web pages.

When it comes to choosing keywords (there are plenty of keyword research tools online that can help with this) and integrating these into your content, there are two things that you want to keep in mind: relevance and traffic potential.

Relevance

Not only do you want to use keywords that are relevant to your products and services, but you want to use them in a way that is relevant to users’ search intent.

The topics you cover in your content should answer the question or need that your audience is searching for, with your keywords acting as the semantic bridge between the two.

Traffic Potential

It’s all very well finding a keyword that you’ll rank high for, but if no one is searching for these terms then there won’t be enough traffic potential to lead people to your site.

You want to find the right balance between high traffic and low competition.

Your keyword strategy is an essential component.

Top Tip: Remember to naturally incorporate keywords throughout your page, including your title tag, meta description, headings and the main body of content - but don’t cram them in where they don’t make sense!

Create a Crawlable Structure

In short, crawling is the process whereby search engine bots quickly discern what content is on your page and its relevance to search queries in order to determine where to rank it on their results page.

Creating a clear structure helps these bots to understand your page, which you can do through the effective use of a title tag, meta description and headings.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first thing readers see when you show up on a results page, so should clearly summarise what your page is about and be written to the optimum character count.

As for headers, implementing these not only helps Google to understand what your content is about, but also helps with readability.

Add Internal & External Links

Internal links are links that take a user to another page on your website. The more of these you have, the easier Google can find, index and understand the pages on your site, thus improving your chances of ranking.

You should also include external links where possible, which link to a separate website that is high quality, relevant to your content, and reliable. Doing this means Google is more likely to view your own site as being relevant and trustworthy.

Engaging Your Audience: How to Optimise Your Content for Readability & Style

Create a Readable Structure

In order to keep the attention of your audience, you want to create content that is easy to scan and digest.

Being presented with long paragraphs with no variation in visuals is overwhelming and a sure way to scare readers off. Instead:

Use clear headers, subheadings and bullet points to break up your content.
Have distinguishable paragraphs and vary sentence lengths.
Adapt your tone depending on the content style (e.g. informative tone for product descriptions vs personal, informal tone for social media and blog posts).

Incorporate Visuals & Multimedia Elements

Another way to better engage your audience is through the use of impactful visuals.

You can achieve this by utilising different colours and fonts, including images (with optimised alt tags and file names) or by incorporating other multimedia elements, such as:

Infographics
Gifs
Videos
Audio (e.g. text-to-speech assistance)

Top Tip: Remember to include social media icons on your site that link to your relevant social pages!

Measuring the Success of Your Content with Analytics

Now that you know how to optimise your content, how can you go about measuring the success of your efforts?

Though content itself is considered qualitative, there are certain metrics that can be used to measure the success of your content marketing strategies, such as:

Ranking positions
Traffic sources
Impressions
Click-through rates
Shares and backlinks
Bounce rates
Keyword rankings

Measuring these is key for identifying where your content optimisation efforts are succeeding and where they can be improved.

There are various tools out there that can be used to stay on top of these metrics, with some of the most popular ones including Google Analytics, SEOquake and Semrush.

We understand that it’s hard to juggle your marketing goals whilst running a business – especially when it comes to something as specific and time-consuming as writing content for your website. That’s why we’re here to help at Bigg.

With a dedicated team of in-house content writers, we’re experts in creating and optimising content that delivers results. Let us help you meet your digital marketing goals and be part of the driving force behind your business’s success – get in touch with us today!

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2023 e-Commerce Trends: Insights from Industry Report

In today’s fast-evolving digital commerce landscape, where connectivity and fulfilment have reached new heights, the e-commerce industry is booming. In this blog, we’ll summarise our key industry report insights, focusing on the future of e-commerce and its potential impact on your business.

Key Insights for 2023

The UK currently holds the esteemed position of being the third-largest e-commerce market globally, and it’s estimated that British households will collectively spend a staggering £120 billion on e-commerce purchases in 2023. This doesn’t come as a surprise, given the surge in online shopping in recent years. With platforms like Google Shopping Ads, Instagram Ads and the emerging TikTok Shop, consumers can now enjoy a seamless and convenient shopping experience whether they’re at home or on the move.

British households will collectively spend £120 billion on eCommerce purchases in 2023

Consumer eCommerce now accounts for 30% of the total retail market in the UK (up from 20% in 2020),

In the UK eCommerce market, the number of users is expected to amount to 59.2m users by 2027.

So, what does this mean for how you approach prospective customers?

2023 Commerce Trends to Consider

When creating a digital marketing strategy designed to improve your business’s online success, there are a couple of notable e-commerce developments for 2023 that you should bear in mind:

Enhanced Customer Experience

One notable trend is an increased focus on delivering an easy and enjoyable shopping experience. Research indicates that 64% of shoppers respond better to personalised experiences when shopping online. There are a range of ways you can enhance customer satisfaction, including appealing visuals, fast loading times, user-friendly navigation and informative long-form content. By embracing these strategies (and many more!), you stand a good chance of significantly boosting conversion rates.

Growth of m-Commerce and Social Media Sales

In 2022, mobiles accounted for a whopping 78% of all retail traffic in the UK and, as such, there is no denying the significance of mobile commerce (m-commerce) going forward. Thanks to branded shopping apps, high-speed data networks, and the allure of social shopping, it is now easier than ever for people to shop on the go using mobile devices.

M-commerce retail sales forecast in the UK from 2019 to 2024

Social media sales are also projected to triple by 2025, increasing competition between brands that invest in social commerce content. Moreover, spending on social media ads worldwide surged by over 38% between 2020 and 2021, highlighting the potency of this channel.

Mobile devices share 80% of social media traffic. Furthermore, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their mobile devices.

Already a multibillion-dollar industry, social media commerce sales are expected to triple by 2025, reaching $1.2 trillion.

On top of that, global social network users surged over the four billion mark in 2021 and are projected to reach almost six billion in 2027.

eCommerce businesses should take advantage of this trend, especially when 75% of users use social media platforms to research products.

Facebook is currently the most popular social network worldwide, currently boasting approximately 2.9 billion monthly active users.

Selling from social media channels is cost-effective and can be a great solution. Of organisations engaged in social selling, 61% report revenue growth.

Celebrating Our Campaigns

Let’s take a moment to celebrate some of our client success stories:

Ed & Sarna

Specialising in vintage sunglasses and eyewear, Ed & Sarna sought our help to boost organic traffic to their website. Our SEO and content teams collaborated to create and implement a comprehensive strategy that resulted in a remarkable 54% increase in organic traffic and a consistent year-on-year revenue growth of 8%.

Boosting organic traffic to Ed and Sarna website

Monty Wines

We also worked with Monty Wines, an independent organic wine seller looking to promote their wine subscription service through social media. Our social team executed an incredibly successful Instagram and Facebook campaign; in just three months, Monty Wines witnessed an astounding 53% increase in revenue compared to the previous year.

The Bigg Picture

Adopting a comprehensive, mobile-focused omnichannel marketing strategy can help to ensure that your brand stands out in the crowded digital marketplace. Whether you’re struggling to reach the right audiences, position your business as an authority in your field or even just secure ad space, Bigg is here to help. With our industry expertise and omnichannel approach, you’ll see first-hand how a well-crafted digital strategy can drive improvements in key metrics, including conversion rate, business growth and revenue.

From email and social media marketing to SEO and content services, we’ll employ a variety of strategies designed to engage both potential and existing customers effectively, taking the appropriate steps to ensure your business’s online success. Each team at Bigg comprises specialists in their field, which is why we’re confident we can position you as an expert in yours.

Your Digital Marketing Partner

If you’re looking to thrive in the e-commerce industry and would like to learn more about how a digital marketing strategy could help, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Bigg team today. We’re always on hand to share our expertise and help you achieve the results you’re looking for!

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Search Optimisation

SEO Competitor Analysis: What It Is and How to Benefit From It

Getting your business noticed online is no easy task, especially if your industry is heavily saturated with competition. However, we’ll let you in on a little secret: your competitors can actually be the key to your success if you let them! Want to know how it all works? Keep reading to discover the value of SEO competitor analysis.

Understanding SEO Competitor Analysis

At its core, marketing is all about persuading customers that the product or service you’re offering is the one that will best meet their needs. However, to be able to do this, you need to have a good idea of what your business adversaries are offering. This is where SEO competitor analysis comes in.

SEO competitor analysis can...

- Identify areas of improvement in your SEO strategy

- Benchmark your current SEO performance

- Reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses

- Discover your competitors' winning strategies

An SEO competitor analysis is the process of researching your competitors to gather insights about their keyword, content and backlink strategies in order to improve your own SEO strategy. In other words, you’re looking to identify what they have that you don’t, and vice versa. By the end of a competitor analysis, you should hopefully be clued up on:

What the current competitive landscape of your niche looks like
The key strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ websites
Why your competitors occupy the top spots on certain queries
How your competitors convert users into leads and collect traffic

Why is SEO Competitor Analysis So Important?

The fact is, if you’re tired of losing to your competitors through organic search, conducting an SEO competitor analysis is the quickest, most effective way to find out how to outperform them. We know it’s easy to feel confident when your site is ranking number one for certain keywords, but this can all change very quickly, and you should never underestimate your competitors’ ability to get ahead. If you’re still not convinced that a competitor analysis is necessary, here are a few of the ways that your business can benefit.

When executed with precision, SEO competitor analysis paves the way for creating superior content, climbing the search engine ladder, and pulling relevant traffic to your digital doorstep.

New Keyword Opportunities

An SEO competitor analysis is a great way to discover new keywords that your competitors are ranking for. By using tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can:

Find out which keywords competitors are targeting
Determine how much traffic these keywords get
Assess the level of difficulty to rank for these terms

You can then compare your findings against your own list, prioritising the keywords that have a high search volume and low competition.

Tools to spy on your competitors.

Semrush and Ahrefs

Improve Content Quality

You’ll be surprised by how much you can improve the quality of your content simply by analysing the strengths and shortcomings of your competitors. BuzzSumo is a handy tool that can help you in this process by:

Identifying the types of content your competitors are creating.
Revealing how their content is being promoted.

These insights can then be leveraged to create optimised content that still covers the topics and perspectives your audience is interested in, but in a way that is more distinctive and valuable than that of your competitors.

Optimise Technical SEO

SEO competitor analysis also helps to enhance your technical SEO by locating and fixing any issues that have the potential to impact your site’s performance or user-friendliness. Try using Google PageSpeed Insights to check your competitors’ site speed, mobile-friendliness and accessibility, as this will give you an idea of how to improve your own score.

Identifying Your Competitors

Naturally, you can’t get started with an SEO competitor analysis without knowing who you’re up against. While you’re bound to be aware of the key players in your industry, it’s often the case that your biggest SEO foes will be a little different. Through analysis you may even find that you have several SEO competitors that land outside of your niche but you still have to contend with SERPs.

To assist you in the analysis process, here are some key points:

Identify Your SEO Competitors: Your first step is to pinpoint your SEO competitors. This involves understanding who is currently ranking highest for the keywords you aim to target.
Use Keyword Research: Conduct keyword research to identify the keywords that are most relevant to your business. These will be the terms you want to rank for in the SERPs.
Google Your Target Keywords: A straightforward way to identify your SEO competitors is by searching for your target keywords on Google. Take note of the websites that consistently appear at the top of the search results.
Consider Niche Competition: While industry competitors are important, don’t overlook niche-specific competitors that might not be as well-known but still rank prominently for your chosen keywords.
Leverage SEO Tools: Utilise SEO tools like SEMRush‘s Organic Research to streamline the competitor analysis process. These tools can provide comprehensive insights into your competitors’ strategies, including their backlinks, keywords, and organic traffic.
Monitor SERP Changes: Even with the assistance of SEO tools, it’s crucial to continually monitor the SERP landscape. Search engine rankings can change, and staying updated allows you to adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.

By following these steps and considering these key factors, you can effectively identify and analyse your SEO competitors, allowing you to develop a more robust SEO strategy tailored to your specific goals and market dynamics.

Improve Your Rankings with Bigg

Tried implementing your own strategy and aren’t seeing the results you were hoping for? Bigg can help.

As a search optimisation agency with a proven track record for vastly improving clients’ rankings, we know what it takes to uncover your biggest growth opportunities. Combining leading industry tools with traditional optimisation methods and a visitor journey approach to SEO, we strive to grow your business and increase your profitability month by month. If you’re ready to take your business to the top of organic search, then schedule a strategy call with our performance experts, or simply get in touch for more information about our services.

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Search Optimisation

An SEO Checklist for Site Migration: Safeguarding Your Traffic

A site migration on paper can seem like a great business move; acting as a fresh start and an ideal opportunity to rebrand or grow your business. But it can also come with some dangers, such as a drop in visibility and site authority.

Here at Bigg, we are experts in providing results-driven digital marketing for our customers. Here is our checklist for a smooth site migration, which will help you safeguard your traffic during the process.

The Benefits of a Site Migration

So for those unaware, website migration is the process of making changes to a website’s location and structure with the eventual aim of having better online visibility. This could involve adding a mobile version, moving from HTTP to HTTPS, a new server or even a completely new CMS.

The advantages of a website migration include:

Rebrand Your Business: You can use a site migration to rebrand your business, incorporating new logos, designs and other features into your fresh site. You can even change a domain name as part of this rebrand.

Improve Functionality: Functionality is key to success, so a site migration can help you to improve the experience of your site such as introducing new features. Moving to a new server can speed up your site and increase performance.

Add A Layer Of Security: A site migration can add a new layer of security to your site, which is important if you’re dealing with customer data. Switching from HTTP to HTTPS can secure the site and make sure potential customers know your site is safe to browse.

Refresh & Fix: You can take this opportunity to refresh the existing copy and locate any existing issues on your site to fix them.

Add A Mobile Version: Most people nowadays browse on a phone or tablet, so having an optimised mobile version of your site is key.

Our SEO Checklist For Site Migration

Any drastic changes to your site can affect SEO and a site migration might just be as drastic as it gets. You should always plan your move carefully to ensure everything goes smoothly. Site migration failure is often a result of a lack of forward planning.

Here is a checklist of what to do to ensure your SEO remains as untouched as possible for the best results.

Crawl Your Old Site

Crawling your current site will reveal any current issues you have with it. You don’t want to copy and paste these problems over, so crawling your site will reveal what you should be working to fix before you even get started on your site migration properly.

Benchmark your current website and crawl for errors before migrating

Look At Inbound Links

Inbound links are key to maintaining your traffic levels once your site has moved, especially if they are from sites with a high domain and page authority. You can find out which sites are linking to your current domain using tools such as Moz and contact the owners to ensure the link they have will lead to your new site.

Old links might be flagged as spam or have a low domain score, which can impact your site in the rankings.

Put A Redirection Plan In Place

A redirection plan is probably one of the key ways that you will maintain your search rankings and traffic. If you decide to change your domain name or upgrade to HTTPS, every single link on your old site will need to be changed.

The easiest way to do this is to crawl your old site, recover a list of all of the URLs and then match them with the most relevant new page links. This should help you keep your link equity and prevent a loss in rankings.

Mapping URLs

A clear list of old URLs and new URLs is essential when making a well-tailored web migration plan.

URL mistakes can have costly consequences that take a long time to recover!

Make sure you redirect the destination URLs on your paid adverts as well, and this can be a good time to check your analytics to see how they are performing and optimise them for your new site.

Migrate At The Right Time

One thing many people get wrong is not migrating at the right time, which can lead to a significant impact on conversions. You should plan ahead to ensure your site migration occurs in periods when activity might be a bit quieter.

Transitioning during the holidays is normally a bad idea and you should remember that even a relatively easy site migration can take some time to bounce back. Base your migration timetable on sales/conversions of a previous year, picking the period you see the least interaction.

We also recommend migrating in chunks and performing tests after each move to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Use A Sandbox/Copy

Don’t just switch over straight away, you can test your site migration on a test server. Doing this will allow you to see that all of your links and redirects work properly and fix any errors before the site goes live.

Going live with mistakes can see a large drop in traffic, leading to a loss of profit and conversions. Make sure you block access to your new site while you are migrating, otherwise, it will compete with the current version.

The Risks Of A Site Migration

If done incorrectly a site migration could have major consequences for your business. This can be anything from a drop in visibility to a significant loss of profits.

If you skip building a plan, you risk more than a failed migration. You risk traffic, leads and revenue.

Google will have to re-index your site after a migration, so you will see a dip in organic traffic.

Your site’s authority may decrease if your old pages are not redirected properly and any external sites linking to you are not redirected accordingly.

You might also face issues with responsiveness, page speed and analytic tracking if not done correctly and even possibly lose parts of your site!

A site migration will impact your visibility on search engines, so preparing accordingly is key to mitigating the impact of this.

Bigg: Your Digital Marketing Experts

Bigg is an innovative digital marketing agency based in Bristol, focused on providing our clients with innovative thinking and data-driven results. We use a dynamic and scientific approach that uses marketing and conversion data to improve your results.

We do this by offering varied services across a range of digital marketing fields including paid advertising, search optimisation, content writing, social management and more. This allows us to offer bespoke packages to our clients, built around their specific needs.

If you’re looking for clear results and increased conversions, get in touch with us today to find out how Bigg can ignite your campaign.

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Digital Marketing

User Experience vs Customer Experience: What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter?

If you run your own business, then you’ll have likely come across the terms ‘user experience’ and ‘customer experience’. However, the two are often used interchangeably, which can ultimately lead to missed opportunities when trying to optimise your website and services.

Read on below as we help you grasp the concept of customer and user experiences in order to effectively channel your business towards success.

Understanding CX and UX

What is CX?

Customer experience (CX) refers to your customers’ overall experience throughout every interaction with your business, from their initial engagement to ongoing support, through various different channels (e.g. social media, customer support, website).

CX is very much focused on your prospective and existing customers’ emotions, opinions and perceptions of your business.

Why does Customer Experience (CX) matter?
It improves customer satisfaction. It improves customer retention. It enhances cross-selling & upselling.

What is UX?

In contrast, user experience (UX) refers to your customers’ interaction with your digital product, service or system and their experience throughout this specific interaction.

UX focuses less on sentiment, and more on usability.

What are the Key Differences Between CX & UX?

The most helpful way to understand the main difference between CX and UX is to look at it like this: UX refers specifically to your product or service and is included in CX, while CX also contains other aspects outside of your product or service.

Essentially, the two are not separate, combined or overlapping with one another, rather UX exists within CX.

As for their additional differences, these can be broken down into the following categories.

Target Audience

CX focuses on customers’ overall experience with your business. This could include anyone who researches your business, makes a purchase or contacts your customer support – whether it’s the same person performing all these interactions or separate individuals.

Meanwhile UX targets a smaller group, since it focuses solely on the individuals who are actively using your product, service or system, regardless of whether they initially researched or bought it.

Key Objectives

Different goals must be established in order to target the aforementioned audiences’ needs effectively.

Goals and objectives for CX could include:

Attract, engage and satisfy customers
Promote customer satisfaction throughout each stage of the customer journey
Create a feedback portal where customers can voice their needs

Goals and objectives for UX could include:

Design a seamless product/service experience with minimal pain points
Develop products/services that are interactive, enjoyable and easy to use
Resolve key issues customers may face throughout their experience of interacting with your product/service

Metrics

When it comes to measuring CX, you should be focusing on how satisfied your customers are with your business overall and the likeness of them recommending your business to others.

These can be measure in various ways, including:

Net Promoter Score^Ⓡ (NPS) – a measurement of customers’ overall perception of your brand and how likely they are to recommend you to others
Churn rate and retention rate – churn rate evaluates how many customers your business loses whilst retention rate evaluates how many customers you keep over a defined period
Customer satisfaction – the overall degree to which customers are satisfied with your business based on their various interactions; this can be measured through qualitative data such as surveys and reviews

Contrastingly, in order to measure UX you want to be testing the usability of your product or service. This can be measured by the following:

Website load speed – the time it takes pages on your website to load content
Task time – the time it takes customers to complete a specific goal (e.g. find the contact page on your website)
Adoption rate – the percentage between new users and all users for your product/service
Success rate and abandonment rate – success rate measures the percentage of users who complete a particular task while abandonment rate measures the percentage of users who leave a task before completion (e.g. the number of users who press ‘checkout now’ vs the number of users who leave items in their cart without checking out)

Why do these Differences Matter?

Distinguishing between CX and UX is a must in order to achieve the same ultimate goal: improving customer retention and ROI.

The best way to ensure this is through the combination of usability and positive brand experience, which is why both should be focused on using separate strategies.

If customers experience excellent usability but poor interaction with other aspects of your business, it’s likely that they’ll have a negative perception of your business overall. Vice versa, if they have a great general experience with your business, however face barriers when interacting with your website, this again leads them away from your business.

How Can UX & CX Work Together?

So, how do the two work together? Well, UX has a direct impact on CX, which is why you should optimise both in order to positively influence your customers’ impressions towards your business, products and services, thus increasing your chances of customer retention, ROI and business growth.

Understanding the significance of utilising both UX and CX to their fullest potential is essential to crafting exceptional products and services that resonate with your target audience, and we can help here at Bigg.

From improving brand awareness and engaging customers on your socials, to optimising your site’s content and improving your search engine rankings, let us help you by doing what we do best – delivering tangible, measurable results for your business.

What are you waiting for? Book your 1:1 strategy call with one of our experts today to discuss your goals, or get in touch for more information regarding our services.

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Digital Marketing

Health & Fitness: The Top Industry Insights for 2023

In this new age of the health and fitness industry, it’s important for businesses to be aware of what’s trending. Take a look at the top industry insights for 2023 below and how you can use them to your advantage.

Top Trends

Hybrid Memberships

With research highlighting a 41% increase in the number of consumers adopting hybrid fitness routines, gyms have an opportunity to drive revenue by offering hybrid memberships with quality digital offerings.

Prioritisation of Wellness

Mental wellness has become a big priority for many, and your digital content should absolutely be reflecting this. A good place to start is by optimising your content to promote holistic well-being over aesthetic goals. Think ‘Mind Over Mass’ or ‘Meditate to Regenerate’. You can even have those taglines on us!

In the UK, the health and
wellness industry is estimated
to hit £30.6 billion in 2023

Community-Focused Fitness

Working out in a communal environment is great for releasing endorphins, forming meaningful connections and establishing healthy habits. Plus, it’s fun! Not only will promoting exercise with a community-focus, such as zumba, spin and pilates, be a bit hit amongst members, but will also demonstrate that your club is a welcoming space for all.

Community and group fitness should be a focal point. Now more than ever, people are looking for the sense of community. AND community is what will make clients 'stickier'.

Leveraging Trends for Success

Now that we’ve unveiled the top health and fitness industry trends of this year, you’re probably wondering what this means for your business. Try considering some of the following strategies:

Mobile-First Approach: An increasing amount of people accessing information and services through smartphones, so ensure your website is mobile-friendly, or even develop a dedicated mobile app, for a seamless user experience.
Wearable Technology Integration: Embracing technology like fitness trackers and smartwatches improves customer engagement.
Personalised Content and Coaching: Deliver personalised content and coaching through online platforms to offer a bespoke hybrid experience. Data analytics and user profiling can be utilised to deliver tailored workout plans, nutrition advice and wellness tips.

Grow Your Business with Bigg

Maintaining a consistent online presence with tailored content is the key to maximising profits and driving traffic. If you’re looking to get your business noticed by a wider audience, Bigg can help. We’ve used our wealth of digital marketing expertise to help expand a number of companies in the health and fitness sector. Our work for MSG, a Snap Fitness franchise group, helped them to scale from 3 gyms to 25 across the UK through paid advertising and social media campaigns. To find out why clients love our personalised, results-driven approach, get in touch with us today.

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