Over the past decade, Carden IT Services has been delivering reliable IT solutions to businesses in the UK. But how have we grown, how do we market our services, and how do we find new clients? Here, we take a deep dive into our marketing strategy.
Website
Every business needs a website. Especially if you’re a business like ours which works in the IT sector. Our website has gone through quite a few changes in the past few years, but with the help of some talented web developers and graphic designers, it now matches the quality of the IT services we provide.
Our website isn’t just a catalogue of our IT services though, we also have informative blogs, tips, tutorials, and links to our dedicated customer web portal.
Referrals
Word of mouth will always be the best marketing method any business can use, and the managed IT services industry is no exception. Over half of our new customers come through us through recommendations from existing customers.
Business owners and decision-makers tend to talk with each other a lot. So, when someone is impressed with our service, they tend to let others know about it!
Landing Pages
While a website is important for laying out all the information about a business and its services, sometimes you need something more attention-grabbing to attract new customers.
A landing page is a single page created for a marketing campaign. Often when you click on a link online (whether that’s an online ad or a link in a business’s social media bio) you will be taken to a landing page instead of their main website.
Whereas your main website needs to cover every aspect of your business, a landing page only needs to focus on one product, offer, or location. For example, we have different landing pages for different areas of the UK that we operate in.
Think of our full website as an online catalogue, and the landing pages as online flyers or posters. A well-designed landing page can make a big difference to the effectiveness of your online marketing. Ad campaigns which use landing pages almost always outperform those which do not.
Here are some of the landing pages we’ve created to target audiences searching for different services or in different places.
Our default Carden IT Services landing page:
Landing pages aimed at Brighton and London businesses looking for managed IT services:
Lead Magnet pages focused on providing useful free information and services:
- Free Cybersecurity Guide | Brighton & London
- Free Cybersecurity Audit | Brighton & London
- Free IT Services Guide | Brighton & London
Landing pages aimed at Brighton and London businesses looking for IT support:
- IT Support | Brighton & London
- IT Support Services | Brighton & London
- IT Support Services | Brighton & London
A landing page aimed at small businesses looking for IT support:
Landing pages focused on accountancy firms looking for professional IT support:
Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a marketing tool designed to attract potential customers and gather contact information, usually in exchange for a free resource or valuable content. the purpose of a lead magnet is to generate qualified leads and establish ourselves as a trusted source of information. This is a great first step in building a relationship with potential customers – by providing them with something of value.
Lead magnets can take many forms, including eBooks, whitepapers, tutorials, templates, webinars, and free trials. The key is to offer something of value that addresses a specific problem or pain point for our target audience. Our sales team can follow up with users who have interacted with our content and see if there are other ways our services and knowledge could be helpful to them.
Search Engine Optimisation
For a user online to ever find our website among the thousands of other managed IT providers in the world, it needed to be optimised for search engines.
Our website is designed to look great on both desktop and mobile web browsers and is regularly updated with new content in the form of blogs like this one. We also make sure to include relevant keywords on all of our pages and link them together to make the site easier for customers to navigate and easier for search engines to crawl.
Sometimes we will create SEO-focused landing pages about particular services specifically to attract traffic from people who might be searching for them (see landing pages list above).
We regularly check where our website ranks in local and national searches and work to continually improve them.
Google and Bing Ads
Carden IT Services Google Search ad example
A perfect time to make contact with a potential customer is when they are already looking for the types of services we provide. This is why we run adverts on Google and Bing search engines and target keywords related to our business and our services.
Online ads have been useful in driving traffic to our website, but they don’t win clients by themselves. We still need to have a compelling website and a dedicated sales team to convert that initial interest into new business for us.
Blogging
Every month we publish articles and news in the blog section of this website. This helps us market our business in multiple ways. Firstly, search engines like Google prefer websites which regularly update their content, and secondly, it allows us to cover specific services or technologies in much more depth than we can on a landing page or list.
Our blogs also provide real benefits, with in-depth tutorials on specific pieces of software we use in IT support every day. Every blog also includes at least one call to action (CTA) to encourage readers to contact us.
Social Media
For many users, social media quite simply is the internet. Almost all the time that people spend online these days is spent on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Carden IT Services has a presence on four of the main social platforms:
- Carden IT Services Facebook
- Carden IT Services Twitter
- Carden IT Services LinkedIn
- Carden IT Services Instagram
A social presence not only allows us to find new clients, it also provides social proof to potential customers that we are a real business.
There is an old marketing myth that you need to see or hear a company’s message 7 times before it has an effect. While this isn’t always such an exact science, it’s important to make multiple connections with new and existing clients and social media interaction is just one way we do this.
Monitoring
A key part of any campaign, and the thing which differentiates online marketing from offline marketing, is monitoring results in real-time. Thanks to services like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Microsoft Clarity, we can see exactly how our audience is interacting with our website, our ads, and our social media profiles.
We can even view recordings of each website visitor’s time on our website, seeing exactly how they interact with it, what’s working, what’s not, and what’s catching our user’s eye.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is an essential aspect of digital marketing that helps businesses measure the success of their marketing campaigns by tracking the actions of users who interact with their ads or websites.
Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, which are often challenging to track, conversion tracking allows us to measure the success of their campaigns accurately (and in real-time). By tracking how many people take a specific action on our website, such as filling out a contact form, booking a call, or subscribing to a newsletter, we can determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Need Help With Marketing Like This? Carden Digital Can Help
All of our marketing is handled by our sister company Carden Digital. This was originally our internal marketing team but in the past few years, we have expanded it into a full company, offering digital marketing services to businesses across the UK.
They’ve helped other businesses harness the power of online ads, social media, and SEO to reach new customers. If you need help with your managed IT services speak to our team today, if you need help marketing your business, speak to Carden Digital.