by Kerry Ferguson | Sep 3, 2021 | News
I’m really pleased to be tutoring at Aberystwyth University over the coming term, as part of the Lifelong Learning department. For 2021/2022, I will be teaching three courses, one alongside fellow digital marketer Lucy Kemish from LK Digital Marketing.
This year I’ll be teaching Creating Podcasts, Enterprise: You Can Do It and a Welsh language course, Marchnata ar y Cyfryngau Cymdeithasol.
All of the courses are online, and self paced (although yes, there is homework). I spent plenty of time over the summer lesson planning and pre-recording my lectures into short, digestable lessons.
I am hoping for 2022 onwards to also teach more modules with Aberystwyth University, keep your eye out for information on that.
The Lifelong Learning department at Aberystwyth also teach a range of courses within humanities, languages, art and design, science and history. Visit their website to find out more.
by Kerry Ferguson | Aug 24, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Social Media
I’ve been working with a range of new clients over the summer, and also preparing my upcoming social media course for Aberystwyth University. When lesson planning, or chatting with clients, I’ve made a note of some thoughts that popped up along the way.
One of them was – why are we using social media? So often I see clients get really hung up on how much energy and effort is needed to put into their marketing, and I think we often forget why we’re here on social media in the first place.
Going back to basics, yes, of course we’re on social media to market our products. However, what I always point out to clients and I’ve mentioned on my course is – social media is all about being social. I think we can get so stuck in our strategy or content plan (or even, lack of) that we forget this.
Social media is a tool that we use to find our audience, connect with them and hope that they then connect and relate to us. It isn’t as complicated as we tend to make out. There aren’t magic formulas that mean our one post will go viral. There aren’t set rules about what we should or shouldn’t post.
At the end of the day, it’s all about making sure our content is relatable. Do our audience click with us because they have the same problems or challenges, or the same successes? Are we able to relate on the same level about our cooking mishaps, or our shopping disasters?
We’re all human of course, so being that human behind your social media – letting that human shine through, will work wonders on your marketing. It also makes it much easier to plan and think about too, when we remember that we have to be social, be human.
So, next time you’re banging your head against a wall or wailing in despair about social media being too hard or not knowing what to do – just go back to basics. Be you!
by Kerry Ferguson | Jul 22, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Social Media
As someone who works with websites and digital marketing, I’m often asking the question – who is your audience and what are your goals? It’s a question that’s important for both of the aspects of the business.
A few months ago, a new client replied with ‘everyone’, as their target audience. I was half wondering, do they think this is the easy answer or not? To be fair, given the line of work too, everyone pretty much is their target audience – or rather, anyone with access to the internet.
So, what do you do when your target audience REALLY is everyone?
You have to plan per social media platform or per marketing avenue. Sorry! Rather than having one strategy to target your target audience, you need to plan your strategy per platform.
How does it work? Well, we know that we have certain demographics on the different platforms, so if we are targetting everyone then we need to tweak our marketing to that demographic based on the platform. That could be as simple as the graphic used, or slightly different text – or, going further and the types of content we use, for example you might utilise Reels on Instagram for that audience but stick to content and images on Facebook.
The plan of action would be to write down the list of social media platforms you want to use for your marketing, and do some research into the typical demographic for each one. Then, I would pencil a little plan of what you intend to achieve with each platform, based on that demographic.
For example, we know that Instagram is pushing video at the moment – so plan video into your strategy on Instagram (be that Reels, Lives, IGTV…). Twitter on the other hand is more social, short and sweet so the strategy here will be quite different.
by Kerry Ferguson | Mar 17, 2021 | SEO
Today I want to look at exactly what is SEO, and why is it important if you have a website for your business.
SEO stands for “search engine optimisation” – it’s the means by which you can increase the quality and quantity of website traffic, though non-paid search engine results.
Basically, it’s where you work on your website to optimise it as much as possible for those people online who might be trying to find you. For example, if you are a dentist in Cardigan, you’d expect to rank on the search engines fairly high for those three keywords: “dentist in Cardigan”. If you weren’t ranking well, then you need to spend some time optimising your website.
Why is it important?
It’s really important to make sure your website works well for your business, without you having to pay for advertisements. This sort of traffic, those who find you without advertising, is called organic traffic. The more organic traffic you can get, the better – and today, 2021, the majority of online traffic is still driven by search engines (despite how popular social media is!).
There’s also the element of credibility too, if it’s very hard for someone to find you on the search engines, it might genuinly affect how you are perceived as a business too. This is also why I recommend that every business should have a website too, and not rely on social media for marketing.
Where do you start?
So SEO is quite a huge sector, which just shows really how important it is to be honest. There are a LOT of things you can be doing constantly to keep on top of your optimisation, and it’s really important to remember – this never stops! Don’t just launch your website and then do nothing, you need to work on the SEO all of the time in some way.
Here’s a list of basic things you need to do:
- Always bear your audience in mind – write your content for your visitors and NOT for the search engines. It’s all about quality and being informative, not trying to play the SEO “game”.
- Make sure all of your pages have the correct Header tags
- Add Alt-Tags onto your images
- Write new content for your website consistently – blogging and news is a great way to do this, and it also gives you a way to answer customer or visitor questions or queries too
- Add and use internal links through your website (especially if you mention your services or other blog pieces)
As I said though, SEO is a huge topic and I’ll start covering it a lot more over the coming months in bitesize chunks – but hopefully this is a good starting point for you to see how important SEO it, and possibly how large a topic!
You can also check out my blogs over on Gwe Cambrian Web – some will be in more detail over there as we focus a lot more on websites and website optimisation as part of the company!
by Kerry Ferguson | Mar 10, 2021 | News
I had a few things on my bucket list for 2021, and I definitely wasn’t expecting anything like this! Absolutely chuffed to have been named as one of the 40 Digital Women to Watch in 2021 at the Digital Women Shortlist Awards on International Women’s Day.
I was also lucky to be shortlisted on two other awards too – Role Model of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year – absolutely astonished!
To see the whole shortlist, visit this webpage on the Digital Women website: https://digitalwomen.live/learn/digital-women-awards-2021-shortlists
I would like to wish everyone who was shortlisted the very best of luck and to those that had applied/been nominated and weren’t listed – GO FOR IT AGAIN. Honestly, please don’t feel put down, go for it again!
