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Smart Monkey may be a small agency, but it’s big where it counts. Having had an incredibly successful 2023 where it picked up an award at the UK Agency Awards, and been shortlisted for numerous other accolades, the team shows no sign of slowing down.
Securing not one, but two nominations at the European Content Awards, the spotlight is on the team’s outstanding achievements.
Shortlisted for ROI Content Campaign of the Year and Low Budget Content Campaign of the Year for their work with a client in their first year, this is a testament to the digital marketing agency’s strategic approach that delivers results.
The Smart Monkey team’s work started after the client knocked on their door as a last resort; not sure where to turn, the client had gone from a hugely successful 2021 to an incredibly challenging 2022 where no new leads were coming through the door. Having ploughed money into Google Ads, social advertising and even lead generation sites with no results, SEO was his last resort.
As a franchise business, the Smart Monkey team knew this wouldn’t be as simple as just getting leads to the business – this required more and needed to drive business growth from inside and outside.
The first step was focussing on business growth. With goals in place, the team decided to go back to basics – what had worked in the past, what wasn’t working now, and why.
Having realised that a franchise lead generation site had delivered in the past, the team looked at why this wasn’t doing so now. Discovering that the page was outdated and incredibly poor in comparison to competitors’ pages, the team worked on a plan to bring it up to date and make improvements. This included creating new content, highlighting the USPs of opening a franchise with the client, and highlighting key stats to draw people in.
To further bring attention to the franchise and to humanise the content, the team interviewed five current franchise owners from different backgrounds to create case studies and further showcase the opportunities of franchising with the business.
Once that was completed, the second stage could begin. The team made improvements and optimisations of the main business landing pages helping it to move from position 10 on Google, to position four – while additional pages for potential franchise owners to find out more and encourage visitors to stay on the site were also created to help build the story.
A new site architecture that incorporated bringing subdomains back within the main domain improved the user journey from a customer perspective, enabling visitors to find their location and request a quote. Local rankings improved with the franchisee pages benefiting from the main domain authority, while changes to CTAs across the website which pointed potential customers to a single quote request page gave the client more control of the data for lead nurturing.
The team then moved onto the consumer side of the business, optimising the existing content to add missing content for specific search terms which drove traffic. Alongside these on-page changes, a small outreach campaign was also completed to drive links from relevant media.
The latest in a string of award nominations for Smart Monkey, the team is understandably proud – and excited for the year to come.
Smart Monkey founder, Beth Nash, said, “These awards are a recognition of the countless hours, strategic planning, and creativity brought by the team to turn a business around that was at a real crossroads.
“The team really got behind the business – and its owner – understanding what they were trying to achieve and delivering on every part. And as such, not only is the business now thriving, but we have a loyal client that sings our praises, and we’re able to compete with some of the biggest and best agencies in Europe at these awards.
“We have a very exciting year ahead of us, with new hires and growth plans, but most importantly, continue creating amazing work that delivers for clients – and wins us some awards, too!”
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