Web Design

This completely depends on what your requirements are. It takes longer to build a 1000-page mega-site, than a smaller eight-page e-commerce store or even a single landing page. After initial discussions and having a full understanding of the project, we’ll be able to provide accurate time frames.

Yes. As standard we include a clause that upon full payment, the intellectual property (IP) of your website (including domain name) and any content is solely yours. Joint ventures and variations to IP ownership are possible upon request.

In this day & age, you’d have to be insane to sign-off on any website that isn’t mobile & tablet optimised! By the standards of today, a whopping 80%+ of your website traffic will be from mobile or tablet devices – especially when working with social media strategies.

Optimising your web pages is a must, and we do that here at XC Agency. All our websites include professional optimisation & design where required, giving you that aesthetically pleasing website design from any device.

Web hosting is required in order to get your website online.

It’s the digital space you ‘rent’ to house your web files and allows users to access your site and the information contained on it.

In simple terms – it’s the digital hub/platform in which your website sits & operates.

No, to answer simply.

We can rebuild your website on the WordPress platform, to your current websites exact visual specifications if you require. However, this would be a complete website rebuild & redesign, so please do bare that in mind with your costing expectations.

Yes, we do. With the normalisation of virtual meetings on tools such as Zoom & Skype, we can speak to pretty much anyone anywhere in the world at the click of a button.

When we initially hand over your website, unless otherwise agreed or specifically requested, we leave you to it. It’s your new site, run wild & use it! If you do require any assistance, we’re available to help for support & aftercare.

Unfortunately, for training purposes we can’t offer much more help. We’re experts in using the technology, not teaching others to become experts.

 If you’re looking for long-term administration of your website, or regular maintenance & update packages, we can cater a service plan to your exact requirements – speak with us directly to arrange this.

Yes. Purchasing your own domain is the simple part – pointing it to your website via your hosts control panel & so forth, no so easy.

If you already have a domain, no problem. We can transfer that over to us in a flash. If you’re looking to purchase a new domain with a new website, speak to use first & we may be able to make things a little easier for you.

No, other than your hosting charges which will be discussed with you during your initial consultation, we have no hidden fees.

Commonly charged extras such as stock content & plugins will have already been discussed with you during the build brief stage & have been worked into your quote if necessary.

We can offer copy writing as part of the website build. This will be discussed with during your initial consultation.

Similarly, if you already have written content ready to use (high-quality), then we can work with what you have. Although, please don’t be offended if we tell you it’s not up to scratch or won’t produce the desired results.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertisement is the use of applications & platforms to run a range of adverts with varying objectives.

Depending on your overall marketing strategy & objectives, these can consist of; driving traffic to your website, generating high quality leads, generating increased revenue & sales through E-Commerce stores, bringing brand exposure to your business or drawing awareness to products, stock or services that you offer. But… this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.

The platforms we specialise in are;

  • Facebook Ads
  • Instagram Ads
  • LinkedIn Ads
  • Google Ads (PPC)
  • YouTube Ads

Absolutely 100% without a doubt. Not only can paid advertisement deliver you fast results for a range of objectives, it also naturally grows your social followings & organic site traffic which yields much bigger long-term positive effects.

  • Scalable
  • Measurable
  • Flexible to your industry
  • See instant results
  • Appears on SERPs
  • Engages with your targeted demographic
  • Converts cold traffic
  • Complementary to other marketing channels
  • Competition is using it

You pay for the results your ad generates, based on the interest & traffic it receives. This is known as Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertising. You configure the Advert type, platform variables, define demographic details & set your budget.

Once your budget/ad spend it set & advert configured, the advert will run in-line with the spend and results generated will be based off of your initial budget.

Google Ads work by displaying your advert when people search online for services and products you provide. Google Ads helps to show your adverts/links in front of potential  ready-to-buy customers.

How you can get started;

 

  • You begin by choosing your goal, like getting more phone calls to your business and more visitors to your website.

  • Next, you decide on the geographic area where your ad should be exposed. It could be a small radius around your organization, like cities, counties, or entire regions.

  • Finally, you’ll set your monthly budget cap and craft your ad. Once your ad is accepted, it could appear whenever individuals in your target area search for a service or product like yours. You pay when individuals engage with your ad, like calling your business or clicking your link.

Besides trusting in experts, we use a host of analytic measurements to keep track of our key metrics & performance indicators. Keeping us in control of your strategy & steps ahead at all times.  

Facebook ads offer numerous different advert objectives. A “Boosted Post” is officially called a ‘Page Post Engagement’ ad, and it’s designed to get users engaged by targeting those most likely to click a link, expand a photo, like, comment or share your selected post.

There’s nothing wrong with Boosted posts, but there is something majorly wrong with the way in which most people who use these advert types configure the advert. This is because they often skip the strategy portion and go straight to advertising without working through demographics, targeting, business objectives, and conversion tracking…

Needless to say, it’s not as simple as putting out a quick post & hitting ‘Boost’. Our tried & tested advert strategies make use of a multitude of various advert types and multi-channel analytics, along with varying levels of content & digital marketing tools to achieve your overall business objective.

Our Facebook ads services offer a more overall rounded solution with your objectives & business journey in-mind, not a single post.

 

Facebook ads consist of the Format – what the ad looks like, and the Placement – where on Facebook the ad appears for users. You pick the Audience you want to advertise to, a budget for how much you want to spend, and an advertising objective.

Objectives are decision making process entirely on their own – Objectives includes things such as increasing traffic to your website, generating enquiries through your contact form or driving sales to your e-commerce store.

Facebook Ads and Google Ads are different in the way they target people.

Google targets based on what people are typing into the search engine right there & then, in that moment (as well as demographics) – the intent to purchase, search or be given results for X are already active.

Facebook targets based on interests that people have in their digital online profile (interests they have shown & demographics targeted based on 3rd party data).

With Google ads you can target more around what people want immediately.  Maybe they are searching for “best prices on tennis rackets” vs. Facebook ads where you are targeting that they are interested in Tennis & frequently visit sports centers.

There is no ‘Facebook is better than Google’ answer. They both play their respective parts in an overall marketing strategy.

SEO is a much longer-term game and involves the correct set up of your website, online content & wording used – ultimately bringing you more organic search and referral traffic. You don’t pay directly for this traffic, but you’ll pay with time and money getting this right.

SEO should always be an important element of your digital marketing strategy, and it’s often overlooked and underestimated by both businesses, web developers and marketers.

Google AdWords is a fast way of bringing in targeted traffic to your website. It is fast to set up, and a far faster way to generate the traffic than SEO (generally speaking). Both are ongoing investments, but you’ll only pay for AdWords clicks when people are interested in your product & click your link.

SEO

SEO is the process optimising your website or landing page to rank higher on search engines.

This optimisation comes in the form of various practices & tools used to achieve the best results for your website, conforming with over 200 SEO ranking factors & algorithms, given relevant keyboard & phrases, and of course, the desired outcome from the project/service.

Yes, your business should be investing in SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation offers you an organic way of appearing higher up in the search results for given keywords, phrases & even locations. In comparison to PPC or other paid advertisement, this is essentially directing ‘free’ traffic to your website.

Google have personally answered this one for you, they say that in most cases SEO can take between 4 months to a year to help your business first implement improvements, and then see potential benefit.

We like to set expectations around the 6 – 8 month mark.

In an ideal world, a business should balance multiple marketing channels to avoid a reliance on any single source of traffic (or conversions). But, especially for smaller businesses, budget is often a challenge, funds aren’t endless.

Even in this instance, it’s essential to balance a long-term SEO strategy with a small but targeted & well strategised PPC campaign.

SEO takes time because there is no longer an easy way to ‘cheat’ the system, coupled with hefty punishments dished out by Google should you be found cheat the system. Search engine algorithms have become more and more advanced with an emphasis on delivering users the most relevant and highest quality results based on their search query.

Whereas when SEO began, all it took was filling a webpage with your chosen keyword and pointing as many links as possible to it to see fast results. Thankfully, things have changed – drastically. Deploying tactics like this in today’s digital world, you’re likely to be doing far more harm than good.

Yes, is the answer to this. There’s more than 1 name for SEO and the tactics used vary depending on the style of SEO in which we’re carrying out. Although, the outcome is the same – to achieve a higher ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)

A common question asked by many is “why can’t I just buy ads and forget about SEO?” The answer; SEO and PPC work better when used together. Even though these verticals are addressed through different strategies, the efforts complement each other. You can increase your visibility & exposure, keyword research (paid and organic) can be shared across platforms and best performing ad copy can help when it comes to creating an organic content strategy. This is just a scratch of the surface into the integration when working side-by-side

In addition to working well together, SEO and PPC both play fundamental roles in the conversion funnel in their own right, whilst still working together. SEO creates awareness and interest through content at the top of the funnel, whereas PPC tends to drive users at the bottom of the funnel to take action.

Keywords and keyword phrases are a central element of search engine optimization. In its most basic definition, a keyword or keyword phrase is the text a web user types into a search box to find relevant information, links or content. Phrased another way, keywords are descriptions of the information people are searching for and that ultimately drive traffic ‘with intent’ to your website.

Choosing the best keywords for your website and SEO optimization is very important for getting targeted traffic to your website with the greatest chance of converting them to customers and repeat visitors. Effective use of keywords is essential for ranking well and being found on the Internet. Keyword research requires a skillset & toolbox of its own.

With given timescales for fresh SEO being months, depending on your overall strategy & budget, paid advertisement can definitely excel certain areas of your campaign.

By no means should this be looked as a viable alternative or even rival to SEO – when combined, these services complement one another perfectly & your funnel efficiency.

Backlinks are like small endorsements in a website. If a website links to your website, that is called a ‘backlink’ – or a vote of confidence in your website. The more that you have the higher your website is viewed by the powers that be.

However, backlinks need to be strong and from a trusted source who similarly ranks well. The more backlinks you can amass, the stronger your website appears thanks to these digital ‘endorsements’ gained from external websites. There are various methods of collecting powerful backlinks with the correct strategy.

Content Creation

Content creation is a very general and loosely used phrase. We refer to it as the physical creation or manipulation of any form of digital content. This can be a video, photo, GIFF, infographic, animation or another form of digital media in which you require creating.  

With any form of content creation, this will be addressed during the initial discussion & planning. We can provide the files in a range of formats to suite your needs & similarly can deliver them digitally, physically or a hybrid of both if required.

Yes, stand-alone content creation is limited to professional photography & videography services. This is available based on an hourly rate.

Strictly speaking with professional images, no. The copyright ownership stays with the photographer in question as the images are rightfully their property. However, all content is provided on a ‘unlimited usage’ basis unless otherwise stated. This allows you full access to use the images where & whenever you like.

The reason the copyright is retained by the photographer whom captured the images is to hold the right to display images on their behalf for portfolio, advertisement or work generating purposes.

This is our default policy. Of course, we can cater to your exact requirements if copyright ownership is required. Please contact us directly to discuss this.

We pride ourselves on putting 110% into each piece of content we create. We have a robust & refined process that enables us to process each piece of content professionally and efficiently. This process typically takes 10-14 days. We do, however, provide fast track services & regularly take on quick-turn around projects.

If you need to postpone or cancel a content session, please let us know as soon as you can. For deferment, we’ll work with you to arrange an alternative date.

Cancellation of a booking made more than two weeks before the date of the shoot will incur loss of deposit but no further fee. Cancellations within 48 hours of the agreed date will incur a 40% fee of the agreed rate.

As a starting point, we’ll arrange a meeting or call to fully understand your requirements & overall objective for the project. From there, we’ll provide you with our proposal of how we’ll achieve that – this will include areas for your input & also offer a time where you can adapt or provide further input. In any case, we’ll keep you informed at every step of the process.

If this is a concern you have specifically, we understand. Contact us directly & we discuss your requirements in detail.

With access to thousands of royalty-free music titles, introductions, logo animations & other graphical elements, we can cater your content to your exact requirements.

Subtitles can also be catered for along with most other post processing alterations. Please ensure you mention these in your initial brief.

Given the right brief and project, travelling around the UK can be usually arranged with a 2-3 week notice period. Over seas projects are also available, please contact us directly to discuss.

Equipment:

  • DSLR & Mirrorless Photography Cameras
  • 4K & 1080P Video Cameras
  • Professional DJI Drone (4K Video & Photo)
  • Tracking Vehicle & Crew (Still Shots & Motion Video)
  • Lighting & Flash Setup
  • Stabilization Gimbal
  • Assortment of accessories & mounts to suite a range of applications
  • Wired & wireless microphones


We’re continually investing in new software & equipment to keep up-to-date with the rapidly changing standards of the industry.



Social Media

Here’s where the difference between quality and quantity becomes obvious. Posting frequently where you’re asking people to follow you or to bring in more followers is obviously not going to work. Buying followers might sound like an enticing solution too, but it’s not a viable one if you intend to use your following for anything other than vanity figures. Paid followers aren’t particularly known for engaging with content, and quite simply mess up your viewer algorithm.

You can drive engagement by delivering high-quality content to the right people at the right time, consistently over a period of time. Creative and unique content will do more than just that – It can also determine your follower demographic, who share it with their family members, friends or professional contacts. If done correctly, this turns into a snowball effect with your entire platform, including engagement & follower count benefiting from this growth.

If only it was this simple, our lives could be much simpler too! Unfortunately for all of us, each platform has its own characteristic, native demographics, audience sizes and most importantly, algorithms.

Ensuring your pleasing each platform is key to achieving the best results from each one organically. Having this as the core foundations of your strategy, and more so your business practices can hugely benefit your business.

This isn’t to say you can’t use the same content & copy across all of your platform posts, but simply selecting built in features to auto-post to multiple platforms looks cheap & lazy. Altering hashtags for platforms, removing on those they’re not relevant to, amending content size & crop and URL shortening or relocating are amongst just a few tweaks we often make when posting across multiple platforms.

After selecting the right platforms and planning your campaigns, you should decide what KPI’s to check in order to determine the ROI. Choosing the correct KPI’s will depend on your business type and the purpose in which you want Social Media to serve for your business.

It’s important to remember that return from social media isn’t to be measured only in sales. The business exposure, popularity, overall awareness and customer loyalty you truly gain from social media is immeasurable. That’s where having your eye on the right metrics comes in to play on allowing you to see what matters most to your business, ultimately enabling you to profit more, or directly profiting in sales.  

Social Media ROI = (Return from social media – cost of social media marketing) / cost of social media marketing

Using this formula, you can determine how results compare to your initial goals. It’s best to look at as many metrics as possible, so that you’re not blindly drawn to a single figure.

A common misconception is that it’s all about the number of followers you have. But, in reality it’s far from it. Most businesses with huge followings accumulated in short periods of time will have used follower bots to generate thousands of their ‘followers’ per month – but these are almost all guaranteed to be fake accounts, and certainly not engaging or future customers.  We focus on targeting people that have a genuine interest in your business & services/products.

The number of targeted followers you can expect depends on your industry, the quality & quantity of your content, whether you use paid advertisement tools & the marketing funnel you have in place to back up your premium social brand.

If you’re looking for follower growth with a targeted audience behind it, please speak to use directly to discuss your options. 

During the first few weeks of your initial campaigns, we’ll work closely with you to understand the ethos & inner workings of your business. Understanding your brands voice, style & other digital related decisions is our aim. As part of this, we will send regular post plan documents prior to posting for ‘approval’. At this stage, we recommend adding your own minor tweaks to the documents to enable us to direct insight into your brand. Discussions will be held later on in your campaign as to whether you wish for this to continue long-term.

For communications & engagement we will post in real time and keep pace with the online community. Of course, constant communications are held with all of our clients – we’re only a message away should you want a comment amending, post removing or story content changing.

After selecting the right platforms and planning your campaigns, you should decide what KPI’s to check in order to determine the ROI. Choosing the correct KPI’s will depend on your business type and the purpose in which you want Social Media to serve for your business.

It’s important to remember that return from social media isn’t to be measured only in sales. The business exposure, popularity, overall awareness and customer loyalty you truly gain from social media is immeasurable. That’s where having your eye on the right metrics comes in to play on allowing you to see what matters most to your business, ultimately enabling you to profit more, or directly profiting in sales.

Social Media ROI = (Return from social media – cost of social media marketing) / cost of social media marketing.

Using this formula, you can determine how results compare to your initial goals. It’s best to look at as many metrics as possible, so that you’re not blindly drawn to a single figure.

Contrary to popular belief, we believe negative comments are in-fact a fantastic way to show your true business personality – with an extra dose of sarcasm for the people!

“Kill them with kindness” is a popular phrase when it comes to negativity & trolls online in general. Replying to comments with complete professionalism, providing value and of course, that all important wittiness for the viewers entertainment. Providing value right through to the end is a subtle but effective way of showing perspective customers what they’re going to be delivered with.

By responding to the comment & not simply deleting it, like many businesses do with negative comments, shows true belief in your structure & service. If you’re not concerned about maybe 2 or 3 negative comments throughout your entire page, you’re unlikely to have more lurking. If your page is spotless… that’s too perfect, you’re clearly hiding something… now the imagination runs wild with reasons.

Not to be forgotten, warranted negativity or criticism should also be left public & responded to. This shows your potential customers that although things may not always go as planned, you’re not going to leave them high & dry with a bad tale to tell.

Social media can be overwhelming, with too many posts to write, graphics to create and share, and tasks that seem impossible to complete. We help you manage your social media efforts so you can focus solely on your business.

We help by taking control of all your social media tasks; We plan, write, and manage your social media efforts, keeping your accounts up to date and helping you publish the right content, at the right times. We’re the social media experts you need. Complete management without the thought or worry of ever having to post again.

We can take on as many tasks, or as little as you’d like. Depending on the overall complexity of your strategy, and of course your own time.

There’s no set answer for this. Although, the overall post count shouldn’t be your primary concern. We’ll work with you to understand your business objectives & provide insight and knowledge as to how we believe is best to achieve these.

Each campaign objective different, as are each businesses individual requirements. Some brands need their profiles to look super active, and others need strategically placed posts to ad their audience in seeing overall. As such, the level of posting is different for each business.

In a sense, there’s no “one size fits all” answer, and the final result depends on your specific goals, as well as the nature of your social media presence. Our social media management services typically consist of:

  • Post scheduling
  • Story posting
  • Identifying key posting times
  • Content management: writing, imagery, videos
  • Inbox monitoring
  • Responding to comments and feedback
  • Monitoring analytics and insights
  • Content calendar organisation
  • Post plan creation
  • Follower vetting

 

The specifics of each service vary depending on what your brand wants from social media, and the budget you’re allocating to achieve your given objectives.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the strategic process of producing useful, relevant, and valuable content for your target audience, which generally includes both current & prospective customers. This builds invaluable relationships with your target audiences and is the point where you craft the stories and messages that capture people’s attention, guiding them along your consumer journey until they become another happy customer.

Most content marketing strategies include written, video, or image-based content, and many incorporate all three forms seamlessly.

While it can help towards boosting your company’s sales, content marketing isn’t focused on sales and doesn’t come across as spam. Instead, it focuses on adding value for the reader while positioning your business as a helpful, knowledgeable, or reputable partner.

Every business will have a different marketing strategy, therefore there’s no ‘one size fits all’ answer for this. In essence, it should be viewed as a single piece to a much bigger overall marketing strategy.

Some of the most common ways we integrate Content Marketing are;

– Driving traffic to key web/landing pages

– Spreading brand awareness

– Building meaningful relationships

– Generating revenue

– Generating social shares and backlinks

 

These two forms of marketing aren’t the same, but many businesses integrate their content marketing with their social media marketing strategy. This combination helps brands ensure that they’re optimising their marketing efforts & ensuring a same page approach.

While content marketing combines written, graphic, and video material that can live on your website, or any number of other digital or physical placements in which your business utilises within its marketing strategy. Social media marketing takes place strictly on social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn.

– Blogs
– Vlogs
– Podcasts
– Emails
– Webinars

With the right strategy in place, you can use content marketing to generate a steady stream of new leads for your business. While most brands offer content like blog posts, articles, and videos free of charge, they also create high-level content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks to serve as lead magnets. Then they require readers to opt in to a mailing list before gaining access to the high-level content.

Once you’ve gained permission to email interested customers, you can introduce fresh new leads to your sales funnel. As your leads discover and engage with your other content & marketing efforts, they may convert from potential to current customers.

When it comes to content to marketing, it’s important to focus more on quality than quantity. We understand not all businesses have the time to create new content every day, so if you’re a relatively small business getting started with content marketing, one high-quality content piece every other week is better than poor quality content weekly.

If your business has the ability & budget to expand on this, weekly & even daily blogs or similar content posting will help to drive organic traffic to your desired destination. Along with directly driving interested traffic, having specific articles strategically placed can also aid SEO strategies & overall ranking.

There are 4 key areas to cover when getting started with content marketing:

Strategy – what is the purpose of this marketing avenue? What topics are you going to focus most heavily on?

Engagement channels/methods – your content won’t magically make people engage with it. Are you sharing it on social media? SEO? Driving traffic with paid ads? Hosting webinars?

Content creation – it’s super easy to create poor quality content. Not so easy to create good content. Do you want to be the business who sets the ‘we can’t produce quality’ tone from the get go?

Analytics – You got it. You’ll want to measure how your content is doing; good, bad, and the ugly.

It’s not quite as simple as writing a short blog & away you go, if you want it to work efficiently anyway. That’s where XC agency come in – with a well though out strategy & ample experience, we integrate your content marketing just like any other ordinary marketing task, with effective results!

Quality content means content that satisfies the intent of the content viewer. Re-read that and let it sink in. This requires a lot of empathy, thoughtfulness, and analysis. Quality content isn’t something that can be thrown together in minutes, or even hours unless you’re experienced.

Quality content takes time & experience, along with a host of changes along the way to achieve top quality.

SEO is inherently coupled with content marketing.  Along with satisfying the search engines themselves, having a well mapped out website full of proven-to-be-useful content & an abundance of relative traffic utilising this content is invaluable for SEO. Having content that targets users’ intent also helps to narrow down & forcibly drive potential customers through your funnel.

Depending on the size of a given SEO strategy, content marketing may even already have a fundamental place within your marketing plan to achieve projected or desired results.

Yes, every digital marketing strategy should have a content marketing component. Content marketing is the only proven SEO tactic that has remained effective throughout all search engine algorithm changes & generations.

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