Assignment 3 - Task 1 - Inbound Marketing Report

 I have researched the leisure vehicle manufacturers Elddis and Swift.

Elddis’ approach shows their website visitors relevant content and quality imagery throughout their site, they offer several ‘Call To Actions’, as well as email-marketing sign ups and blogs.

Swifts’ approach includes use of keywords, blogs, priority on customer care, email sign ups and clear social media links.

The main strength of the Elddis website is their blog. It is extremely relevant to their customer base as the content and images used promotes the use of their leisure vehicles by real-life customers and by different industry relevant journalists.

‘Call To Actions’ are a strength on the Elddis website, as they are relevant and are highlighted multiple times across the website. However, I believe there is a weakness in their CTA format. I think Elddis could incentivise the CTAs better. I think they could offer a customer a reason to click and fill out the online form, such as discount off a purchase or a freebie when a customer completes the form. Without a reason to complete a CTA form the customer may exit the website and not return.

The main weakness of the Elddis website was the lack of reoccurring keywords. The homepage is full of keywords such as ‘Caravan’. However, as you delve deeper into the site these words become less frequent.  The lack of key words means that when customers are searching for leisure vehicles, the Elddis website doesn’t show up on the first page of the search, but competitors do. A simple exercise of increasing keywords would result in more website visitors due to a higher page positioning when a customer carries out an online search.

The main strength of the Swift website is their use of keywords throughout their website pages. Every page I visited on the Swift website included keywords that their customer base searches for such as ‘Caravan’ and ‘long-tail keywords such as’ best-selling caravan’. This means when customers search for products Swift appear on the first page of their search.

The main weakness of the Swift website is their Homepage. The homepage is not as attractive as its competitors as it has limited imagery, it is very long and contains a lot of information. I think Swift should create more webpages to host this information to make navigation easier for their visitors. For example, the homepage includes some FAQs but not all. This could confuse a customer who is looking for answers to a simple question, they could get frustrated and leave the page. To fix this weakness Swift should remove the listed FAQs from the homepage and add a link instead that takes the customer through to the full FAQ page.

Based on my research I believe Elddis has the best inbound marketing. The website is attractive with CTAs, signs of email marketing, links to social media and hosts relevant images and content for visitors. Its mobile website is a mobile-friendly replica of their desktop website, so every customer gets the same experience when visiting their website, unlike the Swift mobile website which has only one image on the mobile home page. The Swift page utilises keywords stronger than Elddis, but I believe Swift could improve their page by improving the quality of its imagery, including more CTAs and shortening their homepage.

You can visit the Elddis website here - https://elddis.co.uk/

You can visit the Swift website here - https://www.swiftgroup.co.uk/