Using Twitter

If your business has a serious professional image and you are looking at new ways to get your messages out, you would be forgiven for initially dismissing Twitter as something that is just not right for you. However, it might be time to think again. Admittedly, this form of social media has a strong emphasis on ‘social’ and to the uninitiated it might appear to be simple a medium for fans to follow every move of their celebrity idols. But as with any form of communication, the key is in how you use it. The medium itself does not determine your message. Firstly, do your homework to decide if this route to market is right for you. Do some research on your customers by looking through Twitter to see who is talking about your company and its products and services or those of your competitors and decide if there is a community you can engage with. Don’t worry if there doesn’t appear to be one at first, as you can build it. It is important to remember that you will not get far just pushing out sales-focussed marketing messages. As with many social media tools, the key is to establish yourself as a trusted source of valuable information who is keen to share it. If you feel you can create a meaningful engagement with your customer community, then this is the tool for you. Twitter is a great way to keep contacts and clients abreast of developments, events or new products, but it is also a great tool for customer care and support. It is quick and easy to use. You don’t have to worry about how much of the content will be read, as you might do with emails, newsletters or direct mail. With only 140 characters at your disposal, it would be hard to miss any of it. The real art of maximising your use of Twitter lies in crafting meaningful and impactful communications in just 140 characters. If you have great copywriters in your marketing team, then this will be a challenge they will relish. When you have established your strategy for using Twitter, then you will find that resource is required on a constant basis to manage the outgoing and resulting content. If this isn’t resource that you have in-house, then speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire to find out how to engage the right talent. If you aren’t sure which marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire to use, then why not take to Twitter to find out about the different agencies? Another part of your strategy will be to monitor and track the impact of your Twitter activity. While it is relatively simple to track re-tweets, you can use apps and software to help you. You will, of course, be able to gauge initial impact from the responses you get, depending on the nature of your post. Before engaging new resource to handle your Twitter-related work, investigate the software available that can automate some functions.

Snappy Strapline Summaries

Getting your message out to the market is a non-stop challenge. Frequency of visibility of your brand can only be a good thing. If you are succeeding with that, then you can maximise on the ongoing impact by having snappy straplines to accompany your logo to quickly communicate what it is you are about. However, generating the right strapline is not as easy at it might appear, even though they are usually only a matter of a few words. You can take a few approaches to get the creative juices flowing, and it is wise to remember that the best suggestions can come from the most unlikely of sources. Setting up a brainstorming session with your marketing and sales teams is one way to generate ideas, as the natural flow of suggestions comes from the ideas of one person sparking an idea in another. While this might not immediately generate the final useable strapline, it can take you a good way towards it and the good offerings can be fine-tuned. Another good approach which works well to get staff engaged and feel a sense of belonging to your brand is to set up a competition at work to get all staff sending in suggestions. Obviously, you should offer a great prize for any submissions used. If you cannot generate a strapline which fully hits the mark by less formal means, then you could always engage the services of a marketing agency. You could also bring in a freelance copywriter if this is not a skill which you have in your current marketing team. Copywriting is a skill that can take a while to develop and if you don’t have the capability in-house, it is worth weighing up the benefits of recruiting. Copywriters will bring you strapline solutions, and they can also craft your online content, your advertising copy and content for all your marketing literature, taking the burden off other members of staff who are not best suited to it. Additionally copywriters can be well placed to contribute to your internal communications functions and business documentation too, so there are many ways that you can secure a good return on your hiring investment. If you speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire, you will also find that many marketing candidates list copywriting as one of their many skills, so they will be able to turn their hand to other marketing tasks too. However, if you do want someone to purely concentrate on the written word, then marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire will be able to find you the ideal person.

Taking New Ideas to Market

Seeing ideas turn into reality is a dream come true for inventors and entrepreneurs. But the process can involve a lot of hard work and long hours. Getting a product from the drawing board to the shop shelves or into the hands of sales professionals is a long process but this is just what it happening in Coventry. The Health Design & Technology Institute at Coventry University has been busy helping local innovators in the health and social-care sector to bring their products to market. The inventions have largely been products which help individuals to live independently in the community and remove their dependence upon other healthcare services. The ever-increasing size of the UK's older population means that the demand for products which support independent living is only going to grow. But even when a market is as certain as this and an idea seems sure to succeed, there is still the question of how to turn the idea into reality. For innovators in Coventry help is at hand. Support from ERDF funding means that local entrepreneurs and SMEs can access consultancy services for product development, including design services and testing for usability. The university is using its expertise and excellent facilities to deliver these services, which include quick production of prototypes and testing. The testing is vital, either to inform a subsequent design stage or to qualify the product claims regarding features and benefits that you will want your marketing messages to carry. The reports are independent validations of your product. So your idea works and you know your market, but it still isn’t going to sell itself. You need to work on how you are going to market your product. This is where your marketing planning comes in. You know that your product is great and so do all those who have helped you develop it, but can you put that into words that a new customer would quickly appreciate? Defining your product features and benefits and agreeing your market messages will be things you need to get started on. If this is a new brand as well as a new product, then you’ll need to establish that too. You already know who your target market is, but do you know what their purchasing drivers are or what type of communication they are likely to respond to? These are all things you’ll need to know to develop your marketing strategy, while at the same time setting realistic budgets with which you need to implement it. If you are looking for investment to help take your product to market, then be realistic about what you’ll need to support your marketing, and make sure you’ve done your homework. If you are a new business, you may not have this expertise within your resource base. If this is one of your first hires, you might want to enlist the help of marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry. If it is too early to take on full-time permanent staff, then speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry about short-term contracts or even temporary part-time positions as long as you can engage the right level of expertise.

Meaningful Engagement with Younger People

A recent report in Warwickshire, which was submitted to the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee for Children, Young People and Families, has illustrated a successful reduction in the number of NEETs — those not in education, employment or training — among young people aged between 16 and 19. In 2005-2006, the NEET figure for all 16 to 19 year olds in Warwickshire was 6.7%. However, by the academic year 2012-2013 the number had come down to 3.6%. This is a very encouraging improvement in the outcomes for school leavers, ensuring that they are either engaged in employment or other meaningful activities which can help prepare them for the world of work. Despite these encouraging figures for the county of Warwickshire, the issue of high youth unemployment has not gone away. With recent figures for youth unemployment at all time highs, it should remain a concern for employers that the next generation is not being fully engaged in order to be ready to take up the reins when older staff retire. While resource costs are among the highest costs businesses have to cope with, there is another way to prepare the next generation of employees for your business. Apprenticeships are a cost-efficient and effective way to bring in new talent and train them in the skills you need for your business. Often one of the concerns that employers have when taking on new young employees is that they don’t have the skills that they need to make them immediately useful and productive. So an apprenticeship is the ideal way to get them up to speed and competent in the skills and abilities they need to perform their jobs. An added benefit is the fresh blood, new pairs of eyes and enthusiasm that new employees can bring to the workplace. If you need to review your future resource planning and are considering taking on an apprentice, then speak to your local marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire. You will also need to engage with a training provider to deliver the training and assessment element of the apprenticeship framework if you do not have these professionals in-house. Alternatively, you can contact the council for advice. It is already working with the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership to help ensure that businesses generate a good enough range of employment and training opportunities for the young people entering the labour market. Remember that marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire might already have young people on their books that have registered interest in getting an apprenticeship, so your talent pool may be ready and waiting.

Making the Right Connections

Is your web strategy driven by the need to increase traffic volume or traffic relevance? Depending on what you want your website to do for you, you will need to do one or both of these things. But if you need a specific type of visitor to your web pages, you could be wasting valuable time, money and resources by trying to get them through sheer increase in volume. Gone are the days when simply having a website was an end in itself. Websites are moving feasts which need strategic thinking to ensure their ongoing effectiveness. You need to get to know your customers and your audience and understand their online behaviour and activities. You need to know what other sites they are using and what forms of social media they use and how they engage online. You need to understand what they want from your site and make sure you deliver it. If you are looking for a specific type of customer then a one-size-fits-all approach is not going to work. Your site needs to appeal to and be tailored to the needs of your target user. You could invest in link building to boost the relevance and credibility of your site and to ensure that your ideal prospects find you easily when online. You need to be linked up to all the right forms of social media and build up reciprocal linking opportunities with other sites your prospects visit. Ideally, you want your current customers and site visitors to be sharing and forwarding your site's content and details. However, for this to happen the site has to be accessible in the right format and visible through the right connections. The content has to be unique and relevant and it must resonate with users. If you are missing these skills in your organisation or your current marketing team, then it might be worth looking to marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham to get an idea of the talent available. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham will be able to advise on the most appropriate role profiles and what skills and experience you should be looking for in your new recruits to ensure a successful implementation of your web strategy. You may need additional design and technical support if the site was built in-house to make it responsive to the many mobile devices it can be accessed through. You may need content developers to boost the quality of your site or you may just need support to co-ordinate the work of third-party developers.

Forgetting What You’ve Learned Is Your Next Move

It used to be the case that you just had to keep up with all the new marketing avenues that were opening up, such as web-based and social media marketing, to keep your marketing strategy relevant. But no sooner have you got to grips with the new technology and successfully built it in to your marketing strategy than you have to revisit and possibly even start your approach from scratch. What was once the ideal way to manage such media could now be potentially detrimental to your marketing strategy. This is certainly the case when it comes to SEO. It is understandable that with thousands of websites that are all vying for space on the internet, there have to be credible ways of ranking results for users when searches take place. While there are the paid-for options to advertise and guarantee your site a top slot in search results, users are too discerning to simply select the option that has paid to present itself to them. They want the best, most credible sites and ones which best meet their search criteria. Ultimately, this means that the content has to be king. With web builders learning how ranking positions were achieved in search engines such as Google, it became easy in the early days to simply litter a site with keywords to help it boost its search position. However, consumers and internet users quickly caught on, and search-engine providers demanded a smarter use of web pages and real content from the sites it was trawling through if they wanted to be found easily. Real content and a user-friendly interface are key if you want your site to appear on the first page of search-engine results. Content isn’t just about the words either. Rich content is that which is linked up to social media, verified by users (which is illustrated through their sharing), validated by its links to authority sites and crafted with the customer in mind. While content is paramount, it is nothing if it cannot be accessed easily and presented effectively to the user. You have to make sure that your site is responsive to whatever mobile or electronic device it is being viewed on.