A Place for Skilled Project Managers in Marketing

Are you a successful project manager looking for a new challenge? Do you think marketing is a completely different discipline? The way job titles are decided and publicised, you could be forgiven for thinking that Project Manager and Marketing Manager were completely different things. However, although there is a degree of subject-matter expertise required within the marketing arena, most of the work will require the skills and disciplines of project management. Marketing involves planning activity and campaigns, co-ordinating staff and resources and working to tight budgets to achieve good return on investment. It almost always involves working to strict deadlines. While there does have to be some theory and experience behind knowing what to plan, how to best to implement things and the most effective timings, these can be learnt relatively quickly and guided by other members of a marketing team. For example, the Head of Marketing might determine and explain the strategy, while the Marketing Manager will manage the overall planning and implementation of the strategy. Marketing Officers and Assistants effectively form the project team along with external suppliers such as printers and media buyers. If you are an experienced project manager and you want a change in career direction, it is worth speaking to marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry about suitable roles. It might be that you need to get a bit of theory under your belt to help you compete with other experienced marketing professionals, but marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry could advise you on what is a best use of your time to put you on fair footing with other candidates. Similarly, marketing professionals who want to enhance their career and promotion prospects might consider taking a project management qualification such as PRINCE2. From your experience in marketing you will already be familiar with the cycles of planning and executing campaigns. You have played a role within teams working towards the same goal, so you should have an understanding of how your contributions fit into the bigger picture of making things happen. To move to the next management level, you will need to be capable of taking on the planning and management of teams yourself, ensuring that tasks and resources are co-ordinated to work together effectively within budget and to strict timescales. Whatever your skills-improvements targets are, training programmes can be delivered in a number of ways so you should be able to find an option that works for you. Some providers will offer distance learning with online tutorials. Some will require the attendance at one or two workshops, and others might offer class-based learning. Whether you opt for night classes or take holidays to attend residential courses, it can all pay off in the end. If you are unsure which area to focus on to boost your career potential, then look through job descriptions and evaluation criteria to see what qualifications or knowledge is being expected. Then plan a realistic timeframe in which to achieve your goals.

Awards Bring Great Marketing Rewards

Being able to say that your company or product was the winner of an award can massively boost your marketing impact. Awards are independent verifications of your quality and excellence, and as they are so often industry-based they can set you apart from some of your closest competitors. Next month the RICS West Midlands Awards will be celebrating all that is good in the built environment by giving awards for excellence. The event is a great opportunity for local property professionals to showcase their talent. Awards will be given for a range of achievements covering development, conservation or regeneration of the built environment. The winners of a few of the categories will also go forward to the national RICS awards to be judged later in the year. Awards bring with them prestige and give potential clients and customers a sense of reassurance that the company they are dealing with or the product they are buying is good value. Most importantly, they can engender a sense of trust, which is what businesses strive for. Being able to display awards as accolades supporting case studies is like having an official stamp of approval. Awards often have logos or badges which can be reproduced on your website, e-communications and stationery, so the impact of your success can be immediate and far-reaching. Even if you are not successful in winning awards, just being entered can bring a lot of associated publicity as the awards themselves generate their own interest. The awards will be publicised to gain submissions and the actual ceremony itself is often a glitzy affair which generates media interest. So even though entering awards can require the completion of a lot of paper work for your submission, it really can be worth it in the long run. Compiling awards submissions is usually the responsibility of marketing teams and will require fact-finding and evidence-gathering as well as excellent copywriting and presentation skills. Depending on what industry you are in, it can feel like a full-time job keeping on top of which awards are available to enter, applying for entries and then compiling the submissions. If you haven’t had the resource to commit to awards submission but find that your competitors are displaying badges of their success, then maybe it is time to reassess your resource allocation. Weighing up the cost of resource against the potential benefits to be derived, you may find that it is worth hiring new staff, or at least consider taking on temporary resource for the awards season. Whatever your requirements, marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands will be able to help you get the right people on board quickly. Good marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands will be able to sift through registered candidates' CVs to find those with direct experience of writing award submissions. This can be extremely valuable if you are thinking of taking on temporary resource as you will need them to be up to speed and able to get on with the job straight away.

Harness Your Wide Knowledge

Are you maximising your marketing activities through exemplary knowledge of your market, your customers, your product impacts and case studies? Sometimes this knowledge can be buried in other parts of the company, away from the marketing department. What might seem like a little bit of incidental information to one person, which arises as part of their every-day tasks, could be the key nugget of knowledge that a marketing team needs to give their promotions a leading edge. Knowledge management can be easily overlooked, and even when it is addressed it is sometimes only managed as a process of setting up centralised stores of existing files and company documents. What lies at the heart of the best knowledge management programmes is the extraction of valuable knowledge and subject matter expertise which resides in the heads of individual members of staff. To engage staff effectively in knowledge management, you need to foster a sense of sharing and may even need to incentivise the sharing of expertise, knowledge or content. When expert knowledge has arisen as the result of an individual’s hard work, which gives them what they feel is their competitive edge, it is understandable that they might be reluctant to simply ‘hand it over’. In these scenarios, it is important to recognise and reward the contributions of such individuals. A lack of communication processes for staff to follow, which can affect the flow of information, can be easily fixed. Your employees may be very willing to share their knowledge but are hindered by not knowing how, where or with whom they should share it. A simple but effective interaction of a member of operational staff with a happy customer could be the basis for your next big case study, but you will miss out if your marketing team never gets to hear about it. This alone is a realistic argument as to why internal communications functions should be closely aligned with your marketing department. If you keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to generating good marketing content, or if you repeatedly hit brick walls when you try to engage staff in sharing their knowledge, then it could be time to look at recruiting specific resource to tackle the problem. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham will be able to help you clarify and define the role you need based on the outcomes you want to bring about. Whether it is knowledge management experts, communications professionals or marketing content compilers that you need, marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham will be able to help source great talent.

Is Your New Recruit Money Down the Drain?

Recruitment can be a costly business if you keep getting it wrong. When you are looking for your next hire for your marketing team, you don’t want to be wasting money. Make sure you are learning from your past mistakes — if you can recognise them — and avoid the mistakes others have made to ensure you hire right first time. If you are new to the process and need expert help to guide you through the potential pitfalls to gain the right talent, you could speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire who can help you every step of the way. Hiring new members of staff is something which managers are expected to do, often without any previous experience or training in this discipline. Managing recruitment can require a specific set of skills, which unfortunately are all too often learned on the job through trial and error. However, you can avoid making some of the common mistakes hiring managers have made. Your first task, especially if you need to try to keep your recruitment costs down, is to advertise your vacancy internally. By failing to do this you could be missing out on great talent. An internal hire has the added benefit of already knowing the company and its operating processes, and they would be able to get up and running in their new role relatively quickly. If nothing else, you will have saved on external advertising costs and the time and cost of another company induction programme. While it is essential that you will be recruiting to a specific role profile, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to find an individual who has carried out each of the typical job tasks in an identical situation or role. Focus on competencies, skills and ability rather than exactly mirrored experience. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire will be experienced at managing competency-based interviewing, so get them on board if this approach is new to you. Make sure you allow enough time to conduct a thorough and fair recruitment process. You may fear that the gap in your department needs filling instantly, but you can do much more harm than good by hastily filling a post for the sake of it, only to find out that person isn’t right for the job. It can waste lots more money and extend unproductive time, so take a little longer to make a more considered and informed appointment.

Protecting Your Online Presence and Reputation

Everyone is out there doing it — busy building their online presence. They are building a profile for themselves, boosting their brand and making inroads into valuable customer communities. To be smart about your online image, you have to be just as smart about how you handle what others say about you as you have to be about what you say about yourself. Rightly or wrongly, your reputation can be in tatters in a matter of minutes given the speed at which online resources can fuel communications. You have to be one step ahead of bad comments and be ready to act and react accordingly. Protecting your brand and your reputation can be a full-time job for dedicated marketing resource, and it shouldn’t be something to look on as a ‘nice to have’ extra. If you spend all your time loading content and making comments but never dealing with what comes back to you, then you could be doing a lot of damage to your reputation and brand rather than the positive impact you intended. However wrong you may feel a customer comment or post might be, you would be wise to view them all as opportunities to enhance your image. How you respond to and rectify an issue will leave a much longer-lasting impression than the initial issue raised. If your response is nothing, the unaddressed complaint will live on and its impact can grow out of all proportion. However, handle it well and appease the complainant and you will find yourself with customers who are more loyal than they were before the problem was aired. It is well to remember that publishing content to the web is what it says — a form of publishing. There have been many stories in the news relating to what individuals have said on social media platforms which have landed them in hot water. Learn what the dos and don’ts are and the difference between a genuine customer complaint and slander or liable so that you know how to react accordingly. If you are managing an effective online presence, then hopefully you will be generating mostly a positive range of feedback. With positive comments and postings you will rightly want to make the most of them. To do this, you need to make sure that your online and social media activities are integrated with your overall marketing strategy. Co-ordinating your content development, communications and PR can be the perfect mix for boosting your positive brand profile across all media. Don’t let your online presence suffer or do your business damage through lack of dedicated resource. Speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire about the available talent who can help protect your brand and help enhance your online presence. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire will have a range of skilled candidates who could meet the needs of varying role types in your business. And if you’re not sure what the role profile should be to cover this or any other area of marketing work, then they can help you with that too.

Are Your Emails Relevant, Responsive and Readable?

Emails are still a popular form of customer contact, but if you are still churning out the same old ones it’s time to think again. You especially need to revisit your approach if you are seeing numbers fall off your data lists. Emails can be ideal vehicles for snappy updates or summary newsletters, but if your focus is wrong or your content is unreadable then recipients will turn away in their droves. In today’s busy world many people will view their emails when they have a spare minute, which is often when they are on the move. This invariably means that they are viewing emails on a device which does not have the full display screen of a desktop computer or laptop. However, it would be a mistake to assume that all your customers are using a hand-held device. Not everyone has a smartphone and if you treat all your contacts as though they have, you will start to lose previously loyal customers. If you have ever opened an email on your phone and been faced with just a web link where it should be showing onscreen content, you will know it is worse than not getting the email at all. It is like venturing to answer the phone only to find the person at the other end has hung up — it is an annoyance and a frustration. To avoid irritating your contacts, you need to invest in making your email communications suitable for as many hand-held devices as possible. In short, if you want your content to be read, it has to be visible. Once you’re sure your content will be readable, you need to make sure it is relevant. Content really is king, so where possible you need to be tailoring your content to your ideal customers. You need to make sure they stay engaged with you, and to do this you need to keep appealing to their interests or delivering something they want. To remain relevant you need to know your customers. If you don’t know their likes, dislikes and engagement behaviours, then you won’t know how to tailor your content to make it relevant to them. To keep your e-communications top-notch, you need great skills across CRM, data analysis, market intelligence, copywriting, e-comms, responsive design and e-campaign management. Whatever skills are missing from your team, marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry can plug the gap. Whether you want to try out temporary positions or move straight to permanent, marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry can help.