Getting Started: Knowing How and Where to Promote Your Business

When you are a new business it can be tricky to know exactly how and where to promote your business. As funds will also be limited, you don’t want to try too many expensive options if you can’t be sure they are going to yield any return. In the early days of your business, it is a good idea to seek out any and every free opportunity to gain publicity. That may be achieved through your own PR activity or you may be able to find free routes for promotion. Schemes that are available from your local council or government-funded new business support services are great places to start. Staffordshire County Council runs a couple of schemes designed to help local businesses promote their good and services. Businesses can take advantage of free promotion to more than 27,000 young people through the Your Staffordshire Card, which is ideal if your product or service has a youth focus. Additionally, if you are a public-sector organisation or your company works in the tourism industry, then the council promotes the Destination Staffordshire scheme, which works to build the tourism sector for the county. Finding the marketing routes that work for you is not always easy, and if you are just starting out in business then this might take more time than you have available, especially if this is not your strong point. It might be worth considering taking on some temporary marketing support to help get you started. Having skilled and experienced marketing resource could help boost your marketing efforts much more quickly than if a non-expert is left to find their way through trial and error. But you need to hire the right person, and if recruitment isn’t your strongpoint, you won’t want to waste limited resources making the wrong hire. You could engage marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire to ensure you get the talent you need. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire will deal with part-time, full-time, permanent and temporary contracts and will have a pool of talented marketers ready to meet your needs. If you don’t know exactly what skills you need from your marketing support, but you know what you need to achieve for your business, then marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire will even help you develop and tailor the right job description and role profile. If you aren’t sure how long you can commit to employing your marketing resource, you can start with a short-term temporary offer with the possibility of extension.

Taking Chances with Your Content

With so much happening on the web and within social networking circles, your content could easily be getting lost. Imagine that you enter a library looking for a good book but don’t know where to start. The easiest way to find something that you will enjoy will be to ask someone who knows your likes and dislikes and get them to recommend something. With so much to choose from, the web can work in exactly the same way. Users will naturally look at things that someone they trust has recommended. Alternatively, you can go to the library looking for a very specific book and you have all the details but you still won’t be able to find it until you know the shelf location and catalogue code. The same can be said of using keywords and search terms in your web content. If you can’t furnish your content with the same terms and keywords that your ideal customers would search for, then you are making it very difficult for them to find you. You need your content to stand out from the crowd, so you may need to take some risks. Take off your sales hat for a few minutes and think about what sort of things would catch your attention. You might find the answers lie in three main forms: things that shock you, things that make you laugh and things that tug on your heart strings. Whichever of these effects you decide to go for, do your homework thoroughly and try to avoid anything that could generate negative responses. Taking a chance on introducing a bit of humour can work wonders for your visitor numbers. Not everyone wants to be sold to all the time, so remember that as people browse they will only pause to read further when something captures their interest. What better way to do this than to make them laugh? If you can combine your humorous content with an action to get people involved, such as adding their own suggestions to funny ‘caption’ photos, then you engage your users and will most likely get them talking about you and your company. If the humour is good enough, you will find your ‘social media circle’ growing as users pass your link to their friends to join the fun. This may have nothing whatsoever to do with selling anything, but it gets people talking about you and that’s good for any brand. When it comes to SEO and search-term marketing, you shouldn’t leave this to chance. Your site's content should use the same language that your customer will use. You need to research which terms and keywords users are entering to locate sites similar to your own. However, when you apply your findings to your site, they need to built into good and relevant content and not just tagged on. If you are looking for innovative content creators or SEO experts to boost your online presence, then speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham. If you don’t know where to start in choosing an agency to work with, then why not search for marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham and see which results grab your attention?

Boost Your Marketing Impact With a Bit of Competition

If you are developing new product lines or you are an inventor, you might be able to take advantage of competitions to boost your marketing potential. Competitions are great ways to start testing and publicising your products, so keep searching for upcoming competitions in a field appropriate for your product. Even if you don’t win the competitions you enter, your product will still get great exposure just through being reviewed and considered. Finding out how your products are received by the judging panels is a great indication of how they may be received by the wider general public or your specific target market, so the feedback is always useful. Competitions can act as independent verifications of the benefits and worth of your products as judges assess and pass comment. When similar products are up against each other in a basic ‘best of’ type of competition, then this really is the way to mark your product out from the rest. Other types of competition may pitch different types of product against each other in competitions for ‘most innovative’ or ‘most creative’. These competitions can be more beneficial for company profiles as a whole rather than for individual products. So when you are looking for new business contacts rather than immediate sales increases for a particular product, these would be the competitions for you. When your product is a specialised invention designed for specific use by a target market, then getting it viewed and assessed by industry experts can be vital. For something new which hasn’t had time to generate widespread user feedback, competitions can bring the sorts of accolades you need to get your target audience feeling confident that yours is a product they can trust. Competitions can involve the completion of a lot of paperwork in the form of entry submissions, and you might not always have the time to do this. With the value that can be derived from taking part and even winning competitions, it is worth weighing up whether it is cost-effective to hire in some temporary marketing resource to help with this work. Marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry will be able to help you find temporary or part-time resource to help with peaks in your marketing workload, so don’t feel that you have to struggle on alone or miss out on potentially profitable activities. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry will have a bank of CVs of available talent for you to start considering, or they can easily provide a shortlist of candidates for interview, saving you a lot of recruitment time and effort.

Responsible Marketing to Children

n recent years, much has been made of how we advertise to children, especially where the products raise concerns over health and well-being issues, such as sugary sweets and drinks. Advertising standards and governing bodies have rightly set out clear guidelines on how and when children can be exposed to certain types of advertising. However, if you are thinking of working in the children’s marketing arena, you may have your own personal standards about what lines you are or are not prepared to cross in the name of supporting the aim of sales. Admittedly, children won’t have the means or ability to make purchases themselves at a young age, but they play a vital role in persuading the purse holders about where to spend their money. Pester power has long been recognised by marketers as a powerful tool for generating sales. Some may look on this as a questionable manipulation of young impressionable minds. However, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you work for a company which sells educational products or toys and equipment which encourages physical activity, then you might want to fully embrace the potential to appeal directly to the target market of children in the knowledge that you are promoting beneficial or life-enhancing products. There is a certain skill required to be able to make the reading of books as appealing to children as eating lots of sweets. It's a valuable ability to be able to make outdoor exercise seem as attractive a way to pass the time or as exciting a form of entertainment as a trip to the cinema. Being able to capture the imagination of children is central to being able to promote ‘worthy’ products to them. However, the marketing approach will usually be two-fold, as it will need to appeal to the purse holders as well as maximise sales potentials. Finding the right balance isn’t always easy, and sometimes it is not simply the content of the marketing promotion but the vehicles and communication channels as well which need a two-pronged attack. Believing in what you sell is central to being able to carry out your marketing activities with integrity. If you don’t believe in what you promote, you will never being doing your best work or you will lose sight of what is right for your audience. Knowing what you are going to be involved in promoting should be a key consideration when you choose which jobs you are going to apply for. Job descriptions and role profiles should be read closely, especially when an employer with a broad product range is recruiting, as marketing roles can be split by product type or audience focus when large marketing teams are involved. When you are job hunting using marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire, you will be able to get good detail about the jobs and what will be involved before you put in an application. You can discuss your suitability for roles with the experts at marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire to make sure you can fully commit to the products you’ll be working with. If you have to work hard to convince yourself you can promote a particular product, you will find it even harder to convince the interviewing panel.

19th-Century Marketing Principles Still Lead the Way

Given the huge advances in technology and the large proportion of marketing activity now taking place online, it could be easy to forget that we are still driven by marketing principles that were articulated by eminent economists in the 19th century. The economist and political philosopher Adam Smith wrote a witty step-by-step illustration of how advertising really works and it’s all based on the need for repetition and frequency. The guide to successful advertising illustrates what the viewer of an advertisement thinks each time he sees it and maps out how the thoughts change through 20 viewings with the increasing impact that the same advert has. It starts with the viewer not even noticing the advert but finishes with the same viewer being desperate to get hold of the item as a ‘must buy’. If you have ever run marketing campaigns which included advertising, but you found the adverts to be ineffective, then the first question to ask is whether they were run frequently enough. Advertising can be costly, so it is important to spend that money in a way which will get you the best return on your investment. While it might be appealing to go for the one big splash advert opportunity, this can easily be money down the drain. It would be much more beneficial to run smaller and cheaper advertising options repeatedly to the same target audience in order to secure a positive impact. Researching and planning effective advertising campaigns takes a certain set of skills and experience, and although it can require a large financial investment the returns can be huge. Getting the right staff on board to ensure success is not something you can leave to chance. If you are not experienced at recruiting specific skill sets, you don’t want to get sidetracked by candidates who can talk it up at interview but who then take their foot off the gas the minute they get into the job. By teaming up with marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands, you can be assured that the candidates they source for you have been vetted for suitability before they enter your own recruitment process. Good marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands will have members of staff experienced in different areas of the marketing mix, so they will be able to sift out the best candidates from the simply good ones and advise you on what specific skill sets and levels of experience you should be requiring for the roles you need.

Get Off the Phone!

Some career paths can be simple progression routes, where each step requires doing more of the same but at increasing levels of responsibility. You can usually stay within the same environment, learn a bit more about that area of business and improve on the skills you are already using. However, in the sales profession career development can mean jumping from one distinct type of role to another, so how do you make the transition and prove you are capable? If you have started your sales career doing telesales, you are immediately dealing with a challenging role in a demanding environment. But much of what you do will be scripted and monitored and there will always be the back-up of a team manager when things get tricky. With so much planning and co-ordination of work computerised and with data at your fingertips, this is a role you can do (once initially trained) without any daily preparation. So in this sort of role how do you prove that you are capable of the field sales or sales representative side of things? Sales representatives need to be able to plan their own schedules, develop their own leads, research their clients' backgrounds and retain a lot of that information for face-to-face meetings. They will be dealing with clients alone so will need to be able to manage difficult situations without support. Another area of the role requires building up contacts and networking, so you will find yourself in a lot of situations which will be far from scripted. You will need to be able to assess a situation and judge the right approach quickly in order to make the right impact. To start proving yourself, you can take more control of the difficult types of calls you deal with and show how you were able to handle them without management involvement. To prove other skills, you may need to take advantage of the internal departmental opportunities where you are not on the phone, such as team meetings, co-ordinating social activities and volunteering for company initiatives, whether they are project-based or charity fundraising. As long as the right people can witness your efforts, it can all work towards you proving you have the right skills to progress When opportunities for progression are not available in your current employment, you need to look elsewhere. Sales recruitment agencies in Shropshire are a great place to start. As well as having offices which you can visit to discuss your options, sales recruitment agencies in Shropshire also have online vacancies listings so you can start searching immediately.