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.

Do You Know Your Elevator Pitch?

If you work in sales and you haven't got your elevator pitch prepared, you need to do so now. Your elevator pitch is named as such because it highlights a very limited period of time when you have a captive audience to whom you have the chance to communicate your offer or sales pitch. Looked at in a different way, it is a handy metaphor for reminding you that every opportunity, however small it may appear, is an opportunity not to be missed to communicate your brand. Larger organisations or those with a good marketing strategy will already have defined a company-standard elevator pitch. These will have been designed to contain the key agreed market messages which all employees can use to contribute towards communicating their brand. As a dedicated sales professional, you will find yourself in more potential selling situations than the average employee, so you will need to be able to adapt and tailor your pitch without compromising brand market messages in order to maximise the impact for your audience. While you may be great a reading a situation and quickly interpreting a prospect's purchasing drivers, you don't need to have to think on your feet to deliver the ideal pitch every time. Your experience will have taught you about a lot of common types of interactions and types of clients, so you can have a set of elevator pitches prepared in advance for use in different situations. Using these, you will find it much easier to adapt variations when you are faced with completely new circumstances. Once you have your elevator pitches ready, you need to become skilled at when and where to deploy them. Imagine that you have an elevator pitch about yourself and why you are a great sales person. This might be suitable to use on your first meeting with sales recruitment agencies in Staffordshire. However, it would be inappropriate to use when meeting your partner's parents for the first time. The example is a little extreme but it highlights the need to assess a situation and take account of the purpose of the encounter and its potential to lead to a sale. Returning to the analogy, imagine that your partner's parents are to become the in-laws. Had you indeed made your pitch upon first meeting them, you would not want that to come back to haunt you when they get to know you better and find out you are not everything you claimed to be. So too with your sales elevator pitch — while you will want it to make an impact and leave a lasting impression, you want it to lead to a sales relationship so it must stand up to scrutiny and not claim to promise anything you cannot deliver. As always with successful sales approaches, you want to be honest, knowledgeable and passionate about your subject. Your enthusiasm will be infectious and before you know it you will have your audience engaged. If this is the type of challenge that you thrive on but you don't work in sales, then maybe you should reconsider your career options. You will find that sales recruitment agencies in Staffordshire would love to hear from you and hear your pitch.

New Wave or Old School: Where Do Your Talents Lie?

When looking for the next great talent for their clients, marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham will need a variety of candidates to address the diverse needs of marketing departments in hiring companies as one size does not fit all. One marketing job can be a world apart from another. Within their talent pool they will also be looking for candidates with specialist areas of work and others with a broad handle on the entire marketing mix, whether at strategic or implementation level. If you are looking for your next marketing challenge, you may want to decide where you want your focus to lie. What is it that will determine which jobs you want to apply for? Is there a specific employer or sector you want to work with, or is it the nature of the remuneration package with a strong element of work-life balance that will draw you in? Do you want to focus on one specific area of marketing within a large marketing team, or do you thrive on jumping from one discipline to another where internal marketing resource is limited? If you have a broad range of experience and would rather go where the best offers are, then you will need to make sure you tailor your CV and applications to each role you apply for to bring to the fore the particular skills, knowledge or experience it demands. In recent years the scope for marketing has massively increased with the growth of the online arena — not only are websites a must, but you have the discipline of social media to master too as an everyday task. Along with these developments, consumers have also progressed and have become smarter at honing in on the information they are looking for and blocking out the unnecessary clutter which surrounds it. This makes it harder than ever for advertising to make an impact, which increases the demands being made on advertisers. The range of skills required to cover the marketing mix is huge, as the new vehicles haven’t necessarily replaced the old standards, such as print-based promotions and direct mail — they have simply added to the tools available to be used for different situations, media or audiences. Print production still has a big role to play in marketing and therefore so too do the skills required for this job, such as co-ordinating content, graphic design, copywriting, proofing and managing third-party suppliers such as printers. If you feel that your skills are best suited to the old-school marketing methods, then don’t worry that suitable roles are disappearing. Visit your local marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham or check out their websites to see what is currently being advertised. You may find that job titles have changed but that many tasks remain the same — or at least still require the same skill set even if some of the applications have moved on. Businesses will always need glossy brochures and events and exhibitions will always need attending. And no matter how green the agenda gets, there looks to be no end to direct mail and promotional inserts put through our letter boxes or tucked inside our newspapers.

Paper Still Has Its Place

The pace of change proceeds at such a rate in today’s digital age that it can be difficult to keep up with what’s hot and what’s not. It can be very easy to overlook the obvious easy exchanges that we can make as human beings. We rush to our electronic devices convinced that they will have a really clever and impressive way to do the very same things for us at the touch of a screen — if we could just bring up the right screen. Some people believe that to stand out from the crowd they need to stay one step ahead of their peers. While this is true to a certain degree, it is not always the case. Yes, technology may have brought great advances, such as access to information at speed or the ability to solve complex mathematical problems or facilitate intricate design and engineering. However, in a profession such as sales, as sales recruitment agencies in Shropshire will tell you, your success will depend on the building of good relationships, which is best done face to face, person to person. By all means, let technology enhance your presentations and allow it to illustrate and illuminate your product benefits, but never ask it to do your job for you — nothing will replace the human interaction. The same can be argued for paper. Hard-copy information that can be handled and passed around is a great way to communicate and promote your brand if used correctly. However, it is important to get the balance right, as too much can be wasteful, bad for the environment and leave the impression that you are behind the times. The simple exchange of business cards hasn’t lost its clean-cut effectiveness. Technology has had a positive impact on the use of hard-copy business cards, simply in that the advances in technology have meant that print items are now cheaper than ever. Additionally, there are many suppliers that will ensure they use recycled materials, so you don’t have to worry that using paper-based products is ignoring your green responsibilities. So you can stand out from the crowd precisely by not jumping on every electrically powered band wagon that rolls by. Don’t be afraid to stick to tried and tested means. If you visit any sales recruitment agencies in Shropshire, whether you have something to sell or you are in the market for a new job, it would be normal for an exchange of business cards to take place. It is simple and very economical.

Taking Centre Stage

If you are moving into or hoping to move into a career involving face-to-face sales, especially in the B2B environment, then you need to get used to delivering professional and productive presentations. If you have no experience in giving presentations, then it is a good idea to get some practice or formal training as you don't want to find out to your cost that you are out of your depth. If you are applying for jobs that will involve face-to-face selling via sales recruitment agencies in the West Midlands, then use the interview process with them as practice for your presentation skills. Ask for honest feedback and work on the pointers you are given. When it comes to separating the good presentations from the bad, preparation is everything. That doesn't just mean to make sure you know your product inside out. It also means making sure you know your audience. What is their role or purchasing driver in the process? It means being able to pace your presentation to make the optimum use of the time you have allotted to you. It means learning to understand the body language of your audience so that you can maximise the impact of your delivery to keep them engaged. And it means getting used to speaking in front of a lot of people. This can be nerve-racking at the best of times, and however much you know your stuff a total mind blank can happen to anyone. A fail-safe approach to preparing a great presentation can involve the creation of a set of prompt cards or a script. If you know your subject well enough, this shouldn't need to be something you read word for word. It can just be something to remind you of what's coming next and to store any complicated facts and figures that you need to get right. They can also be helpful aids to keep reminding you to keep speaking at a slow enough pace and to keep making eye contact with the audience — all things that can be forgotten when under pressure. Remember that some of your audience might not want to be there, so do your best to keep them engaged. Drop in the odd question now and then to regain their attention and steer your focus to any obvious areas of interest notable from their replies. It is a good skill to be able to read the body language of your audience to see if they are listening, interested and thinking about decisions or if they are bored, challenging you or have drifted off into other thoughts. Above all, be mindful of people's time, and never overrun on the time you have been allotted unless this has been agreed. Keep an eye on your timings and if you are running over, then skip to the main points you need to make. If the prospect of presenting to lots of decision makers doesn't fill you with dread, then you may well be cut out for a career in sales. Speak to your local sales recruitment agencies in the West Midlands to find out what opportunities are available.