Look a Little Further

Successful marketing isn’t always about promoting your products and services to the end consumer. Often you need to be able to market yourself as a keen supply-chain partner and find routes to deliver your services via a third party. So when you are looking at target markets, you should be keeping an eye on large firms that may require your services within whatever projects they are delivering. When they win business, you can win business too. Make sure you are taking full advantage of your location. Many council-run projects will have targets and strategic objectives to engage with local firms on the work they need doing. For example, earlier this month Coventry City Council announced plans to promote supply-chain opportunities for local businesses to work with Costain, which has won a council building contract worth £12.6 million. Collaborating with the Chamber of Commerce, they have come together to promote the local opportunities available through a drop-in day. This is an ideal opportunity for local companies to market themselves to the council as well as the major contract delivery partner Costain. While these may be building contracts, there are all sorts of suppliers that may be needed on projects and the ‘think local’ approach will apply as much to the hiring of employees as to suppliers. If you are an individual looking for your next career move, it might be worth contacting marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry to see if there are likely to be any sales or marketing-related opportunities arising. Communications might be a key area on big projects, along with PR, so it is worth enquiring. Announcements such as this recent one by the council are timely reminders that supporting council principles and objectives can put you in a good position when it comes to applying for preferred-supplier opportunities. Marketing teams can be preparing the ground for such opportunities by aligning their market messages to those areas important to the council, which will make the bidding process that much easier for the sales teams when the time comes. Marketing roles can open up a huge range of career opportunities for the keen candidate, as there are so many disciplines incorporated in the marketing mix. Get started with a general support role and learn where you would like to specialise as you build up your knowledge. For the latest opportunities in sales and marketing, visit specialist sales and marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry.

Feedback Is Always Good

When it comes to marketing your business, gathering feedback is always a good idea. Even when feedback isn’t good, it can be an invaluable way to identify areas for improvement, which in the long run is better for your service delivery and therefore better for your quality of offer. This is ultimately better for your market image. Feedback questionnaires can be easily located at any service outlet or can be included in the packaging or delivery of products where there is no on-site option. If you need feedback that isn’t linked to a specific purchase period, then the process could warrant a direct mail campaign, depending on the spread of your customer base. When the feedback comes in and it is good, this is excellent news for your business and your further marketing potential. Hearing positive things about a product or service from users is the next best thing to getting a personal recommendation. If you are able to poll a specific amount of people and gather enough returns, you will be able to convert your findings into percentages, which can be very effective in advertising and promotion — for example, 99% of service users said they would recommend us to a friend. Just make sure you have the correct sample size to be able to qualify your results and claims. When designing you feedback questionnaire, think about the questions you really want answering and try to be specific — rather than ask if the customer was generally happy with their purchase, ask if the item did the job it claimed to do. If it is a cheaper product, ask if it performed just as well or even better than more expensive alternatives. If it's managed in an organised and efficient way, you can quickly amass hundreds of accolades which can be a much better boost to your business profile than solitary case studies. Case studies are essential for any suite of marketing literature, but they can be time-consuming to produce and you’ll need to generate a good number of them to avoid them looking like ‘one-offs’. If your feedback questionnaire is not an on-site completion, then you may need to incentivise the return of forms with a date-dependent special offer or competition. Give your customers long enough to complete and return them, but don’t let the process drag on too long or you might miss the boat in terms of the impact you can make with the results. Be careful not to incentivise the return of questionnaires in such a way that encourages the respondents to fabricate the positive nature of their comments. You want honest feedback. Gathering customer feedback is just one of the many and varied tasks you might get involved in when working in marketing. If this sounds like the sort of thing you excel at, then visit marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire to find out what opportunities might be available. When you have used the service, you may find that marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire are seeking feedback from the candidates they see, so make sure you complete a form. Don’t worry — they are usually anonymous.

Time to Try Something New?

As it starts to get closer to the end of the financial year for most companies, budgets and forecasted spend will be revisited. Where resource budgets have not been completely used, this might present opportunities for companies to buy in temporary support to progress specific projects or areas of work. This is great news for those of you looking to try out something new without committing to a new career. Departments in companies which can benefit from temporary support resource often include marketing. More staff may be required when big campaigns are being planned and implemented, so if you think you have the right skills for a career in marketing, then keep your eyes peeled for temporary jobs that might be being advertised with marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire. If you think you might enjoy a career in marketing, but you aren’t sure if you have the right skills, you can always pop into one of the many marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire for a quick chat about your suitability. Because marketing presents so many different aspects of work, you may be surprised to learn of the many and varied skills that can be of great value. Often people make the mistake of thinking that marketing is all about creatives, advertising and networking skills. However, there are many more practical aspects such as planning and project management which require a completely different set of skills yet are equally as important. There are also some very detailed roles such as market research, data analysis and brand management, which all require a great attention to detail. There are many areas where you might have appropriate skills. When making a career move, it can be difficult to fully anticipate what the new role will involve, so getting some experience in a temporary position is a great way to test it out. Other benefits of taking temporary jobs include the fact that you get to find out more about working for different employers, which will help you decide what type of company you want to work for when you are ready to apply for permanent positions. If you are very lucky and find a temporary job that you love and which suits you perfectly, there can sometimes be the possibility of moving from temporary to permanent. This is sometimes known at the outset of a temporary contract, so it’s worth checking with your recruitment agency when you are considering different roles. Temporary roles can often be part-time, which is a great way to help support yourself financially if you are studying to equip yourself for your career move. If you are taking a marketing course and you can get hands-on marketing experience at the same time in a temporary marketing job, your learning will start to make sense a lot quicker as you start to see the theory put into practice. While many permanent roles will ask for official marketing qualifications as part the selection criteria, experience can be just as important if not more so. If you have both, then you have given yourself a great chance against other candidates.

Are You Still Looking For That Ideal Job?

Finding your dream job can be difficult. You can spend lots of time and energy trawling through vacancy listings in papers and online yet still fail to find that dream job. If you find yourself stuck in this kind of rut, then it might be time to seek help from one of the many marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands. What you might find is that the ideal job is there, and you may even have read the job description, but you won’t know it because you don’t know what a good fit you might be with the organisation. Fitting in with a company can count a lot towards your job satisfaction and potential for further career opportunities. Sometimes you just need to get in to get on. How do you go about choosing which agency to sign up with or is it worth registering with a few marketing recruitment agencies in the West Midlands? It is worth visiting a few agencies to see what reception you get and how interested you think they are in getting to know you. It is also worth looking at what companies each agency works with if there is an employer you are keen to work for. Register with the ones you feel are committed to helping you find your fit and who are not just going to push you forward for opportunities to make up the candidate numbers. It is important that the agency you choose spends time getting to know you in order to be able to match you to your ideal job. Agencies should have good knowledge of various companies’ cultures and working practices and be able to advise on where your personality type, work ethic and skills might be best suited. Agencies who work closely with employers will also be aware of the internal development programmes available. Before you start meeting agencies, it is a good idea to think back through your employment history and make a list of all the elements of different jobs that you liked and all those bits that you didn’t. You may be surprised to find that many of the likes and dislikes are not related to the job details itself but possibly are more related to the company culture, internal processes, standards and expectations and the development support to enable you to meet expectations. These are not things you’ll find in vacancy listings and wouldn’t find out until you start in a job. You can get a little more insight by working with recruitment agencies that are tasked to find the right fit.

Is Your Advertising a One-Off Gamble?

Advertising can be a costly business, but if planned and managed carefully it can yield great returns. However, reacting to a spur of the moment offer can be money down the drain. If you are a start-up business or an SME, you are unlikely to have vast sums of money to spend on advertising or to try to test things in order to find what works for you. You will no doubt find yourself bombarded by sales calls offering you any number of advertising spaces. However much they may seem a bargain, if you didn’t plan them then it is better to say no. The key to successful advertising is to have a strategy — know what you want to achieve and make a plan to achieve it. Do your research into what has worked for businesses or products similar to yours to ensure you are going to get a return on your investment. When you are planning your advertising strategy and campaigns, you need to be able to measure and qualify your spend, so a golden rule should be that if you can’t measure it then don’t pay for it. If you are on a very tight budget, it can be tempting to take up the ‘bargain’ offers that sales people may present to you, but you should resist making snap decisions. When it comes to ‘too good to be true’ advertising offers, another golden rule should be if it isn’t in the plan then don’t do it. Don’t be pressurised into making on-the-spot decisions, however good the offer on the phone sounds. If it wasn’t in your plan this time round, then decline. If you really think it is a good idea, then build it into the plan for the next round of advertising. If you are really being given the hard sell on what an advertising offer can ‘guarantee’ you in terms of responses and new business, then ask the provider to give it you for free and tell them you’ll pay them based on the return you get. Then see how confident they are about their ‘guarantees’. Research is vital if you want to get something back from your campaigns. Pick your advertising routes and vehicles carefully and then repeat. It is better to be advertising in fewer targeted locations frequently than it is to take a huge scatter-gun approach on a one-off campaign. One-off advertising is unlikely to yield much as there is so much other advertising to compete with, so you need to keep getting your message out there for it to start to make an impact. Working on advertising campaigns or in the advertising industry can be exciting, challenging and very creative. If you are looking for a role in advertising, it is likely that the marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham which you approach have been the most successful at frequent advertising. Their success in attracting you should give you the confidence that the same marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham are attracting the right jobs too.

Strong Pipelines for Sales and Growth

Chasing new business can be a never-ending task for the successful sales professional, but it needn’t be a race against time to find the next deal the minute you have secured the last one. Nor does it mean a life of constantly making cold calls and breaking the ice at endless networking events. There are many ways that you can build a strong pipeline which will give you a longer-term view of forthcoming opportunities and likely prospects. A pipeline takes the stress away from wondering where your next sales are going to come from and helps provide structure and an organised approach to the implementation of your new business strategy. Cold calls and following up on warm leads generated by telesales teams will form part of your pipeline creation. So too will the leads you pick up from your contacts and the connections that you make at networking events. However, these are not the only lines of approach. Keeping up with all industry knowledge is an important part of the sales process as you learn to anticipate who will be in need of what amongst your potential customers. You will already have identified your potential market. The next step is to keep abreast of changes which position companies nearer to the point of purchase. For example, sales recruitment agencies in Shropshire keep an eye on developments to gauge which companies are likely to be hiring in the near future. If your customers are within the public sector, then the opportunities for new business will be advertised in ways which present a level playing field to suppliers. Public-sector opportunities are often advertised in the form of tenders to which suppliers submit proposals and responses to bid documents. Approaches may vary slightly depending on the value of the contract and often there will be pre-qualification stages which must be passed before full tenders can be submitted. While public-sector tenders can appear to involve a long-winded process, the rewards can be great. As well as tenders for specific contracts, there are often opportunities to bid to become a council’s or public body’s preferred supplier, which will bring you ongoing business. The key to building your public-sector sales pipeline is to keep an eye on all the new tenders being published which are relevant to your business so that you have enough time to submit your proposals and responses before the deadlines. If you think a career in public-sector sales might be for you, then contact sales recruitment agencies in Shropshire to find out more.