Advancing Your Marketing Career Might Bring Unexpected Responsibilities

So you have done your time in administrative and supporting marketing roles, and you have thoroughly learned your craft. Now you feel it is time to move into a position where you get to make decisions and help drive the marketing strategy forward. The prospect of taking on more marketing responsibility and playing a part in decision making can be an exciting time. But before you head along this road of career progression, take some time to consider what it will involve and what jobs will be right for you. Moving from supporting or delivery roles into management can bring with it a whole host of personnel-related responsibilities if your step up the career ladder involves line management. Responsibilities could involve standard HR issues and processes which are not specific to your industry and which might demand skills and competencies you have yet to use or learn in your current job. As a line manager you can be expected to manage performance, attendance, sickness, disciplinary and capability processes as well as managing recruitment to your area or team. While most companies will offer some HR support in these areas, it is wise to find out to what degree you will be responsible for the day-to-day aspects of these processes. If you are to be wholly responsible and you are looking for promotion within a company, then you should expect training. But whether you are trained or not, you will soon learn whether these aspects of work are for you or if they detract too much from doing the marketing job you love. If line management isn’t for you, then read job descriptions and role responsibilities closely before considering an application. When job searching with the help of marketing recruitment agencies in Wolverhampton, make sure the agency knows what you want and do not want to do. All is not lost, as there will be management level jobs which have no line management responsibilities and where you are responsible for managing and delivering a discrete area of work about which you make the decisions. Let marketing recruitment agencies in Wolverhampton know what you are keen to specialise in to help aid the search for your perfect job. Other options for avoiding personnel management while still progressing to more responsible marketing positions might involve moving from in-house to agency marketing work, where you will deal with clients rather than staff and get to focus your skills on developing strategies and campaigns. Or you could set yourself up as a marketing consultant. This is a very big decision to make and not one for the faint-hearted. As well as some kind of financial backing or security to carry you through the build-up of your business, you will also need to make sure you have had sufficient experience and qualifications to present a credible option to clients. You may find that you have to do your stint in the in-house management roles to get the right level of experience under your belt before heading down this route.

Making the Right Connections

Generating new leads, making contacts and building your network are all important parts of the sales process, but could you be wasting your time? The key to successful sales is to get through to the right person — the decision maker. It is true that you might have to meet a lot of people along the way before reaching the people with purchasing power, but that is only really worthwhile if you are making the right connections to get you nearer your goal. Expending too much energy with individuals who are never going to make the purchase and who cannot help you make the next connection can be a huge waste of time. What might be difficult at first is learning who will or won’t be able to help you make connections. It is always a good idea to befriend receptionists or PAs. While they won’t necessarily be in positions to introduce you to the right people, you may get the next best thing, which is access to direct contact. They may either be persuaded to put your call through to your identified contact, or they may be helpful in advising you on who the most appropriate contact would be in their organisation, whether or not they deign to direct your enquiry straight to them. Building your contacts is about quality rather than quantity. You will need to be able to research the market and the organisations of target prospects within it. In order to make the right connections, you will need to be knowledgeable about staffing structures and lines of responsibility within an organisation. Learn who has the power to make decisions or who is controlling the purse strings before you start making your advances. Time can be wasted if you choose to start off blindly just to see where it might lead. A one-off gamble might be worth it, but it is not sustainable when you have targets to achieve. Imagine you are looking for a new job and you know that one of the many sales recruitment agencies in Birmingham is dealing with the employer you would most like to work for. It makes sense that you would introduce yourself to that particular agency. Look at your sales approach in this way and you will stop pursuing hopeless leads and start researching your prospects more effectively. If you were actually looking for a new job, being knowledgeable about sales recruitment agencies in Birmingham will put you in a good position and mark you out as someone capable of doing their homework.

What’s Cooking in Shropshire’s Economy?

The current return to form for the housing market is having great effects on the Shropshire economy. Aga Rangemaster, which has a finishing factory in Telford, has reported an increase of approximately 25% in the sales of electric ovens. The sales are the result of both the build of new houses and the increase in the number of existing home owners making improvements to their own properties. It is an interesting reminder of how interlinked different industries can be and how the performance of one sector can so directly affect the fortunes of another. Further good news for the Shropshire economy came with the announcements from Stadco and Heinz. Stadco, which is a firm that makes car parts, announced a number of new jobs as part of the company’s expansion in Shrewsbury and Telford. The famous food brand Heinz is also planning to expand its local factory, creating around 80 new jobs for the area. Taking on additional staff is a clear indication that a company’s performance is strong enough to cope with the additional staffing costs, and also that there is sufficient optimism about the market and future orders that the additional output from the increased workforce will be taken up. All this is good news for sales and marketing teams. During the recession, it was often the case that the first jobs to go when companies needed to cut back were from the marketing and training departments. Rightly or wrongly, many companies saw marketing as an expense rather than an investment during the recession so would have cut costs in this area. Hopefully, the re-emergence of the economy from the recession will mean a return to more permanent in-house roles for marketing professionals where companies once had to manage with ad hoc support from outsourced services. The recent boosts to the economy might have positive knock-on effects for marketing recruitment agencies in Shropshire as businesses look to build on the growing sales opportunities. If you are looking for a change in your career, this could be a good time to send your CV to local marketing recruitment agencies in Shropshire. You can also always take the initiative and apply directly with speculative applications presenting what you can bring to the company should they be looking to hire. If you are to choose this approach, then keep a close eye on what’s happening in the local economy to see which firms are most likely to be hiring.

Would You Hire You Based on Your CV Alone?

If you were running one of the top marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire and you were looking for the best talent for an important client, would you consider your own CV to be amongst those good enough to impress? It can be difficult to know what part of your CV is going to stand out to potential employers, so it is a good idea to step away from the situation and ask yourself a question. Based on your current CV alone, would you hire you? It can be very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you will get to really sell yourself at the interview and forget that your CV has to sell you first before you get that far. So imagine that there are no interviews and no chances to give fuller explanations about your skills, experience and qualifications. Your CV has to do it all. In taking this approach, one skill you will certainly have to demonstrate is the ability to present detailed information in a concise and compelling manner. Most professionals looking for their next career move will have much more information to share about their career history than will fit on to two sides of A4. So how do you go about selecting and presenting the highlights which will grab the reader’s attention? For any job you apply for, there will be selection criteria that each candidate will need to meet. There may be lists of skills and experience which are essential or desirable, so it is your task to clearly illustrate how you meet all of the requirements. No two jobs will be the same, so be prepared to have more than one version of your CV. You may find that you can repeat some of the sections on skills, experience and qualifications from one application to the next, but make sure that your opening personal statement or summary is clearly tied to the requirements for each specific role. Another danger with CVs and trying to impress is that individuals can exaggerate the extent of their skills and experience. Another test for anything you claim on your CV is to prepare real examples and evidence of where and how you have deployed specific skills. You would be asked to do as much in your interview, so make sure you are prepared. Don’t be afraid to illustrate how your skills might be transferable and therefore relevant, even if they were gained within a different work environment or profession to the one you are applying for. The key is to focus on the competencies required to fulfil tasks and job roles and not just to mirror exact experiences. It is normal for marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire to request CVs, and also normal for them to interview you to assess your suitability for different roles and various clients. Again, don’t wait for the interview to show your best. The difference with your CV requirements when registering with marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire is that you will need a general overall CV to present the breadth of your capabilities and career history. It should be enough that they can gauge the range of roles they could put you forward for at a glance.

Branding

Building a successful brand requires you to grow a company that lives and breathes your brand values. Everyone from the front-line customer advisor through to the senior management team and CEO should all be practising behaviours which support and promote your brand values. The last in line to experience the brand is the customer, but it is by starting your brand engagement programme with them in mind that will help you map out the perfect brand journey. Once you have your internal brand engagement programme working effectively across all areas of your business, the output will be an excellent brand experience for the end customer. Building a strong brand has never been about simply getting your logo seen everywhere. It is about the entire customer experience: the interaction with sales or advisory staff; the effectiveness of administration; the performance of the product or service; the quality of after-sales service and much more. In order for every step in the journey to be successful, all behind-the-scenes operations and delivery elements need to be as fully immersed in your brand as the customer-facing elements. You can’t expect your staff to intuitively know what your brand is and how to live it, so it must be clearly communicated and training may be required. However, all aspects of the business should be delivering to the brand values. This means that how the staff are treated, how they feel valued within the business and how well they understand the contribution they make to the bigger picture are all part of the brand experience. It is easy to see that generating a truly successful brand will take more than just an effective marketing department. It requires a strong CEO and senior management team to lead from the top, an effective HR department and training team to roll out the brand across the workforce and well-equipped line managers to reinforce the brand values on a daily basis through performance management. The brand engagement strategy will be the corner stone for making it all happen, so you‘ll need a strong marketing professional to develop this for your company. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire can find whatever marketing talent you need to take your business forward. If you don’t know how to start looking for a brand engagement specialist, then let marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire steer you through the process. They will have seen hundreds if not thousands of skilled and experienced candidates over the years so will know where to find your perfect fit.

Local Figures or World-Class Names?

Celebrity endorsements or public appearances to support promotions can be a sure-fire way to get the press interested in your news. But how do you select the right person for your product? The reality may be that you have to make do with whoever is willing and available at the right price. For endorsement opportunities, you should aim for influential figures whose reason for fame is relevant to your product. For example, if you produce sports training kit or energy drinks and foods, you would want sports people to help promote them. In Warwickshire you have a host of famous sports names on your doorstep with the Warwickshire cricket team. The added bonus would be that these people have a local connection too, so it might be a little easier to persuade them to support your cause. When looking to attract the attention of the media or hard-to-reach service users, then the relevance might need to be more closely linked to names that the media or the target audience will know but may have no link whatsoever to the product or service itself. For example, think of schemes such as literacy campaigns to get boys reading. Footballers and sport stars are called upon to act as role models — not because they are intrinsically linked to literacy, but because they are likely to be of interest to the target audience. If in doubt, the target market needs to be convinced that if it is all right for the stars then it is all right for them. Over the years your PR team or agency will have built up relationships with lots of contacts. This can bring you that step closer to securing a celebrity figurehead. Sometimes it will be enough to have a local legend to support your cause, but bigger stunts might require household names to grab the attention you are after. Whatever your approach, you will need to weigh up the costs of the appearance fee against the predicted sales to ensure a good ROI. Above all, you need to be able to measure the impact. PR support can be an integral part of your marketing team. It is worth weighing up the cost of agency services if you outsource your PR against the cost of hiring in-house resource. If you can attract professionals with strong career histories and even stronger contacts lists, then they can be worth their weight in gold. Specialist marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire can help find the perfect recruit. Calling marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire could be your first step to PR success.