Marathon Marketing Efforts

When employees go beyond the letter of their job descriptions and do whatever it is that needs doing to get the job done, we often describe such efforts as going the extra mile. Whether it's in the spirit of awareness raising, charitable fund-raising or simple marketing activity, many charities and organisations will be benefiting from the efforts of swathes of runners going the extra 26.2 miles as they take on the challenge of a marathon. With several marathons taking place at the weekend, literally thousands of enthusiastic runners took to the streets of cities across the country to achieve personal goals. Many were also raising money for charity. Later in the month, Warwickshire will play host to two marathons. Along with the thousands of participants, the streets are equally crowded with thousands of supporters, so it is easy to see why these big events are such a draw for advertisers. The opportunities for promotion at marathon events are many and varied. From having a presence at the race village to proving goodies in the race bag at the end for all the finishers, there are many places to get your products seen. Advertising spaces are available on websites and in race booklets and advertising hoards along some of the routes. For those with larger budgets, the sponsorship opportunities abound. These are obvious draws for companies with runners as a target market, whether it is a sports brand for footwear and training gear or a producer of energy drinks and supplements. But marketing companies do well to look for connections which aren’t immediately obvious but have logical links, such as producers of deodorants, plasters, lip balm or sun screen. As well as the obvious advertising and promotion opportunities which marathons present, they can also provide great opportunities for employee engagement. With some marathons now offering relay challenges, this can be a great way to get a company team together. This gives the company a team to be proud of and support as well as raising the awareness of the company amongst the local community. Alternatively, you can encourage a running group that wants to run a marathon together. Of course, on the day your team can run in company-branded running vests. As a boost to your Corporate Social Responsibilities, you can use such efforts to raise money for a local charity. Many companies already support schemes where they match funds raised by employees when they are raising money for charity, and marathons are a popular vehicle for such personal efforts. Remember that when you are recruiting you want to attract the very best in talent, so make sure that the marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire which are supporting your recruitment know how to promote your employee engagement activities. Offering a great all-round experience for employees so that they really feel they belong and that they are part of a team can be extremely important. Your prospective candidates don’t have to be runners to appreciate the efforts an organisation will go to in supporting worthwhile and challenging employee-engagement opportunities. Likewise, if you want to work for an organisation which values employee-engagement activities, then speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire for more information.

How much to ‘Make Up’ at Interview

First impressions last, and however much we would rather they did not, appearances can make a difference regarding how people will perceive and judge you. So when it comes to dressing for that all-important interview, the classic conundrum of what to wear raises its head. For ladies the scenario is further complicated by the issue of how much or what type of make-up to wear or whether it should be worn at all. Deciding what to wear for interview is never easy so it is always better to play it safe. Some candidates find out what the general company dress code is before their interview so that they can dress in a similar fashion, but even this can be a mistake. Remember, you don’t work there yet so you still need to use your attire to help convey the right image about you. The same might be said about make-up too. While make-up can be a confidence booster for some women, it can also be a factor by which they are judged. As with your clothing, make-up should be conservative and subtle. You are not entering a beauty contest and nor are you preparing for a night out on the town. However much you might think that bold, bright make-up is simply a reflection of your strong personality, try to tone it down for interview. You want to look smart and professional and show that you have made an effort to be well presented. If you don’t normally wear make-up, then stick to that approach. Trying to get to grips with what works as make-up for you can take a long time, so there is a good chance that you won’t get it right and could end up feeling uncomfortable if you are worried about how it is looking. This would be an extra thing to worry about before your interview which you don’t need. When looking for your next job, there are many good reasons why you should consider registering as a candidate with marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire. As well as having the direct access to employers with vacancies, marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire can also help you sharpen up your application approach and help you fine-tune how you present yourself during a recruitment process. When you sign up with marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire, you will go through their own candidate vetting process, which is a great way to test your overall performance in a recruitment scenario and get constructive feedback from the experts.

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.