Category: SEO

SEO

Attract & Retain: Get The Best Digital Marketing Talent…

The term digital marketing is a slight misnomer – let’s face it, any kind of marketing is just marketing. But make no mistake about it, it’s an important part of your armory these days, whether it’s to grow your business into new areas or just to keep up with the competition.

That said, the online marketing field can be a bewildering one for those looking in from the outside. If you struggle to get to grips with how social media can benefit your business, or don’t know your SEO from your CRO, how can you possibly hope to find the right talent to help you achieve your overall marketing goals?

As a consultant, I see this a lot – particularly in startups and small businesses. But, if you can get the online marketing right, it can help you compete against the major players in your industry, with a lot more resources. So it’s important to be able to attract – and retain – the best people your money can buy.

 

Let’s take a look at how small business and startup owners can source that talent, put it to good use, and get a good return on their marketing investment. Read on to find out more!

 

Understand the reality

First and foremost, you might think that every marketer out there would love to work for your company. After all, given that marketing is essentially about growth, what more could a marketer – online or otherwise – want more than to take a small company to enterprise size? The reality is those good online marketers have a huge range of opportunities open to them. You should also be suspicious of anyone knocking down your door to work for you if you haven’t got much to offer – going down that particular route will often lead to a lot more damage than success. The solution is to make sure you have a unique value proposition to offer potential candidates that help you stand out from everyone else. And that’s where this guide should – I hope – come in handy.

The short-term fix

Of course, you don’t have to start hiring full-time marketing employees. If you are in your nascent stages as a business, you will often be better off outsourcing rather than employing full-timers. This way, you only have to pay per project, and you won’t be paying wages, taxes, National Insurance, and benefits to people who have no work to do when your business goes through quiet phases. You can also expect to learn a little more about the online marketing world this way, so make sure you find a reputable consultant who is willing to talk things through with you – any freelance marketer or consultant worth their salt will do this for you as part of their package.

 

The must-nots

Before you start reaching out to potential online marketing employees, there are a few rules you need to abide by. Firstly, throwing vast sums of money in an attempt to compete with other employers isn’t going to work. You won’t be able to match what an enterprise-level company can offer in financial terms – even if you outgun them on wages, they will beat you on benefits. And anyway, money and perks are only part of the equation. As a startup, you should be looking at bringing to the fore all those intangible benefits that you get from working with a startup. We’re talking about things like giving candidates the opportunity to work in an exciting and flexible environment that you just can’t have in the corporate world.

 

The must-haves

It’s also important to have a few things in place before you start hiring people. As you become a bigger company, you should be ensuring you have a safe workplace. There is no room for cutting corners, here – it’s the law. Managing larger teams will have it’s own inherent problems, too, so there are a few things to consider. You’ll need help with the human resources side of things for issues like drawing up contracts and employee absence management. It’s also worth trying to find someone to head up your marketing team – someone who has an understanding of the online marketing world and can help you with your hiring decisions. Finally, it’s a good idea to establish your company culture – what are you about, how can you sell your team and vision to a candidate, and what is exciting about your product or service?

 

Highlighting opportunity

OK, so now all the basics are in place, you should have a better understanding of how you might attract people – in theory. But when it comes to actual practice, how does this work? Well, firstly, you need to have a good idea of the opportunity on offer at your company, in real, quantifiable terms. Marketers – good ones, at any rate – are the type of people that want to see figures, and imagine how they can improve them. So, make sure you know everything possible about your current market to grab their attention from the outset. Who is your current market, and how are you addressing them? What problems are you finding, and what is the total market opportunity that can be tapped into? The idea here is to challenge the marketing candidates, get their brains working, and start thinking about how they can help you straight away. If you can offer them an awesome opportunity and progression (more on which in a moment), money may not even come into it if their bright ideas can guarantee you results.

Highlighting investment

Ultimately, if you want to attract and retain talent, you’ll need to show how you invest in your employees. Progression is important to candidates, as they will want to climb up the ladder and become successful in their own right. And as a small business, that passion to self-grow is something you want to see in every employee – you can’t afford to take on coasters. You’ll need to have a rough idea of what that progression looks like, too, so be prepared to discuss their role in three months, six months, or even a year in advance. Finally, it’s important to understand that interviews are not the one-way process you might think they are – your online marketing candidates will be interviewing you as much as you are them. Good luck on your search!

 

SEO

Things To Consider When Setting Up Your Small Business

Setting up your own business is a great way to take control of your career and independence and get out of the rat race than can bring you down. When you’re your own boss, you make all of the decisions, which is great in many ways but it means that the buck stops with you if something goes wrong. To set up your own business, you’ll need to make sure it’s 100% the right decision for you, so consider the following to help you work out if setting up your own business is the right move for you.

Is your business your passion project?

Setting up a business is no easy feat, and if things start to go wrong, or you start running into difficulties, will you be able to retain the enthusiasm to keep you going? Most people who set up their own businesses do so because they’re passionate about what they do, but if your heart is only half in it, or you’re simply bored and looking for a change in direction, you could find your business failing because you don’t have the drive to see it through.

How will you get started?

Do you have any ideas for how you’re going to get your business off the ground? How can you begin and how will you gather the funds to get it started. Do you have savings or someone willing to invest? Have you explored all avenues such as http://www.sage.co.uk/business-advice for advice on launching your startup? There’s a lot of research to be undertaken before you get started, so you must be prepared to put in a lot of hard work before you even get started on planning.

How will you manage money?

How will you manage money coming in and going out of your business? Could you survive if someone doesn’t pay an invoice on time? Getting a tight grip on your business’ finances is important from the outset, and you may wish to try spot cash loans or factoring as explained here: http://www.interstatecapital.com/spot-cash-loans-vs-factoring/, to help you manage your business’ cash flow. You’ll need to make sure that you have contingencies in place as well as some savings in case you are faced with unexpected business costs.

Will you need additional staff?

Can your business operate with just you or will you need additional staff? Can you afford to pay salaries when you first set up your business? It may be that you can’t afford to hire more people at the beginning and could look at hiring freelancers instead to do work as an when is needed (more info available here: http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2014/02/17/freelance-vs-in-house-which-should-you-hire/). When you start a business, and other people are involved, you need to be sensitive to the fact that they have homes, families, etc. to pay for and support and you’ll need to make sure that you can pay them before you start your business.

Once you get your business started, make sure you tell people about it. Social media packages from marketing professionals can take care of the hard work of running your social media accounts to help raise awareness of your business and its services. This leaves you to focus on running your business and making it a success.

SEO

Speed Up Your Website

If you run a business, there’s no doubt about it – you need a website Not only that, but your website needs to be fast.

Internet connections are faster than ever before, and this means that users will not be happy to wait around for a website to load due to failures at your end. Slow websites will also be penalized by Google making it harder for customers to find your site in the first place. So, yes, speed really does matter, and it should be a priority for you if you’re serious about marketing and selling online.

To help you speed up your website, here are some tips:

Hire the Right Staff

The best thing you can do to ensure that your website stays up and running and up to speed is to hire a good network support services team, who have their eye on the ball and know exactly what is required to make your website and your network fast, simple and convenient to use. If you outsource, this should not set you back too much, and it will be worth every penny to have a reliable site up and running.

Size Images

Images take up a lot of space, and they can take a lot of time to load if they’re too big, which is why you should be using a content management system for uploading content to your website, and why you should be using it to adjust the sizes of your images, so that they don’t slow your website down.

Ditch Unneeded Plugins

There are so many free plugins that promise to make your website bigger and better, that it’s easy to get tempted into using them all, but the more plugins you have, the more sluggish your website will be. So, stick to the essentials if you want to see your speed increase.

Update Your Scripts

Many scripts that are commonly used by businesses need to be regularly updated. Sadly, many business owners are not aware of this, and they don’t make the necessary changes. This causes their websites to slow down, and they lose a not insignificant amount of business as a result. If you don’t want this to happen to you, check and update your scripts as soon as a new version becomes available.

Use Content Delivery Networks

Content Delivery Networks are huge networks of servers that are located all over the world. If you use them, your website’s visitors do not have to rely on coming through your web host’s central server, which will be a lot slower than CDN’s and which are much less likely to crash at an inopportune moment, because they enable visitors to access cached versions of the site from their closest web host.

Have CSS Files at the Top and Javascript at the Bottom of Pages

If you do this your website’s code will be a lot neater and this will ensure that pages load more quickly, crash less often and always look as intended. This is perhaps the best thing you can do to give your visitors a pleasant and efficient experience when visiting your site.