If you’re struggling to find the time to build or maintain a business blog yourself, you may need some outside support. Here’s my step-by-step guide to engaging freelance support for those who have never done it before.

Step 1

Don’t put it off any longer – decide once and for all whether you will be able to find the time to populate your business blog yourself. If you decide you can, be sure to set some time aside each week to make it work for you on a consistent basis. Don’t make your blog a one or two post wonder! Treat it with the same importance you treat any other aspect of your business. This can be difficult because there’s no deadline as such, like there is when you file your accounts for example. But consistency is key, so if you decide you don’t have the time to do your business blog justice, move on to step 2.

Step 2

Approach one or more copywriters and ask some of the following questions., depending on how much support you’re looking for and what you need to know to put your mind at rest.

Step 3

When you have spoken to a couple of freelance copywriters, hopefully, you’ll feel more confident in appointing one. If it gives you additional peace of mind most freelancers are used to working on a trial basis or even on a one-off basis, so you could start small and build up. You’ll still need to pay them for their time, even if you’ve agreed to a trial run, but explain you need to feel confident with how the process is going to work, so you’d only like to commit to a small number of blogs before confirming a long-term agreement. In the long run, it is worth engaging someone to supply copy consistently. They’ll get to know you and your business better than if you use several freelancers or start and stop with the same writer. Ask them to drive the programme though, to put ideas forward for content, research material and write content. If they are supplying a consistent number of blogs for you each month you can also agree a fixed price per month. This means you know where you stand and are only paying what you can afford. It’s also a good way to protect you from hidden extras or uncertainty if you pay by the word, or by the hour.

Step 4

Once you have a copywriter in place, view them as part of your team. Just as you might work with an external accountant for their specific expertise, a copywriter is there to deliver hassle-free content that will boost your profile. They should want what’s best for your business and to help you succeed, so answer their questions and give them the information they need. A little input upfront should make the long-term process much simpler and hassle-free for you.

Step 5

Once they have the information they need, your copywriter should be able to draw up a Content Plan for you to approve. This will be a list of suggested topics that you have come up with between you, laid out in a month-by-month or week-by-week plan. I often find as soon as this plan is in place, clients can see how the whole process is going to work. They relax because they can see they have full visibility of what I’ll be doing for them and when. There are no ethereal promises that are easily broken – the plan is there in black and white for all to see. Of course, things change, and all parties need to be a little flexible – perhaps you’ll decide to launch a new product or service and you want your blog to focus on that, or your copywriter might bring a new event or trending topic to your attention that you want to comment on – but if that happens, the plan should be updated, so everyone still knows where they stand.

Step 6

Once you get to this stage in the process, you should be able to take more of a back seat and let your copywriter do their job. You know what they’re writing about and when they’ll be writing it, so the next you should hear from them is when their e-mail pings into your inbox with a draft blog for you to approve. You might have some feedback at this point with some changes you’d like to make, but in time, it’s not too much to expect your copywriter to learn your voice and deliver content that is right first time. Most copywriters will have a set number of edits they’re happy to perform on any one piece of writing at any stage in the process anyway, so if a bit of to-ing and fro-ing is needed upfront, you don’t need to pay any extra to get it right. Hopefully, they’ll be reliable into the bargain, and you’ll come to know when to expect the latest blog in your inbox. If there’s a good time for you to set aside in your schedule to check a post, let them know and ask that they work to that deadline each week, or each month.

Step 7

Depending on your up-front agreement, the post may now be in your hands to upload, or you may give written approval for your copywriter to upload the blog post for you. It’s worth putting it in writing – even if just an e-mail that says ‘post approved’ to protect yourself and your copywriter. If your copywriter is also taking responsibility for accompanying images, make sure you get these sent to you at the same time as the copy to make it as hassle-free for you as possible.

All that’s left now is for you to sit back (or continue dashing around at the rate of knots running your business) and enjoy seeing your business blog grow and become a genuinely useful source of information for your existing and future customers.

 

 

 

If your understanding of the startup world is based on the series produced by (and starring) mid-noughties nerdy heartthrob, Adam Brody, it might surprise you to learn that most tech ventures aren’t funded by dubious dosh from the criminal underworld. That isn’t to say that StartUp isn’t an entertaining show, by the way, but it’s not exactly an accurate representation of how startup founders might seek investment.

While there are some great examples of companies that have ‘bootstrapped’ their way to billions, most successful tech businesses will raise equity finance at some stage in their scale-up journey — usually over several funding rounds. The right investment not only unlocks the cash you need to accelerate growth but also provides you with a new business partner who is aligned with your goals, brings business acumen and an invaluable network of industry contacts.

Knowing how to turn your venture into an investment magnet is key to getting the attention of the right type of investor while never feeling pressured to settle for a bad fit. So, how do you as a startup founder attract that perfect investor? Here are 6 qualities investors will be looking for in your tech startup.

1. Passionate founder(s)

As a startup founder, being passionate about your project should be a prerequisite. If not, then it’s probably the wrong venture for you. You need to truly believe in the product/service you want to provide and be confident that it’s either an improvement on what’s available on the market or an entirely new take on addressing an old problem.

Beyond your bright idea, you should also be mindful that investors are investing in you as much as they are in your business. Are you able to distil and describe the journey you’ve been on thus far? Can you showcase your passion, skill-set and creativity?

However, while passion per se is great, would you put your money where your mouth is? Most investors are looking for founders who are willing to invest their own capital — hypothetically, at the very least. After all, why should someone part with their hard-earned cash for your project if you’re unwilling to do the same? The same applies to investing your time. If you’re unwilling to work hard on your own project, then it’s unrealistic to expect anyone else to.

To get your business off the ground, you’ll have to — or will have had to — raise the initial capital yourself. This can come from your own savings, borrowings, or even friends and family. Either way, this is a concrete example of demonstrating that you believe in your product/service, so much so that you’re willing to invest money into it.

2. Traction

To be worthy of investment, any new product/service needs to have a proven market and be appealing to that market. Ideally, your venture will have begun operations and demonstrated an ability to sell that product or service — essentially, you need to have a robust ‘proof of concept’ to show investors. Investors will look for the following:

For a tech startup, the proof of concept is often an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) — a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and provide adequate feedback for future product development. Through our experiences building brilliant launchpad apps for businesses, we’ve come up with a checklist to help you get started with your MVP ASAP.

3. Growth potential

Most investors are looking for business opportunities that have potential — primarily, for growth. This is all relative, of course, based on the size of your market, but ideally, you need to have a market with significant reach — regionally at least — depending on the nature of your product or service.

Not every product/service is going to have a worldwide market, of course, but a large enough market to increase scale and margins within your operations is typically a requirement for investors.

If your startup is a would-be disruptor in an existing, saturated market then the same rules apply. However, your growth potential is likely to be deeply scrutinised because any market share gained is being taken directly from a competitor, therefore your competitive advantage needs to be demonstrable.

4. Competitive advantage

Which leads us on nicely…

No matter what the product — whether it’s clothing, music or a new software platform — the same question always applies: what makes your product unique? To be worthy of investment, there has to be something that sets you apart.

If your product or service is genuinely the first of its kind (something that many founders wrongly convince themselves is the case), then that’s your competitive advantage. What’s more likely, however, is that your startup will be entering an existing market. This is where having a real differentiator is crucial for success.

Take German neobank, N26, for example. Voted ‘Best Bank in the World 2021’, N26 is by no means the only player in the online-only banking market — competitors include the likes of Monzo and Revolut. However, by taking a service that people have to consume and generally dislike (banking), and turning it into an enjoyable process by focusing 100% of its efforts on user experience, N26 has confidently positioned itself as ‘the bank you’ll love’.

5. Key team members

To save on cost, most startups will have very limited staffing (at the start of their journey, at least), usually consisting of one or two founders. Whether it’s a team of two or ten, the number of staff isn’t an issue so long as the key areas of the business are covered. For example, if your business is centred around AI technology, do you have someone in the team who is a specialist in this area? It’s extremely important that you have an expert in the tech or market you’re entering.

Operating control is another area investors will be looking at before taking a punt on your startup. They’ll expect you as the founder to have developed (or be in the process of developing) policies and procedures to control the business and ensure their investment doesn’t go to waste.

It’s also important that as a founder, you’re able to ‘let go’ and delegate authority across your team. We get it, your startup is your baby, but over time, you need to trust someone else to take care of the proverbial nappies. Or bedtime story. You get the gist. Investors will take comfort in seeing expertise and autonomy spread across a fully engaged team.

6. Exit strategy

The coldness with which investors approach this topic can be a bit of a shock, but getting into their mindset — ie. looking for a return, can keep you focused on what’s important for your startup. It’s important to know that from a financial perspective, investors will have two primary questions when looking at a project:

  1. How much do I need to invest and when do I have to invest it?
  2. How much will I get back and when will I get it?

These questions can be answered by a thorough financial projection which you can do yourself, but if you’re struggling, there are people you can hire to help out.

Essentially, investors want to know what their ROI (return on investment) will be and when they’ll begin to see it, so including a full ROI analysis in any pitch to an investor is highly advised.

 

At Gravitywell, we love working with enthusiastic startups and help with prototypes, pitch decks, MVPs and conceptual work. If you’d like to discuss how we can take your idea to the next level, get in touch.

If you manage a website that is extremely large or a site that contains content which is very regularly updated, it’s important to prioritise the pages you want Google to pay attention to. If Googlebot is just left to crawl and index the site as and when it pleases, it’s extremely likely that Google will attempt to crawl far too many pages at once – which can lead to a number of issues such as multiple parallel connections overwhelming your servers, or Google automatically prioritising unimportant pages whilst ignoring pages that are extremely valuable to you as a business.

As a result, pages within your site that could potentially rank really well in organic Google search results may instead be completely disregarded. For example, Google could easily choose to prioritise a standard About page which is purely informational and doesn’t directly drive conversions, in place of a core product page which has the potential to rank well at the top of Google whilst also directly driving multiple sales on a daily basis.

So… how can we control what Google crawls and indexes and how do we prioritise the pages that are important to your business?

How to control Googlebot’s Crawl Budget and get your web pages indexed

Crawl Budget’ is the term used to describe the volume of resources and time that Google devotes to crawling an individual site. This crawl budget is determined by two main factors – your crawl capacity limit (the maximum number of simultaneous connections that Google can use to crawl a site AND the duration of the delay between fetches) and the crawl demand (how important Google deem a crawl of the site to be, depending on the size of the site, it’s popularity, how often it is updated and so on).
Your Crawl Capacity can vary depending on a number of factors, including:

Crawl Demand can also vary, depending on the following factors:

Notes: Site wide updates such as domain changes or site moves can also trigger an increase in crawl demand, as Google will detect that all of a site’s URLs have been updated and so will need to be reindexed.

So, now that we know what factors impact your crawl budget, how do we help ensure that we maximise your crawling efficiency, using this information? Luckily, Google has also provided a list of Best Practices for this sort of thing.

Best Practices for Googlebot Crawl Budget Management

There are a number of tools and methods that you can use to tell Google which pages within your site are really important to you – those which you really need to rank within organic Google searches. These include:

  1. Maintain your sitemaps
    It’s important that you keep your website sitemaps up to date. Google regularly reads sitemaps that have been submitted to Google Search Console and so it’s important to remove unimportant content from your sitemaps, whilst also ensuring content that you do want indexed has been included. Google Search Central contains a guide on building and submitting a sitemap, should you need it.
  2. Block URLs
    Take the URLs within your site that you don’t need crawled and block them from Googlebot. Any pages that you don’t want to appear within organic search results should be excluded from indexing. This can be instructed using your robots.txt file or Google’s URL Parameters tool.
  3. Remove all soft 404s
    Soft 404 errors will repeatedly be crawled, despite returning an error code. These repeated crawls will be using up your crawl budget which would be much better spent elsewhere. You can check the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console to check any soft 404 errors being generated by your website.
  4. Use 404/401s
    Return a 404 or 410 error for permanently removed pages. A 404 error (not a soft 404) will indicate to Google that you do not want the page in question to be crawled again. This is arguably better than blocking URLs as blocked URLs will still stay part of a crawl queue for longer than a URL generating a 404 or 401.
  5. Eliminate duplicated content
    Consolidate any duplicate content within your website. By eliminating duplicate content, crawlers can instead focus on crawling unique content.
  6. Avoid redirect chains
    Redirect chains can have a detrimental impact on crawling – find out more about redirect chains and how they can impact your website.

So now that you understand more about Googlebot’s Crawl Budget and how best to manage it – as well as Google’s Best Practices – what’s next? Aside from the above, it’s also incredibly important to make sure that your pages load efficiently and that you regularly monitor your site crawling.

If you’re interested in how to best monitor your site’s crawling and indexing as well as the key steps Google recommend during this process, you’re in luck – part 2 of this blog, ‘Googlebot Site Crawling and Indexing – 5 Key Steps You Should Know’ is coming soon, so check back regularly for updates.

If you have any questions regarding this or would like experienced SEO professionals to take a look at your website on your behalf, the Technical SEO team here at Varn would love to hear from you. Simply drop us an email at [email protected]

Not everyone that wants a business blog can be expected to come up with ideas for regular content and produce beautifully written posts while successfully running their business. Some business owners enjoy writing but acknowledge they don’t have the skillset, while others hate writing but feel it’s something they should do to promote their wares. Others are great writers but are rushing the posts through because they don’t have the time to dedicate to the process.

Ever considered outsourcing?

If this sounds like you, don’t be afraid to look into outsourcing your blog. A business blog copywriter will ghostwrite your posts, so your blog will still sound like you and your audience will think that you’ve written it. You can have as much or as little input into coming up with themes and topics as you wish, but you will always approve content before it goes live, so you can be sure that all copy remains on message. If you want to dip your toe in the water with a copywriter, you might even be able to split the workload and share your blog with an external writer so that between you, you’re able to produce more content for your website.

Top tips to improve your written content yourself

If outsourcing the work isn’t an option for you, and you feel you have the time and space to create quality content yourself, there are still things you can do to make sure your blog posts do your business justice.

  1. Use the spelling and grammar check in Word, or go one step further and use a service like grammarly.com – there’s a free version and a paid-for version, depending on how much support you feel you need. It’s easy to get swept along with a train of thought when you’re writing and in those instances speed to download what’s in your head can overtake precision on the keyboard! That’s why using some form of spelling and grammar check when you’re all finished, is a great way to double-check what you have put on the page.
  2. Read your post out loud to yourself. This may be harder if you’re in an office full of people, but it’s honestly worth doing. More often than not, when we speak the words we have written aloud, we spot mistakes we have missed while reading the prose to ourselves. They seem to jump off the page and become much more obvious somehow. You can also employ freelance proofreaders, who will check your copy for you before you post it. It’s always easier for someone else to spot errors in your work, than it is for you to spot your own.
  3. Stay true to your vision. I find it useful to keep the goal for my business blog and my audience in front of me when I’m writing. It’s easy to go off on tangents once you get in a rhythm, but it’s important to remember what you want to say and who you want to say it to. What do you want to get across to your audience about your business and your offering? Is the post you’ve just written achieving that goal, or could you make it clearer?

 If you’re clear about what you want to say and to who, and you allow time to check and double-check the quality of the content you have produced, you are well on your way to producing quality blog posts that will get read.

Digital is the status quo 

We’re all doing our best to meet the ever-growing demand for organisations to ‘go digital’.

Whether we’re trying to reach more customers, more effectively market our products and services, minimise our carbon footprint or deliver more cost-effective business solutions, finding a digital – and in many ways more accessible – solution is pretty much today’s standard course of action.

The opportunities when we meet a new audience in a new space are obvious. But what about the pitfalls?

The potential for being misunderstood, taken out of context, or having your brand diluted across multiple platforms becomes more likely – especially when considering the speed at which online content is delivered.

And it’s for this reason that our brand identity becomes even more important.

What are brand guidelines?


Your brand guidelines are the rules which determine how your brand is presented to the world. It usually contains information about your brand name and how it’s used, your corporate logo, brand colours, fonts, tone of voice etc.

Your brand guidelines should clearly illustrate how your brand identity is portrayed and communicated to consumers, providing a reference point for employees and clients alike.

And we need them, because when your brand remains consistent, it remains recognisable. 

Research has shown 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support. And when we think about it, it makes complete sense.

Imagine you nip into your local corner shop to buy a bottle of Coca Cola. Only, the label on the bottle looks strange. In fact, it’s not the typical Coca Cola red at all – it’s bright orange.

And, come to think of it, the font looks different too: It’s narrower than you remember. And not as cursive. Plus, the bottle’s neck is slightly longer. But the drink is still claiming to be authentic, traditional Coca Cola – what’s the likelihood this is a fake?

Maybe you risk it. Or maybe you pick the more familiar-looking bottle of Pepsi, instead.

According to PwC’s consumer insights survey, customers selected trust as their number one reason for choosing a retailer. And how can you expect customers to trust your brand if you don’t remain consistent?

The need for maintaining brand consistency across platforms is critical, because it promotes authenticity and trust. In fact, ensuring a consistent representation of your brand can increase revenue by as much as 33%.

With 80% of consumers agreeing that a signature colour increases brand association and recognition, the importance of sticking to your guidelines – is hard to overstate.

 What about having a refresh? 

There’s nothing wrong with intentionally refreshing your brand. In fact, updating your branding every few years ensures you stay modern, and reflects your company’s ability to evolve with the times.

But with any brand refresh, your guidelines need to be refreshed too.

Many organisations keep their brand guidelines in a PDF or printed format, meaning you’ll need to factor in time-consuming tasks: updating your documents, checking and proofing them, making amends, artworking them and having them signed off – all this on top of your rebranding process.

But there is a better way.

Digitising your brand guidelines allows for quick and resource-light updates to guidelines, that are quick to roll out and distribute to all relevant stakeholders.

Creating digital brand guidelines

A digital brand guideline ‘book’ can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, and on any device – without the trouble of having to locate a physical copy, or share a long-lost PDF that’s buried on your desktop. Simply share the link, and go.

At Proctors, we use Webflow to create and update our clients’ digital brand guidelines. Whether they’re used by your colleagues, your customers, media or external business partners, making your guidelines accessible on Webflow gives everyone clear direction on presenting your brand consistently.

Even better, with Webflow, elements such as your logos, fonts and colours can be downloaded by anyone you share the link with. So in today’s digital first world, your media partners or social media managers can remain responsive when it comes to pushing out branded content.

Plus, with digital-first increasingly the norm, companies who use motion graphics in their brand elements can demonstrate real, live examples in their digital brand guidelines book too – something which isn’t possible in other formats.

Even large organisations with lots of different sub-brands can benefit from Webflow’s flexibility. It’s a quick and efficient process to create and update your guidelines, whether you need to edit just one page or to build and deploy several branding ‘chapters’. Plus, any changes or updates can be highlighted on the landing page, so all employees are made aware of them.

With Webflow’s no-code format, any brand refresh updates can be easily executed by your marketing team, meaning you’ll save masses of time on updates. Not to mention avoiding the need to print – and that’s one big environmental benefit.

Scaling up with Webflow

If you want your brand to remain trusted in the digital era, you need to practice consistency.

With easily accessible guidelines, you’ll be able to ensure you’re presenting an authentic brand. So you can reach more customers, and more effectively market your businesses.

If you’d like to find out more about our digital brand guideline services, or any of the other services we offer, talk to us today at [email protected].

One recent study* found that companies who oriented their services and operations around customers, employees, and partners experienced 6.5 times the profit growth compared to those that didn’t.

Despite this evidence for the power of customer centricity, we know that far too many companies are under-investing in customer experience.

That’s because being customer-centric is easy to say, but hard to put into practice, and even harder to know if you’re on the right track!

As a User-Centred Design company, we’re on a mission to help organisations thrive through employing better customer-centric practices.

That’s why we’re inviting companies that run scaled services for customers to join a study that we’re conducting in collaboration with Google, into how companies orient around their customers.

In exchange for contributing to the study, they will receive a benchmark of their customer-centricity score against the rest of the market, plus some unique insights into how to put together a programme of low-cost improvements, free of charge. All we ask is that companies commit to completing a survey by mid-November.

The deadline is the end October, so sign up to become a contributor here https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/customer-centricity-model

We’d love YOU to be part of the study because companies that deploy good user experiences that meet human needs know that improvements in loyalty, revenue and market share follow.

We work every day with organisations to execute programmes that embed User-Centred design into their operations. This takes time and care, but the results are not only impactful in the short term, but set organisations up for sustainable success, and an ability to ride-out storms that may occur in the future.

We’re working with Google to solve this. Through this unique study and campaign that we’ve devised, we’re looking to support organisations in investing in the initiatives that will help them become more customer-centric – and thrive.

By participating in this study as a contributor, you will be joining Europe’s top 200 brands including Farfetch, Europcar, Toolstation, giffgaff and Burberry.

Please sign up here, and we look forward to working with you

https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/customer-centricity-model

 

*https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/insights/interactive/business-of-experience

Bristol-based digital design and development agency, Unfold celebrated success on 14th October 2021, taking home the title of “Best Digital Design” at The SPARKies 2021. This was awarded for the transformational work they completed for their clients Sherpr.

The SPARKies is one of the year’s most hotly anticipated tech awards ceremonies in the South West. Since Managing Director, Harry Cobbold won ‘FutureSPARK’ back in 2019, Unfold has been nominated for several other categories (including ‘Tech Leader of the Year’ this year). The ceremony was held at The Showroom on Bath Road and was joint hosted by the TechSpark team and comedian Stephen Bailey (who had everyone in stitches).

Sherpr came to Unfold with two problems;

Unfold built a custom web app, admin portal and marketing site for Sherpr in just 10 weeks. This completely transformed their business. As well as automating all of the time-intensive back office tasks, Unfold also created an editable CMS through which the Sherpr team could update and manage their products without constant developer support.

As well as immediate savings in overheads, Sherpr were also able to process far more clients with their new reliable and automated booking system.

Following the work Unfold completed for them, Sherpr achieved their first ever 6-figure month and hit an annual run-rate of £1.2m.

“From beginning to end, the team at Unfold have been great to work with. Communication has been easy and any changes we needed to make during the build process were welcomed and perfectly executed.” – Andy Watson, CEO of Sherpr

Read more in-depth info on exactly how Unfold helped Sherpr achieve this remarkable step-change in their full case study.

 

If you have a project or digital platform you’d like advice on, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Unfold team.

Starting a new job can be a nerve-wracking process, especially when it’s your first opportunity after being at uni. Luckily, I’m here to share my experience of starting at Proctors and gaining my first real industry exposure.

Here are some of the questions I found myself asking, the challenges I faced – and some of the lessons I learnt.

What if I don’t know what I’m doing on my first day?

In any new job, a fear of failure is perfectly normal. Luckily, the Proctors people went out of their way to ensure I felt comfortable in the office, had sufficient training/inductions and the resources to get on with my projects, setting me up for success.

It’s important companies give you ample time to find your feet on your first day. So, if you don’t know what to do next, just ask how you can help. Remember, you were hired – you’ve already made it past the stressful interview part! Treat your first day as a fun celebration. Everyone is excited to meet you!

What’s it like starting in a Tech role?

Joining the Tech team at P+S straight after leaving university showed me the differences between education and real-life industry work really quickly.

In uni, I was constantly shifting my focus to find a speciality. This meant that almost each semester I would be creating a new project with a different focus and practicing a different coding language. However, at P+S I was able to focus on my strengths first, with support from seasoned (and friendly) developers, and begin specialising in the areas that I am most interested in.

Over my first few weeks, as I was introduced to all of the developers around me and all of the teams that I would be interacting with, all of the nervousness of a new role left as I settled in to my first full development role and focused on my workload.

How will I remember all these people?

Meeting everyone on your first day can be overwhelming, sometimes it can feel like you’re crashing a private party. Forming relationships takes time, and a supportive workplace recognises this.

At P+S, I was introduced to all the departments I would be working with, encouraged to reach out to anyone if I had any questions, and met with a multitude of messages from co-workers welcoming me to the company. Wednesday quiz nights and Friday night socials allowed me to meet people in a non-work environment. And as time went on more new employees joined, we all easily bonded over being new to the company.

Don’t forget, you’re not expected to remember everyone you meet immediately, but making the effort to get to know your co-workers over lunches and socials will help you feel at ease in your new job.

What do I do if I’m not busy with work all the time?

Sometimes work may be slow whilst you’re being given time to settle in, and you may feel guilty for not tapping away at the keyboard for all 8 hours of the workday. Just remember, people are giving you time to relax into the job and no one wants you to be overwhelmed. Take your time with tasks, regularly check in with co-workers to make sure you’re doing the right thing and focus on the small wins.

When working in a marketing agency, time management is incredibly important and often we are working to strict deadlines. At P+S, I was given access to a plethora of training resources for when I had a moment of downtime, to develop my industry skills.

Stay positive and believe in yourself

The most important thing to remember is to stay open-minded and treat your first job as a fresh start, a learning opportunity, and a chance to meet cool, like-minded people that can help you build an exciting career.

At P+S, we are always looking for talent to join our team across Creative, Strategy and Technology. Click here to find out more about our current vacancies or send your CV to [email protected].

The pandemic has seen UK industries split. Some businesses are still struggling to get back on their feet while others are booming beyond their wildest expectations. Those experiencing an upturn may be seeing sales soar because they adapted their business during periods of lockdown and have discovered a better way of doing things. Others may be experiencing higher demand because consumers have had time to take stock and make a change. Whatever the reason for the growth, it can leave busy businesses in a bit of a quandary when it comes to marketing their wares. The thought of bringing new customers on board right now might make you shudder. How will you cope? However, on the flip side, how will you cope when the work you’re busy servicing now runs out if your pipeline is empty?

Filling the pipeline

I’m writing this blog with a little smile on my face because this is a debate that raged for most of my 20 years working in agency life. There were days I didn’t know which way to turn we were so busy, and I admit, I didn’t relish the idea of pitching for new business when things were already so hectic. But there is no denying the importance of filling your business pipeline. You never know what is around the corner, so it is better to be prepared by continuing to market your business, even when times are good.

So how do you find the time to market your wares when you’re up to your eyeballs in servicing the customers you already have? It’s a fair question. One of the best ways to generate new business a bit more softly, is to generate inbound leads. For those of you unfamiliar with this term it means that you don’t have to generate a vast and complex suite of marketing materials, spend thousands of pounds on advertising, or spend hours on the phone calling your top list of prospects to try to drum up more business that you’re not sure you even want! Inbound lead generation focuses on marketing activity that encourages your prospects to pick up the phone to you.

Gently does it

Business blogs are a fantastic way of generating inbound leads. If people find a blog useful, they will revisit it time and time again and are more likely to contact the author of that blog when they need that product or service. Business blogs position you as an authority in your field, a trusted voice in a sea of noise. If readers like what they see, they may contact you immediately for more information about your offering. Or they may save you as a favourite, sign up to your blog, or follow you on social media (where you can regularly promote your blog) so they know where you are if they need you in the future.

Call for back up

I realise that right about now you’ll be shouting at your screen something along the lines, ‘how on earth am I going to find the time to write a blog right now?!’ Yes, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and keep it clean! I fully empathise with how much time writing and maintaining a business blog can take, but if you don’t have the capacity in-house, it could well be worth looking into outsourcing this part of your marketing. If you work with an external copywriter, they can spend the time learning about your business, absorbing the topics that are important to you, researching the posts you know you want to write about but don’t have the time, and ultimately populating your blog with fresh and engaging content. Content that will ensure your website is working hard to market your business, while you do what you do best and stay focused on delivering the fantastic product or service you offer your customers.

It’s difficult when business is busy to keep the pedal to the metal when it comes to marketing, but that’s where outsourcing really comes into its own. So, if you’d like to make sure the demand continues, while remaining focused on existing customers, don’t be shy in calling for back up. It might mean you can have your cake and eat it which is a pretty good place to be.

2020 saw a surge of people donning their gardening gloves to try and ‘grow their own’. According to Livingetc Pintrest has seen a 600% increase in searches for the term ‘DIY small garden ideas vegetables’ as the idea of homegrown produce became more and more popular. To grow your own fruit and veg though, is a commitment that requires effort. Effort to monitor seeds as they grow, water plants in the heat, protect them through the cold, prune to encourage growth, and of course collect your harvest when the time comes. It’s not easy but the ongoing nourishment is worthwhile for the end result.

To reach its full potential in today’s digital world, a business needs to be nourished with ongoing content in the same way that a garden needs ongoing food, water and sunshine . And while some companies only dabble every now and again to make sure visitors don’t think their business is out of date, ideally a business blog should be kept up to date on a regular basis. The more often the better too from an SEO perspective.

Generating enough content to help your business thrive though can sometimes feel like a chore. Especially when you have so much going on in the rest of your business. Of course, your priority is going to be meeting customer’s needs and delivering on your promises. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Working with a copywriter that is willing to understand your business and work as part of your team to deliver fresh and engaging content on a regular basis can give you peace of mind that you are doing your enterprise justice from a marketing perspective, without compromising your service to your customers.

The bottom line is, the more content you can generate and post online, the better your SEO ranking and the more enquiries you will receive. You could say that blogging to a business is almost as significant as water is to the growth potential of your new vegetable patch!