Author: Ross
Can social media marketing work well?
Social media can be a brilliant marketing platform for businesses to boost their brand and improve sales. The businesses that get the best results from social media marketing are often those that put the most time and effort in to it. Most of social media marketing is free, but If you are willing to do paid for ads then you will usually find that you can attract more views and get a better response to your campaign. Businesses often use paid for ads when they want to promote a particular product or event they have coming up or to boost their initial following on the social media sites such as Facebook.
If you are not using paid for ads then you may need to wait a while before seeing some results. Often you will start off with a small following but as long as you are actively promoting the page and it is of interest to people, this should quickly grow in numbers. If you only have a small following then you may need to find other existing groups or pages that you can post on, always check with the rules of the group as to what you can post or share. Using a social media expert to help you with the set up and management of the accounts can speed up the process and often allow you to see quicker results. They will be able to advise you of what sorts of things you need to be talking about on the social media platforms and how often you should be doing it.
How to create a first website
If you are looking to create your first website then you will need to decide who you are going to use and what you need your website to do. Many small business owners are attracted to free website makers to allow them to publish a page without any upfront costs. The issue with these sites is often they are based on quite a restricted template and will only allow you to change a few elements. They are often not very search engine friendly, meaning that you may find it hard to get your website to rank well.
If you are using a small web design company or someone that is self-employed then you can expect to pay anything from around £400 plus for a very basic site. You may also be charged a hosting amount per year and possibly a support fee if you wish them to manage it for you. If you are wanting to be able to do updates to the site yourself then you will need to ensure that it is built with a content management system attached to it and that it includes all the functionality that you need.
Giving your client feedback on their marketing
If you are responsible for marketing for a client it is important that you give them feedback on how it is going. They will often have to put a lot of trust in you to manage their marketing budget and because marketing can be so in-depth, they may not be able to easily monitor what you are doing for them and how successful it is.
Once a month you should have a full review of the stats that you have access to, to check your marketing avenues. If you use social media to direct traffic to a website, then be sure to check the Google analytics states to see how many referrals you are having. You should also set up goals with analytics to see when someone completes a purchase or fills out an enquiry form. This will allow you to go back through their visit and find out how they originally came to your site.
Another way to track marketing is to check the rankings on the search engines. You can do this manually or you may want to invest in some software that will check the ranks for your keywords on a weekly or monthly basis. This will allow you to show your customer that the work you are doing is having a positive impact.
GDPR; what does it mean for my data?
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulations are now in force, giving consumers ever more power over how their data is stored and used, and companies even greater fines for mishandling that data, so it’s now more important than ever to ensure that your data is not only held securely, but can be managed, accesses controlled, and content retrieved quickly and efficiently.
If you haven’t already, you’ll need to instigate a robust data management plan in order to be able to satisfy the new requirements. Here, we run through a few of the key things to consider.
What data do you store? Consider what personal information you record, and in which areas of your business
Why do you store that data? You should not be storing data you don’t need and you must be clear what you are using it for. If you don’t need it, you must get rid of it.
Where is your data stored? Many companies use a number of different systems, and mechanisms for saving documents which may also contain sensitive client data. As well as what and why, you need to know what data will be found where, and why that area of your business is using it.
Content Production
As any good SEO Specialist will tell you, one of the keys to getting the best search engine results is ensuring that your website is regularly updated with new original content. However, this can be time-consuming; someone actually needs to take the time to construct the content and upload it. Chances are, if you’re a small business in particular, it may not be cost-effective for you to use your own staff or time to do this.
Thankfully it’s easy to find people to do this for you, and at very reasonable rates. Firstly, it’s definitely worth asking your SEO Specialist or Web Designer – chances are they’re used to having to supply content and will either offer this as a service themselves, or will have contacts that they can refer you to.
Alternatively, you could use a sourcing website to find someone. Sites such as freelancer.co.uk allow you to post jobs for independent freelancers to bid on, so post an advert and try a few providers to see who can give you the best results.
Competition is high so costs are actually usually pretty reasonable, and you tend to pay at piece-meal rates. However, it’s definitely worth considering quality – selecting someone with experience in writing SEO-friendly content will be more expensive, but will likely get much better results.
Marketing to improve your business
In business you can sometimes get stuck in a cyclical pattern of merely ticking over, you’re not losing money but after all of the overheads have gone out of the business you’re not making much money either.
Many business owners will just think ‘well at least we’re not losing money’ but is that really a good enough business ethos? No! It’s time to give your business a good kick by investing some money back into it and the best way to do this is to pay for a business consultant to build you a tailor-made development plan.
A good development plan should show you simple ways to build on your existing business to increase profitability and increase your client base also, a consultant should be able to map out clear goals with targets and continue to help you achieve these goals by catching up with you on a regular basis and tweaking bits of the development plan where needed to ensure you get the best out of your business. Marketing should be at the forefront of increasing your business in terms of the number of sales but also your client list. This may be done online, offline or through using both types of marketing. You can often track the return on investment easier with online marketing often making it more favourable.
How to better yourself as an IT consultant
The job of an IT consultant can be very rewarding but the job can also at times be very challenging. As an IT consultant, you will be going into businesses and looking at the way the business is run and how you can improve it by focusing on the IT they use. This may be within the finance area, marketing area, management or a combination of many different departments and often involves looking into how IT can help improve the process that happens within the business.
Firstly as a consultant, it is important that you know about your client and their industry. You need to keep your ear to the ground and be proactive with any IT products that you recommend.
Knowing the history of the business and their current IT software and uses is vital. You need to be able to memorise some facts and figures and try and look at how you can improve their IT as well as saving them money. You may be asked to work alongside a financial consultant as well. As a good consultant, you should look to increase a business’s profits by increasing sales and cutting down on spending.
Setting up email to sync with other devices
Emails can be a bit of a nightmare and, depending upon whom you have your email through, the settings often need changing. If you have an email address that is linked to your domain then you may struggle to set your email up on your PC or phone/tablet. Your hosting provider should be able to give you the details but you will have to check port numbers and authentication settings. This can take time to configure and if you make even a small spelling mistake then often the whole account will not work.
Before you start, remember to only set up on one device at a time. Ideally, ask your hosting provider to email you the details you need to you can double check the spellings and possibly even copy and paste.
You may find that if you have problems setting your email on your device then the hosting company will not help you if their account is working. In this case, you would need to get in touch with an IT support company to check it all for you and set it up correctly.
Always ensure that your emails are backed up in case something should happen and you lose them all.
Is your website loading too slowly?
Website speed loading can be an issue for many business owners. As a rule, if a person has to wait more than 4 seconds for a website to load, the majority of them will leave and go to a different site.
There can be a number of reasons why your website is loading slowly and often the hardest thing is to find out why. There are a few good websites that allow you to check your speed loading page and will show you what elements took the longest to load. Google offers a page speed checker which can be useful in determining what’s going on.
Some of the most common causes of speed lading issues are listed below:
Slow server – You may rent a space on a shared server or cloud server or even have a dedicated one, but if the speed in which your server is taking to respond to the call for the website is slow then it doesn’t matter what you do to the site, it will not get resolved. Speak to your hosting company if you are experiencing this issue.
Error in code – if your website is taking a while to load or timing out then it may be that there is an error in your code. Run a report through one of the popular error checking websites to find out if there is an issue.
Size or images / too much code – if your pages are full of images that have not been reduced or you have pages of code that has not been minimised then you will probably experience slow loading speeds. Reduce the sizes of all images and make sure that they are saved for the web which will allow compression. Remove any unnecessary code and be sure to minimise scripts where possible.