Networks and Social Media
How do I network?
Networking is a key business tool. However using it effectively means understanding why you're doing it.
Are you looking for sales, for advocates, for people to collaborate with?
How big a group should you network with? Should you focus on traditional membership organisations, specific networking groups - or should you spend time on the new social media like FaceBook, Ecademy and Linked-in.
If you do decide to go on-line what's the right balance between online and offline activity? How much of your marketing budget and time should you commit? And how do I get it to work for me?
We know how to use social media to promote our own business and we can show you how to make use of them. We can help you choose the right balance of activity to suit your business and we can help you avoid some of the traps and pit-falls.
What do other people do?
Our research tells us that most small companies spend about 2 days a week on sales and marketing. Most (70%) spend less than 4 hours a week face to face while 25% spend more than 8 hours a week networking on line.
When they are out networking they are looking for referrals, collaborators and sales. They prefer situations organised by membership organisations or exhibitions as venues but far and away the most effective tool appears to be one to one meetings. Nevertheless, the use of hybrid online - offline networks like Ecademy and the pure Online environment of linked-in are favoured.
What you need to do is to decide what suits you - and build it into your marketing activities - consciously. This version of our diagram shows how a hybrid on-line / offline network like Ecademy allows you to add an online profile, advertise and write blogs - all where they will be picked up by Google.
If you take advantage of the tools available to you, you can go a long way to providing that flow of warm enquiries that you want to achieve through your marketing. It just takes knowledge, systematic application and persistence
What we can do for you
We can sell you an internet marketing e-book or you can attend an internet marketing workshop if you want to learn in a group with some individual attention.
These explain how to make these things work for you but we can create an online profile for you and we can train you how to build and maintain an online presence without spending your life doing it.
We can help you get started in blogging and in how to use social media. If you want help with your overall strategic marketing then we have various workshops and consultancy offerings to support. We can offer you distance learning courses in PR and copywriting to support your efforts - or if you want a new web-site designer we can help you there too.
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Our next public workshop is Punch Above Your Weight - Foundation on May 7th at Arora Hotel Gatwick .. You can book here. The price is £77 inc VAT.
New e-book - 21 Business Stories. Takes all we've found out and presents it as 21 engaging slices of business life, covering marketing, monitoring, people, raising finance and above all tracking how you're doing. Only £9.40. You can buy it here.
Why we can help you
Unusually for a consultancy company we practice what we preach. We have 25 years experience of running growth businesses in IT, Business Training, Internet trading and horticulture. Currently we run a £0.5 Million internet trading company - Plants4Presents - and a 10 employee Organic Vegetable Business. These give us a real-life basis for our consultancy and training business that underpins our research into how companies actually use IT to promote themselves and improve performance as they grow.
Our founder, Dr Alan Rae is a chartered fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, an associate of the Market Research Society and an accredited workwise adviser. You can look at his Ecademy Profile and Testimonials or follow his ideas on the How to do Business Blog
Contact - To discuss how we can help with your business growth or marketing ring 0845 094 0407
