Tag: top talent

3 Challenges Digital Marketing Firms Must Face in their First Year

The digital marketing firms industry is a great one to be in right now, if you can build a solid team around you. If you deliver quality service to your customers, then you should have no trouble making a space for yourself. With that being said, you can expect your first year to be rocky and demand a lot of adapting if you are coming from another field or working independently. You may also feel a lot of pressure to get your first clients. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest challenges you may have to face as a digital marketing firm in your first year.

Getting People to Opt-in

Selling digital marketing services will be easier if you’re in a market that’s receptive to them. Hopefully, you have done your research already and know that there is demand. If you haven’t, then you need to start looking at how many people in your area could use your services and see how many firms are already serving it.

Being in a small market is not necessarily a bad thing, but you may have to work harder and look at educating your prospective clients first before you start actively selling them. If you’re in a market with a lot of demand but a lot of competition, then you may have to offer your services for free to some of your first customers so you can use them as referrals and get testimonials.

Attracting and Keeping Top Talent

It’s very hard to retain top employees in this field and recruiting is not simple either. One of the reasons for this is that the pool of talent in digital marketing is not the deepest, and the few people who have the expertise needed to be good digital marketers get courted aggressively by the big players. So, you’ll need to be creative with things like benefits and work arrangements.

Be prepared to have to offer things like remote working and hot desking options to remain competitive. You should also try to focus on development opportunities and have a real health and wellness program.

One of the things you could do here would be to offer a healthy food benefit card. A healthy food benefit card that can be used on nutritious foods and different medications will be appreciated by health-conscious employees, and will also allow you to keep them healthier, and happier.

As far as recruitment goes, it could be a good idea to work with a third-party human resources team if you want to get everything right. This will also allow you to concentrate on what matters the most.

Managing Relationships with Clients

This part is one that many people overlook when they start this kind of business, but managing relationships with clients can get very complicated, especially if you offer a wide variety of services.

If you offer SEO, then you have to be able to monitor results for every one of your clients and be ready to answer their questions when they ask. If you have PPC clients, then you may have to handle multiple campaigns for each of them and have campaigns with widely different objectives, scopes, and budgets. This is why you will need to learn how to manage your clients’ expectations, not be outlandish in your claims, and start getting familiar with things like CRMs.

Running a digital marketing agency can be rough at the beginning, but once you get the hang of it and you’ve built a good client base, things will become much easier. Just make sure that you surround yourself with the right people and get familiar with the back-office part before you start.

Why Marketing Needs to Attract Employees, Not Just Customers

Marketing is often used with the explicit goal of furthering sales, with the focus being on attracting potential customers and retaining existing customers. However, if you really want your business to succeed, then you are going to need to put more effort into the marketing tactics you use for attracting new employees. Your business won’t be able to expand without the right people working behind the scenes, so you need to implement some good marketing strategies to attract employees as well as the top talent and make them proud to work for you.

Marketers tend to like big, bold actions that grab attention and spew off metrics and the March on Washington would definitely qualify as that.  Yet, all too often, we ignore the more mundane work that comes before.  To market a product or an idea, you have to change minds and that’s the real lesson of the Civil Rights Movement.  Marketers need to learn from it.

A Great Company Culture Attracts Top Talent

With a great company image, you can attract top talent with ease. After all, when people are at the height of their careers, they know they have options. For some, their dream job will be one with a high salary, and for others, it will be a company where they can have a voice, input and a healthy work/life balance.

If you cannot offer them that top salary, then you need to work to improve your company culture and later become known for it.

Bolster your efforts by hiring the right people for your team, so that everyone works well together, and you have a family unit, not just a set of workers. An executive assessment, in particular, is key to giving your company a new direction, and if you are known for your great working culture, you can bring in great talent and retain their expertise for years.

PR and Marketing Can Make Your Brand More Recognizable

A great candidate wants to further their career, which means one of two things. One, they are looking to be hired in a higher-ranking position. Or two, they want to work for a brand that will open doors in their chosen industry.

Marketing and PR can help you attract more candidates in both instances. With the right PR and marketing team, you can quickly become a recognized business in your community. It is this recognition and reputation that candidates are looking for.

Innovative Thinking Brings In Top Minds

You want top workers, which means you need to allow them to try new things and be creative. Change your company culture to allow for this free-thinking amongst all of your employees, and aim to be recognized for your innovation through awards.

Being Proud of Where You Work is Key

You need to prove that you have a working environment that people are proud to be in. This means improving your company culture, the design of your office and the outlook of your business. Instead of just advertising your products, advertise the talents and successes of your employees.

This is a great way to showcase what your company is all about and the sort of working environment a candidate can expect if they get hired.

If an employee can say that they genuinely love working for you and are proud to work for your business, then you are on the right track. Simply advertise this culture when hiring and creating job listings, and you will bring in top talent who are looking for a great work/life balance.