The company’s main goal for these upgrades appears to be to persuade visitors to spend more time on the site – viewing and adding comments to content provided by their connections. Here’s a quick summary of what’s now available:

• A heavily improved search system 
• More photos on your main profile
• Videos to be added in a new rich media section
• The ability to upload PowerPoints and other presentations
• ‘@’ style mentions in status updates
• Endorsements of colleagues and contacts
• A contacts update with more ‘personal assistant’ features to help organise your life
• New Android and iPhone apps – which now offer almost as much flexibility as the web-based interface

This offers a great opportunity to make sure your profile stands out from your competitors – and to keep in touch with existing clients and prospects online.

Firms with multiple offices are turning to virtual technologies to deliver internal training.
Significant savings in time and travel expenses coupled with the potent reality that webinar training is stable, inexpensive, powerful and accessible, makes this method a ‘no brainer’.

If your firm is not yet using live webinar technology – it soon will be.

Many training teams want to start delivering live virtual training but lack the confidence and necessary skills to do so successfully. So they hold off – which is effectively wasting time and precious resources. So what are the new ‘virtual’ skills required by trainers? These can be neatly split into three main areas:

Facilitation
All experienced trainers are skilled in facilitating groups in face to face environments. They need to learn how to achieve the same effect and impact in a live virtual environment. This means learning how to engage and interact with delegates whilst, at the same time, manipulating the webinar tools and features available in order to control and drive that environment.

All this needs to be achieved whilst maintaining an entertaining and engaging pace. Ultimately they need to give their delegates a valuable and powerful learning experience.

Content Design
Webinar content needs to be designed for a live virtual medium – it needs to include more graphics than face to face content. Evaluation tools and tests need to be designed to boost and enrich the learning experience. Interactive exercises, feedback and questioning need to be incorporated into the content to create an engaging experience which helps embed the learning.

Using the Technology
There are many software tools with similar features available provided by Citrix, Microsoft, Cisco and others. Set-up, evaluation and the use of tools has to be mastered so the trainer can confidently create a live webinar environment that sings!

Also webinars needed to be planned carefully to ensure that all delegates have the correct technical resources to participate.

Often the presenter will need to be assisted by a technical colleague who ensures that delegates receive their logins and can access the training without any problems – leaving the presenter free to concentrate on delivery and maintaining the training pace and momentum.

Emailogic are experts in delivering training via webinar to clients across the globe and are partners with Citrix – makers of the GoTo suite of virtual training products.

The Emailogic one day “Webinar Masterclass” brings together all the skills and techniques a Trainer needs to design content and facilitate successful webinar training. For more details call the Emailogic experts on 01452 886 556.

What is your website for?
Your site could be focused on lead generation; gaining enquiries from the maximum number of potential prospects. It might be about relationship building; showing your expertise and attracting comments and downloads of information. It could be a revenue generator with online forms, online payment systems or client areas.

Only you will know what your goals are for the website and in our experience the clearer you are about its purpose, the more successful the site will be.

Does it make you money?
Once you are clear about what the site is for, the next obvious question is does it make you money? Are you generating the right enquiries, establishing relationships with your target audience or selling as much as you expected?

Our advice is to think carefully about how you measure that performance and to be clear about the results. Try and think about what needs to be done to deliver even better results.

Are you proud of your website?
This may sound like a strange question but you and all your colleagues should feel proud of your website and be happy to show it to clients and prospects. After all, every day a large number of visitors will see your site as the public face of your firm.

So does it feel like your firm? Are the messages right, does the content match your values and do those fee earner photos show you in your best light? And as a side issue, does it work well when visitors view it on a mobile or tablet because more and more people will be doing just that.

Measuring the detail with a website audit

We hope these three quick questions have got you thinking. The next step that we recommend to our clients is a website audit; this looks at the performance of the site in detail; looks at the metrics and data and provides hard evidence that sometimes confirm initial thoughts but more often produce other ideas. If you’d like to know more call Mike Fieldhouse on 01225 580016 or complete the contact forms and we’ll call you back.

I feel I must share a recent experience with the wider Recruiter market. It made me wonder how often other hiring managers experience the same fun.

The phone rings and its possibly the greenest Recruiter I’ve spoken to calling to enquire what vacancies we have, adding that she is a specialist in our sector (I saved her the embarrassment of asking what sector we are in –she would not have known and could feel her talking to the desk as she read from the script, and I could hear the breathing and whispering of her ‘Manager’ in the background).

That said, she sounds nice and everyone deserves a break. Besides I’d just started a coffee and a biscuit so her timing couldn’t have been better – and we are recruiting.

I explain the role isn’t actually live but offer a 30 second definition of what we’re looking for. I thank the lady for her time explaining that we’ll need to clearly define the role before she can start reviewing the market and that I’ll look forward to receiving her terms.

The very next morning I get an email from an applicant enquiring if we are the ‘Market leading Recruitment Software businesses in the south; which is looking for an Account Manager to join the growing team’.

I email back to explain we are, and ask how she heard of the role and within 3 minutes I’m returned a link to a job-board which details my 30 second brief, almost word for word, dictated from the conversation that day earlier.

Now granted this is an extreme rare example and is exactly the sort of practice good a Recruiter cringes at, but consider that not only was this bad practice, it also meant the Recruiter lost the fee.

Is your newest, greenest Recruiter placing candidates for free?

@paulatvoyager

You’ve been to a social media workshop. You’ve given the go-ahead to your marketing manager to ‘go for it’ with social media. So you or they purchase the obligatory hootsuite subscription.

Then you get really excited because you can start now start pumping out your message on twitter & LinkedIn 24/7; making doubly sure no-one can miss what you about and what you can do for them. Not so great.

Oh, and you can now also add to your twitter account, via hootsuite, the obligatory feed of bland articles which are SO boring they appeal to no-one. But, hey you are sharing content. (That’s what the social media expert told you… right?)

Not so great.

In fact…. a big fat twitter and LinkedIn #fail

The worrying thing is I see this happening far too often from professional service firms who have recently started to use twitter.

All this does is alienated the very people you want to attract.

Twitter and LinkedIn, like all social media tools, work best when used as pull rather than push marketing mediums.

Think about it, we all have so much choice about what we will read and share on Twitter and LinkedIn, that most of us have very little tolerance for reading adverts or boring bland articles. If all I see on your tweets (and LinkedIn status) is ‘buy our services’, and ‘call me’, I’m going to rapidly unfollow you and hide your updates on LinkedIn.

But, but, but… I hear you cry. I didn’t go onto twitter to talk about what I had for my lunch. Of course you didn’t. You want to market your practice and generate enquiries.

So, firstly stop thinking you are talking to hot prospects all the time on social media who are just waiting to buy your services.

Secondly, start providing an interesting stream of content which shows your personality and demonstrates your credibility to a specific target market – preferably via your own blog. In case you are thinking, SMEs or Owner managed businesses is NOT a specific target market.

Thirdly, start proactively connecting and building relationships with people well connected to your target market.

Then repeat. I promise you, once your reputation is established within your target market on social media, the work will come flooding in.

What do you think?

I’m sure every marketing manager in a professional practice worries about a new marketing initiative and what it will mean to their workload in both the short and long term. So, what solutions did this roomful of marketing managers come up to help spread the load for their new practice blog?

1. Get senior management, preferably the managing partner, buy in to the blog before going ahead. 
2. Make sure that the benefits of the blog are clearly understood by your part of the practice. 
3. Recruit or handpick a team of interested people to help you. If 4 people each produce a blog post every month, you pretty much have a new blog post every week. Choose fee earners for your team who are either already asking for a blog, new into the firm and keen to impress, or trying to increase their profile or client portfolio.
4. Be creative in how you create blog posts. Not every fee earner will have the time to write you an article. How about interviewing partners and recording the interview on a video camera or dictaphone? Then creating a couple of blog posts from that interview?
5. Recycle and repackage existing content already written. What have you got in your e-wire/newsletters, White papers, reports which can be re-written as a blog post.
6. Use a content management plan to help you reuse and make each piece of content work harder. It’s much easier asking fee earners for a certain article by a certain point in time. A content management article helps you do that.
7. Schedule your blog posts in advance. Plan to write 2-3 in one go, as it is often more productive than writing them one at a time. You can then schedule them for when you need them.
8. What would be your 8th tip? Let us know…

A priority for every firm’s MP (or whoever manages the firm) is keeping powerful partners happy because unhappy partners can disrupt a firm badly.

One big thing that makes powerful partners unhappy is losing their power. These days it’s simple. Partners are powerful if they and/or their department bring in more money than the others. Anything that changes who is bringing in the money will shift power and create new winners and losers. The old sources of power – years qualified, doing very difficult law (because lawyers respect big brains), having key clients who would follow you if you left – are still there, but they trail way behind.

External events can do this – changes in market conditions, regulation or law. There are more of these changes around at the moment than for a very long time. They include the recession; Jackson; new non-solicitor owners in firms, and ABS structures; commoditisation and ‘unbundling’; legal aid cuts; mergers and acquisitions; administrations; and many more – so power looks set to shift massively and fast in law firms of all types this year.

This will create big challenges for their MPs. When power shifts suddenly, newly-powerful partners invariably start flexing their muscles. They demand backing and resources to capitalise on the opportunities and reduce the risks the changes have created. For example, new strategies, structures and decision-making, more staff, more marketing, better IT. These are big changes, but the MP needs to equip these partners to do the job.

Equally important for the MP is to mollify the losers in the new structure. Powerful partners aren’t always known for their collegiate, reasonable attitudes, and many try to hang on to power. The faster they’ve lost it, the harder they try.

This can lead to disruptive, unprofitable infighting as they elbow and jostle for position in the new pecking order. I’ve seen partners in this situation deliberately, and very visibly, block or delay decisions, drag their feet on changes, undermine the winners’ authority by questioning their competence and judgment and give conflicting instructions to marketing and other support staff. They can turn the firm into a ‘political arena’, with fee-earners lining up behind their respective heads of department, and support staff like marketing, IT, HR and finance caught in the cross-fire. Not power, but petulance.

The MP has to make sure this doesn’t happen or that it is sorted out as quickly as possible. If the infighting is allowed to get out of hand or lasts too long the firm can start losing clients, and revenue and profitability drop. Then you’re on a slippery slope. If clients are leaving it hits morale. Fed-up fee-earners and support staff start looking around for new jobs. Neutral partners start thinking about leaving, and taking their (team and) clients with them. In an extreme case, a firm could self-destruct.

Of course, MPs do manage their firms through changes like these. They’ve learnt that they can’t force powerful partners to do things (after all, ‘being a managing partner’ isn’t one of the things that gives a partner power). Instead, they’ve learnt to achieve their ends by bargaining, politicking and negotiation. Most are very good at this – and they’ll need all their skills this year. The ones who aren’t are about to get plenty of practice.

Our top tip for MPs when power shifts? Focus on clients. It’s in a solicitor’s DNA to put clients first, and a large part of their self-esteem comes from their conviction that only they can satisfy their clients. This is so hard-wired that the impact on a partner of losing, or failing, a big client is extraordinary. Always bringing a disruptive partner back to the potential effect of their behaviour on clients can help shift their focus away from their immediate dissatisfaction to something they care about more – their clients.

It also sends a powerful message to everyone in the firm – neutral partners, fee-earners and support staff – that the firm has not taken its eye off clients. They are still the number one priority. Tell staff this and show them it’s true by your actions – particularly your marketing. That’s deeply reassuring to staff and can help mobilise them to do their bit in getting the firm through this difficult period and back to stability and profitability.

Norwich Business School

Visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKIAOZZritk

This is a great overview of what branding is, how it works and where the value lies – although mainly for consumer brands.

Financial Brand

Visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5016fh7TgQ

This is a video from a US-based financial branding specialist. It’s not as exciting as the Norwich video (Alan Partridge will be pleased with that) but is a good introduction to branding within a professional services arena.

TED – Morgan Spurlock – The Greatest TED Talk ever sold

Visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c0VtOdibcI

A wonderful introduction to branding from a completely different angle. On the one hand it is a sales pitch for his movie. On the other it shows a worrying lack of brand awareness from some of the companies he approached. And who sponsored his talk…

Not realityhouse unfortunately – I must keep a closer eye on eBay.

I will nail my colours firmly to the mast here. I believe in the power of social media – in fact my book ‘The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking’ strongly advocates the use of social media. However, I have been inspired to write this blog by this article in Accountancy Age, which clearly states why accountants should rely on old traditional methods of marketing..  As you can imagine, I have a lot of say on the matter, but in the spirit of friendship and good will, I have decided to define times when I think that the author is right – accountants should not use social media.

For example:

1. You are happy with your current and projected revenue for the foreseeable future – so, why change what you are doing, if it is working for you. But, can you really guarantee that your marketing and business development systems and processes are going to carry on working with the same level of success?
2. You don’t want to adopt a niche as you are too concerned about turning away good clients. After all, you have specialised… you want to work with SMEs and owner managed businesses. That gives you a target market of 40 million potential clients… which every other small accountant is fighting over…
3. Your current marketing and business development efforts are achieving the business growth targets you set your part of the practice. Once again, if it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it. But see point number 1.
4. You don’t have a business plan or overall marketing strategy for your practice or your bit of the practice – without these basic blocks it is impossible to implement social media successfully – or any marketing actually.
5. You have to approve every communication from a member of staff before it leaves the building. Twitter – and many other social media channels don’t work if a committee needs to approve every piece of material before it goes out.
6. Your target market is not IT literate. Like any bit of successful marketing, you need to maintain a presence where your clients, potential clients and introducers are hanging out. However, more and more people are coming online and the biggest growth in social media users is actually from the over 55s…
7. You are not bothered about how much traffic your website gets. Social media used well can build a large traffic of interested potential clients to your website. But, if you are not bothered about this benefit…
8. You don’t bother with e-mail marketing to a mailing list (what mailing list?). Social media can bring large volumes of interested potential clients to your website. With the right call to action you can sign them up to your mailing list….
9. You are not bothered about where your name turns up in google. Social media helps to boost your search engine rankings. But, if you are not bothered about web traffic…
10. Referrals are not important. The use of social networking can literally turbo charge your networking activities and help you keep in touch with a large extended network of potential clients and advocates, to build a steady stream of referrals.
11. You don’t use networking to help find new clients or new business. Social media is more than just ‘marketing’. Social networking is a great networking tool, and needs to be used in conjunction with face to face networking for the best results.

Any other reasons why accountants should not use social media?

Rule 1: Decide on your niche

Doing marketing or business development work costs time and reduces either the profit margin of a firm, or the time fee earners have to do chargeable work. By choosing a niche, it enables you to pool your marketing resources and messages, and attract the clients you like working with.

Rule 2: Differentiate yourself

When you know your niche then you can differentiate yourself so that you stand out from your competitors. After all, at some point your potential client is going to ask you – ‘so why you?’

Rule 3: Keep prospects warm

Most potential clients when they meet you don’t yet have a need for your services. What systems and processes do you have in place to keep both existing and potential clients in touch with your fee earners until they ARE ready to use or recommend your services?

Rule 4: Decide on your channels to market

There are so many different marketing methods available to an accountancy practice – telemarketing, social media marketing, direct mail marketing, search marketing, content marketing, print advertising, PR etc etc. Be selective on the methods you pick and always plan, measure and monitor.

Rule 5: Do a great job for your existing clients

It’s often been quoted that it is 7-14 times easier to get new work off existing clients. Have you got processes and systems in place to make sure that you are doing a great job for your existing clients?

Rule 6: Cross sell your services to existing clients

Many partners within existing firms purely market to generate work for their own part of the practice. There are many opportunities across the firm to upsell more services to new clients. For example, tax advice – both corporate and private – to business owners who use you for accounting services and audit.

Rule 7: Decide on your product ladder

If you know your niche and can differentiate yourself, then it is easy to start to work out the products and services which your firm needs to provide. For example, I was working with one of my clients who runs an accountancy practice – and she wanted to differentiate herself on the fact that she wanted to work with the small clients and cared about supporting them however small her business was. Consequently, her service includes a free helpline regardless of the package which you buy from her.

Have I missed any rules out?

But your recruitment website does deserve some care and attention. Of course you’ll be updating your vacancies but what about the other pages? The news, the company pages, the people profiles and your recruitment blog – they all need refreshing. Up until last year, you could get away with the occasional update but with the changes to Google’s search system, it is now vital to make regular changes and to add new content to keep your existing search rankings and to improve your position.

Our advice is that you need to make some significant changes (a new page or blog) at least once an month. And if you can make more regular smaller changes this will help too. It needen’t take long – this blog took 10 minutes to write and is designed to help our optimisation. If you still need help, then let us know and realityhouse recruitment will be happy to make changes to your website on your behalf.

For many the Recruitment industry is one that people have simply fallen into, rather than one they wanted to get into, and all too often as a result of a truly awful Recruitment experience. Find me ten people that have had a poor Recruitment experience and I ‘ll find you one that’s had a great one (one day I’d like to change that ratio).

While many of our Recruitment agency customers are formed by people going it alone, we’ve also spotted a growing trend. ‘Experts’ are setting up consultancies in their specialised field. It’s the ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ that they draw upon, which differentiates them from the competition and no longer is the speed and price of their service the focus – reassuring in this price sensitive sector.

We’ve seen ex-Accountants are setting up Accountancy agencies, ex-carers setting up domicile care agencies and even Tree Surgeon setting up, yes you’ve guessed it, a Tree surgeon agency! The increasingly consultative approach of these smaller business allows them a better understanding of their customers’ requirements and as a result, smaller consultancies can focus on a truly personal services, something larger agencies are traditionally very poor at.

So if the Recruiters ‘knowledge and understanding’ is key to a successful career in Recruitment why do people need technology? Well I guess that’s exactly what we are here to facilitate – the sharing of that much desired ‘knowledge and understanding’. Our products and services actually facilitate the sharing of this knowledge and allows you more time with your customers. Voyager only exists because it reduces the administration burden by connecting the tools you use automatically.

If you see Recruitment as an exciting career choice, best make sure you find a technology partner that actually allows you to be a full-time Recruiter.

@paulatvoyager

The advantages of the recruitment microsite route are many… for example the candidate or client searches for rail engineering jobs and arrives at a site that:

• Only shows rail engineering vacancies
• Has clients and case studies from familiar brands
• Offers blogging advice specifically related to the rail engineering sector
• Has biographies of consultants with specific industry knowledge

The disadvantage tends to be cost; initially developing multiple microsites will tend to be more expensive and you also need to manage those sites ongoing providing that relevant content.

At realityhouse recruitment, we have been exploring ways to reduce that cost by delivering multiple recruitment websites that are created and driven by one central content management platform. All your vacancy and candidate data is stored in one central location with different information sent to your different websites. In this way you have a single point where all your sites are created and where you can feed information in and out of the system. The initial set up costs will still be higher but this does reduce the cost of ongoing management.

If you’d like to know more about developing niche recruitment websites or multiple websites from a single platform, please get in touch.

Once upon a time Recruitment was………….well let’s just say it was easier!

The latest figures from the REC indicate that whilst there may be slightly less Recruitment firms this year than last, the industry as a whole is set to increase in size and turn over during 2013.

Few doubt that Recruiters are working in an increasingly challenging market. Add to the mixing pot an abundance of candidates, the arrival of great social media tools for HR departmement and a tightening agency budget and you’ll understand why the Hiring Managers are now forced to consider hiring direct.

As a supplier of Recruitment Software we are morally bound to use Recruiters (our customers before everyone starts emailing me) when looking to hire. That said, it doesn’t change the fact that even for a business with 75 staff every hire is strategic, and so it’s unlikely the ‘perfect’ candidate is one that is unemployed and spends their weekend searching the job-boards in their dressing gown.

What don’t I want from a Recruitment company for a 25% finder’s fee?

1. I don’t want my job-spec cut and pasted onto a job-board
2. I don’t want to give the brief three times to three different recruiters
3. I don’t want to pay a fee for a candidate I could have found myself on a job-board

If I’m looking for the perfect candidate the chances are they need to be ‘found’ and so that means listening hard to the hiring manager. I will happily offer suggestions on where the candidate are likely to be found, what companies they probably work for and I’m even happy to have speculative chats with the candidates who are happily employed at the moment. For some Recruiters this doesn’t seem to be a service they’re used to giving?

OK so I’m a fussy customer but consider this; If I’ve given you a target list of perfect applicants and told you to find them; who’s going to be the best connected Recruiter for my next hire? YOU.

@paulatvoyager

Mobile websites

Go to the BBC website on your PC and you’ll see a graphically rich website with lots of large images, videos and layers of text. Go to the BBC website on your smartphone and you’ll see a much smaller site – with navigation that scrolls, small phone-screen sized images and often shortened versions of the articles.

The reason the layout, and often the content, is different is that the experience of using a handheld device with a small screen varies from using a traditional PC. You will scroll more on a mobile, you’ll expect information in bite-sized chunks – possibly as a video or infogram – you may be on the move and be looking for contact details or “your nearest office” – and the smartphone can guide you there; in essence a mobile website takes the best of your main website and packages it up in a way that works for clients on the move. It is instantly available to everyone, is searchable via Google and other search engines and is the perfect first step to win business online.

So what is an App?
An App is an abbreviation for an ‘application’ – like Word or Excel or a game. You have to download it, it is specific to your smartphone or tablet and, if you get it right, it will be used repeatedly by anyone who downloads it.

For example, a tax rates calculator is an ideal app; it will be used repeatedly and is very handy to have if you’re a business owner or accountant. Apps from companies like Amazon and eBay are similar to their websites BUT because they have regular repeat visitors who make transactions their apps are very effective. A news feed of your latest business wins or list of partners in a firm is NOT an app; the only people who will download and use this are people within your firm and possibly the occasional competitor.

Summary
In 2013, you must have a mobile website of some sort. The number of people accessing websites on mobile devices is increasing daily. You may also want app – but please think carefully about what it will do and what will incentivise your clients to download it.

There are two names to describe this type of design – ‘responsive’ and ‘adaptive’ – they are often use interchangeably but they in fact work in two different ways.

The simplest of the two is responsive. This uses your web browser to reshape the page depending on the size of screen that is used. For example on your main PC you may see a job search, testimonials, case studies and images. By the time the browser has reshaped down to the size of smartphone – you will simply see the job search as all the extra content will no longer be visible. Some of it may be seen if you scroll down – but most of it will simply not be shown. The advantage of this is that it is simpler to programme. The disadvantage is that you have less control of what content is shown – and vitally when you are on a mobile although you don’t see the whole page; all of it will need to download making for much slow web browsing on small screens.

Adaptive design is much more complex. This is driven by your recruitment web server. The server will detect the type of device and size of screen you are using and will “serve” different versions of the website to the visitor. The smartphone visitor will only be ‘served’ the job search. Whereas the large screen visitor will receive much more information. Critically you can decide exactly what every visitor sees and in what format but this can take more design and coding time.

Your recruitment website will need to be mobile compatible and these two options offer a very smart way forward – realityhouse recruitment uses both. Contact us NOW to learn more about what will work for you.

http://www.realityhouselegal.co.uk/about-jobs.asp

And let us know if you’re interested…

There has been much talk in the press about how this new service will be a direct competitor to Google – here’s a good overview from Wired. What interests us here at realityhouse recruitment is the potential impact on LinkedIn.

Facebook has been threatening to deliver a killer app for recruiters for some time and this may be it. Delve a little deeper and it soon becomes clear how Graph Search can help Employers find candidates. You may remember that Facebook already asks you for employment details and now you can search these. That means you are potentially searching the career profiles of over 1 billion users.

But don’t take our word for it. Tom Stocky, Facebook’s director of product management, has already stated “Graph Search is a powerful recruiting tool”. And once it’s available across everyone’s profile, employers and consultants will be able to search current and past employee’s plus competitor employees assuming some connection.

It’s an interesting prospect for consultants, employers and candidates alike. If you’d like to know more or are interested in recruitment website design or recruitment website development, then please get in contact.

1. The service has a very different tone of voice to our main offer

This is particularly true of law firms where high end corporate and tax services sit alongside very consumer focused services such as clinical negligence or personal injury. Someone searching for help to sue a hospital or dentist will welcome a site that is open, friendly and supportive. Not something that legal websites are renowned for!

2. The service doesn’t sit easily with my other services

Outsourced HR is a classic example of this; both lawyers and accountants offer HR services of varying sorts but they don’t tend to sit easily against more general  services. Hence the need for microsites.

3. The service is lost in the navigation of my main website

Nobody will admit to this; but let’s be honest, many professional services websites are now buried in content and it is often difficult to find your way to key services and there is often a demand internally to do something different. And microsites are a quick answer.

And the final major argument is that they work. Using Google Adwords to drive traffic to a microsite aimed at a specific audience delivers enquiries and conversions .

So what are the downsides? You are potentially pulling people away from your main website. You have two (or more) sites to manage and this produces additional work for your support teams. And you are dividing your SEO effort between two sites – although it is arguable that it’s easier to optimise a site that targets a specific sector.

Our view is that it’s all about providing the best possible experience to the relevant audience – and that is where microsites really come into their own. What do you think?

As an aside we’ve also been talking about the importance of including that content on your Google+ posts. Although Google has never stated as much, there appears to be a close correlation between how active you are on Google+ and your website search rankings. Even more important is the inclusion of a +1 button that enables visitors to rate your site and your content.

We now have proof…

Having said all this, we were delighted when the Huffington Post published this article stating that:

1. Google+ is now the number 2 social network based on active monthly users around the globe
2. That for marketers the deriver behind this growth has been the benefits of Google+ for search optimisation decisions
3. And that the potential for Google+ to drive social influence is greater than probably any other network because of its flexibility and integration with search

It’s time to adopt Google+

Just as it took business a long time to truly adopt LinkedIn, Google+ has been waiting in the wings and now is the time to bring it centre stage for your marketing. We already have a series of case studies where Google+ has helped develop search rankings; and how that content in turn has delivered more social connections.

Call us on 0845 643 9627 and let’s talk about what Google+ can achieve for you.