Morley Town Hall is a beautiful building and the perfect setting for a big stage event. The characters were wonderful and full of life and a special shout out needs to go the bright shining star, Matthew Young who was the witch doctor with Steven Holt as the confident, larger than life, Dame Sarah Whittington. I haven’t laughed so much for a long time. But being a chartered marketer, the most memorable part of the show for me was the product placement with Fullertons Bakery!

I know it sounds strange but it just shows what you can do with a bit of imagination and a little dough. (Did you see what I did there?)

Dame Sarah Whittington owns a pie shop and there were some not so subtle name dropping about Fullertons and how great their baking is during one particular part of the show. Even during the normal sweet chucking part of the panto, they threw out Fullertons bread cakes. ( I suppose they land a little softer so they don’t have the Health and Safety bods after their tails with bread cakes), and as we were leaving Morley Town Hall at the end of we all received a free bread cake and vouchers for a special lunch deal or cream buns at a reduced price.

What a great idea! Well done Fullertons Bakery. It just goes to show witha little imagination and local links you can promote your company really smartly on tight tbudget.

2. Be original

3. People scan content, so make it easy to read

4. Be creative

5. Add pictures, bullet points and  boxes to make it easier for your reader, and remember every picture tells a thousand words

Ideas for your content

1. Set up Google Alerts

2. Take a look at the competition- but don’t copy it, it may just give you some inspiration

3. Add your own perspective on another blog

4. Review an event

5. Promote yourself

6. Listen to your clients and share tips and information

7. Find a guest blogger

Start a blog strategy

1. Define categories and produce an editorial calendar

2. Start a poll

3. Top 10 favourite blogs

And finally remember, be a leader, not a follower because – you can’t please all the people all the time.

Today I met up with Jen Hayden who owns Pretty Machine, a company that offers botox, chemical peels and a whole chocolate box of beauty treatments for people who want to look and feel great about themselves.

Her question was, “ How can I make the most of my marketing budget?”

These days people use Google as the modern equivalent of the Yellow Pages.” I’ll Google it” has become a verb instead of a noun. So I’m sorry Yellow Pages but you’ll get no recommendations from me. The first step for any online research is the internet. So as a business you need to make sure that your presence is the strongest it can be online. Your website is the central communication hub for all your online activity so should reflect you in the best possible light but also accurately and succinctly.

There are five types of marketing activity that you can choose from and marketers call it

The Promotional Mix

1. Advertising

To the trade, consumers or to other organisations

2. Personal selling

Traditional salesman or telesales techniques

3. Sales promotion

Coupons, special offers, discounts and incentives

4. Publicity and public relations (PR)

Press releases, third part endorsements and (celebrity endorsements)

5. Direct and interactive selling

Direct mail, telesales, database marketing and website.

My response to No. 1 is ‘Don’t do it unless it’s absolutely your target audience!’

The most effective for Jen at Pretty Machine to concentrate on are No. 4 and 5. Online PR with a Facebook page including endorsements from her customers. Word of Mouth (WOM) advertising or PR is the always the strongest form of advertising, (although she did tell me that her customers are sometimes a little shy of telling people that they’ve just had work done.)

No.5.  Once you’ve captured the data of your target audience, and you know that they’ll be in the market for extra treatments – keep in touch with them by email and social media. Offer incentives for them to buy, making sure that you’re front of mind when they’re ready to spend their money.

A word of warning though -  Online methods of communicating are very cost effective, but never underestimate the time that it will take you to put these things together.

Her rate is £150 per day!

Specialist management training courses that you can pick and mix depending on the areas of development you need.

We’ve pulled together a host of experts in their field so that you can benefit from their experience.

Listed below are some of the subject areas that we’ll cover so that you can confidently invest your valuable time gaining exactly the right skills for you and your business.

There’s a total of £1,000 available which is match funded by the funding company, to find out more phone 0113 210 2100.

Managing Self

Managing time

Managing stress

Managerial styles

Managing Activities

The need for a business strategy

The benefits of organisational structures

Behavioural groups

The right tools for the job

Managing People

Effective interviews

Effective appraisals

Motivating people

Managing unauthorised absence

Managing Finance

Setting business projections and financial targets

Business planning

Keeping a grip on costs

The word enterprise means intuitive boldness and energy.

This enterprising group consists of dynamic business people who want to help businesses thrive in these challenging times by doing what we already do well, but for the benefit of others. We’ve got great plans for the future, so if you’d like to come along and see what they are, you’re more than welcome.

The event is being held at Bruntcliffe High School from 5.15 – 6.30pm. Please let us know if you’d like to attend by sending an email to frances@wordweaver.org.uk

One of the many things I love about my job is that you never know what the next meeting is going to bring. And boy was that true about my meeting with Lee.

He explained to me what Natural Cures is all about and why, internationally, its so popular. Put simply it’s a natural, healthy alternative to western pharmaceuticals.

There is a forum on the website so that visitors to the site can discuss their health problems with others and most importantly there are German registered doctors who give the best advice they can to benefit the patient. He explained that elsewhere in the world, if a patient had scurvy, they wouldn’t automatically advise you to eat oranges, because its not on their recommended drugs list, even though they, and most adults know that oranges are the best cure. But in Germany, doctors can give this advice because of the different training that they have had.

Have you seen the film “Super Size Me”? Lee had a burger that he had bought from McDonalds last October! I think most of you can guess the results, but what truly amazed me was that the bread bun was still exactly the same too. There was no mould on it all and its shape hadn’t changed either, it looked exactly the same. You have to ask yourself what do they add to the bread, to make it last that long? And why are we putting it into our bodies?

He told me that there are four reasons for disease in a body

• Nutritional deficiencies
• Toxins
• Stress
• Electro magnetic chaos – such as mobile phones etc.

It makes sense to keep your body as healthy as possible so that it can fight any toxins or illnesses as productively as possible.

As people become more aware of the things that they put into their body, they want to make informed choices about everything, including whether or not there’s a healthy alternative to the drugs they take too.

I’ve been to the supermarket today and I’ve bought grapefruits, organic vegetables and fish and I’m definitely taking the natural and not the man-made option from now on.

Find out more  go to www.naturalcures.com

Friday 25th February was Morley Business Awards night at Bruntcliffe High School.

There are 2,400 businesses in Morley and members of a local business networking group worked hard to pull this all together so that our business owners could give themselves a well earned pat on the back for all their hard work throughout the year.

Bruntcliffe School also played a big part in the proceedings. They kindly hosted the event, in their main hall. The pupils served the food to the guests and another team of pupils showed entrepreneurial spirit by taking photographs on the night of guests so that they had a special memento of the event.  There was live entertainment from Karen – with songs from the shows and later on in the evening Relentless performed popular music that everyone got up to dance to.

Once everyone had eaten their supper, the awards began and were called out by compare for the evening, Barry York. There were various categories and Word Weaver Marketing was under the snappy title of Service Provider of the Year -(office or other).

When Word Weaver Marketing was called out as the winner, I was stunned. I still can’t quite believe it now. All the hard work and effort had finally been worth it. The business has been running for two years now and part of my strategy is to raise Word Weaver’s profile so that more businesses are aware of who I am and what I do. So winning this award means that I get my picture in Morley Observer newspaper and more people will recognise me and my company. It’s all valuable marketing for the business.

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that PR is free. It may not cost you anything in advertising, but a lot of time and effort goes into putting the press releases together, tweeting, sending out emails and adding the information to your Facebook page and Linked In profile.

They say that PR works so much better than advertising.

It will be interesting to see how winning the competition affects my business so I’ll keep you posted.

Members of the Chamber  helped to hold a Dragon’s Den event where the pupils all promoted their companies which included a

Local Community Website

Big Bench Company

A large format printing company

Extra Maths Tuition

Smoothie Company

Each company has a group of pupils responsible for particular areas of development of the business and the mentors have chosen a particular company to work with to share their skills and knowledge.

My company is

http://www.morley.localbizproject.com/

They’ve got a great offer which is a FREE listing on their website they’ll also post any local stories that are of interest to the community too.

So what are you waiting for? If your business,  sports club or charity is based in the LS27 postcode area and wants to raise its profile, get in touch by emailing info@localbizproject.com

Go on give them your support. Its FREE!

So Wordpress is my favoured platform that I’d always recommend it. I’m working together with my technical chap to help with the back end coding so if you need a new website why not give me a call? They start from £500, but the beauty is, that it will grow with you as your business grows. I believe in transparency so you will always own your site. I want to offer my clients the flexibility and freedom to be able to add new pages and technology as your company and spending power develops.

Take a look at Yorkshire Express Solutions‘ site

Now look at Business Enterprise Network site and they’ve both been produced with the same, easy to use,  platform.

If you like them, and you’d like to know more, please get in touch.