Regardless of the potential of a business, there are always periods of unprecedented slowness, over which you have little or no control.

Economic downturns happen for many reasons – in this case due to the disruption caused by Coronavirus lockdowns – and can last for months or even years. In a downturn, you may experience a sudden plunge in your revenue or cash flow difficulties, or it may be harder to make sales.

As a business owner, whenever you engage a person using a marketing technique – e.g. email marketing, an online advert etc – that person becomes a lead. Lead generation is the process of creating interest in your products and services in the hopes of turning them into paying customers.

As the result of lead generation is ultimately sales, rather than enquiries, finding the best ways to increase the quality and relevance of your leads is central to lead generation, as is the process of nurturing a lead from first contact to first purchase.

The ruthlessly competitive business environment for SMEs means any edge can be a huge advantage. Getting your marketing right could massively boost your sales this year.

Follow these five digital growth strategies to get you started.

While business meetings are a common routine in corporate life, too often they are either badly structured or poorly timed to create much positive impact. For example, many businesses have sales meetings but neglect to include their marketing staff, which should be an important part in the process of making sales.

Meetings are essential for the direction and growth of your business, and it is important to know what kind of meetings your business should be having, how regularly they should be held and how to make them as productive as possible.

Despite the temporary lull in business activity, competition in most sectors is as strong as ever, so effective marketing is a must. Uncertain times are always potentially around the next corner, which is why the smartest companies strive to nullify its effects and stay ahead. If you run a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), read on to discover more.

Below, we offer free tips from business experts on how to overcome the obstacles, maintain your market position, compete with larger organisations and grow your company – whatever the weather outside.

After years of keeping focussed on your target, of expensive and diligent hard work, you have finally conquered the famous Google Algorithm. You have a steady flow of new enquiries coming from the internet and it all seems worthwhile. Now for the next challenge - just because you have good rankings today, doesn’t mean you will have them tomorrow. Google results are fluid and the fact that you have been able to get your website to the top means that it is very possible that the next competitor could overtake you, or your site could drop like a stone if Google so decree.

I meet new business people and look at their websites nearly every day. I see business owners who have spent £50,000 on their site, I meet business owners who have paid a small local web designer £500 to design a site, and I meet business people who have got a mate to do it or had a bash at it themselves for next to nothing.

If you are thinking of designing your own site, perhaps this article can help you clarify your thoughts and make the right decision for your business.

Google AdWords is the name of Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising platform. There are different forms of this type of advertising, but when most people think about Google AdWords they think about the search results at the very top of Google’s search result pages (which used to be on a shaded background, and now have a small yellow tag by them reading ‘Ad’), and also the results that appear on the right hand side of search results pages.

Over the past ten years, I have met many businesses in a huge variety of different industries from hairdressers to engineers working with cutting edge technology, from retailers to wholesalers, from tradespeople to professionals, manufacturers and service businesses.

It is many people’s belief (including many SEO companies) that in order to get a website ranking well in Google, they need to ensure that when Google looks at that site, it is made absolutely clear what that sites’ owner/s want it to rank for. In other words, if you want the site to rank well for ‘Precision Engineering companies’, then you better repeat that phrase in as many places as possible – in the pages themselves and in the background of the site – you may hear people talking about getting keywords into the meta descriptions, title tags, H1 headers etc… More learned SEO professionals may talk of demonstrating to Google that your site is popular and useful, by engineering as many ‘links’ from other sites as possible – this often involves directory submissions, forum comments, guest blog post and many other areas.