We don’t consider ourselves to be a fully established business yet. Yes, we’ve been going for a little over 5 years now but we’re still growing and without a doubt still learning. Since rebranding, we have made this new ‘brand awareness’ a top priority. We haven’t got anything to hide, we haven’t changed identity to mask a previous incident we weren’t proud of. No, we rebranded for all the right reasons and although we did our best to make people aware of who we are and what we do, not everybody would have been reached.
One avenue we have focused heavily on is involving ourselves in the #hours on Twitter. You may or may not know what these are, but in brief, a designated hour is advertised at a certain time on a certain day every week, when you tweet, you add the hashtag to the hour and join the conversation (for example #MidlandsHour). People and businesses taking part will interact, retweet and favourite your tweets. It’s about being interesting and showing an interest in others, not just about spamming the hour with shameless, self indulgent promotional tweets. Sure, throw in one or two (we do – just to remind people what we do). Treat it liked a networking event. If they ask, tell them, don’t bore them to death!
Oddly, a majority of our business is not local (by local, we mean solely Hereford), and in our case there are more established (but not necessarily better) businesses that offer what we do. Unfortunately these businesses are better connected because they have been around longer, so rather than compete, we offer ourselves to a more wider audience. We’ll quite often get involved in #WorcesterHour #WestMidsHour & #MidlandsHour. Still within travelling distance should we need to meet with a potential client.
What we offer doesn’t require us to be local. We want to be more widely recognised locally and referrals and reviews definitely help. We can conduct our business via phone / Skype and email which does not restrict us to just the local market.
