Wednesday 17 November 2010

Celebrating Womens Enterprise Day

As the UK and US celebrate Womens Enterprise Day today (17 Nov), it seems like a good opportunity to celebrate women in business and highlight the need for more support for female entrepreneurship. When we started Active Marketing & Design in 2006, we were fortunate to benefit from start-up help from organisations like the Womens Enterprise, Education and Training Union (WEETU) and Women in Rural Enterprise (WiRE), but their resources are sadly limited by continued funding cuts. Other organisations like Enterprising Women have offered free business support to women in Norfolk in the past but now charge an annual membership fee. As part of Women in Rural Enterprise, we were recently invited to make a representation to the Enterprise Minister, Mark Prisk MP, to showcase the success of women in business and highlight the types of support that we need from organisations such as WiRE.

According to BERR statistics, only 15% of the UK's 4.7 million enterprises are female-led. With commentators suggesting that public sector redundancies will hit women hardest as their (commonly) part time roles are first to be axed, this presents an excellent opportunity for women to start up a business with the right support. In my experience, women starting up in business need significant support to boost their confidence and encourage them to take the plunge. One to one advice, training and networking certainly helped us to believe in our abilities to run our marketing company. In the long term, female-led businesses are often more sustainable as we tend to have more conservative ambitions for growth and therefore are less likely to risk losing it all in the pursuit of financial success. Yet it is very difficult to quantify and recognise the contribution to the economy of the numerous female-owned microbusinesses, especially if they are home-based and fall beneath the VAT threshold.

We have supported a number of Norfolk's female-owned businesses to start up and grow through marketing activities such as branding, web design and advertising. Some examples of our successful female clients include:

Igloo Shoes
Karen Eason
Dare To Fly
Care Motoring
Adepta
The Retreat
Make it Count

We have to keep highlighting the importance of female entrepreneurship and can only hope that our current Government will recognise the importance of supporting women to make the first steps into business as part of the bigger economic picture.

Active Marketing & Design is a full service marketing & design company with offices in West Norfolk & Broadland. We specialise in supporting growing businesses in the rural economy through high impact design for print, cost-effective social media strategy & web design.

Wednesday 3 November 2010

Social Media for Rural Businesses

I was interested to read in the Eastern Daily Press Business Supplement today of a survey regarding small business use of social media which claimed only 6pc of businesses in the East describe social media as very useful in their business. I deliver a number of workshops and presentations across East Anglia outlining the business benefits of social media which are regularly over-subscribed, clearly indicating a thirst for knowledge of this evolving technology among the Norfolk small business community.

I was disappointed with the generalisations made by the survey authors - Forum of Private Business - that social media is "less likely to benefit" rural businesses such as those in farming. In my experience the online communities of Twitter, Facebook, Linked In et al are extremely powerful tools for combating rural isolation and allowing geographically disparate business people to communicate in a virtual space. My recent Twitter clients include an equestrian public relations consultant in the Kent countryside and a marketing consultant in the Pennines for example. I first heard about social media at the Women in Rural Enterprise annual conference 2 years ago and the one hour workshop was packed with women from the countryside keen to learn more about this "new" technology. At a recent Rural Business Showcase with Mark Prisk MP (organised by the same superb womens business organisation), all six of the businesswomen invited to attend were regular tweeters.

While we would all benefit from faster broadband speeds in rural areas to allow us to effectively share some of the rich social media content like video, we can effectively use many social media channels despite our poor connection speeds or weak mobile phone signal.

To achieve value from any form of marketing activity (social media included) you must enter the exercise with clear aims and objectives, plus strict rules on customer targeting and avoiding diversions. Using this approach, I have gained valuable new marketing and design clients through Twitter alone, and I know that other rural businesses could benefit by marketing in the same way.

Some excellent rural tweeters:
@breckland
@brays_cottage
@yours2share
@pennylindop
@stonemejeweller
@growingdirect
@RS_Tor
@equineman01
@moobaacluck