Top Tips

Here are some of our members' 'Top Tips'. If you would like your 'Top Tips' to be listed here, please contact Liz at liz@isme.ie or 01 6622755.

Three Ways to Get the Most from Your Team
Sales
Marketing
Search Engine Optimization Tips

Three Ways to Get the Most from Your Team

Contrary to popular belief, teams are not always the best way to get work done. Problems with coordination, competition, and motivation can undermine even the most well-designed and expertly-managed team. Here are three ways to give your team the best chance of success:

•Designate a naysayer. Groupthink is a dangerous byproduct of teamwork. Ask someone to play the role of devil's advocate to be sure ideas get challenged.

•Avoid double digits. Teams should be as small as possible - never have a team of more than nine people.

•Keep the team together. Avoid swapping members out. Established teams work better than those whose composition frequently changes.

Adapted from Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams.

Sales
Provided by MarketBuild. Web: www.marketbuild.ie

1. Know your audience, what they really want as opposed to what you want to give them
2. Sort out your story, tell it from your customers perspective not from your internal view
3. Match all your sales activity to ensure your message is hitting the right people in the right way at the right time
4. Develop a sales process to ensure all business development activity happens when it is supposed to in a consistent way to maximise the result
5. Set targets , review regularly and amend activity as appropriate.

Marketing
Provided by MarketBuild. Web: www.marketbuild.ie

1. Conduct a full marketing audit to see what is needed , what works and doesn't in your business
2. Implement a cost/benefit approach for all marketing ideas before they become a reality
3. Develop an annual marketing plan with all marketing campaigns identified, review all activity regularly, learn from past activity and seek constant improvements.
4. Put yourself in your customers shoes and ask what would make you buy from you!
5. Highlight your points of difference in all marketing activity.


Search Engine Optimization Tips
Provided by Inspiration Marketing. Web: www.inspiration.ie

1: Avoid Poor Coding

Ensure that your web pages are created in a technically compliant way. Search Engines bots crawl through web sites by analyzing the sites code. The idea is to make html clean and error free so that these bots are able to index every page of a website. Having errors could undermine your other search engine optimization efforts. All pages on your site might not get indexed by the bots, and ultimately can lead to a lower page ranking.

2: Optimize your search engine access using relevant keywords

For example, if a website is about Lir Irish chocolate, then go after specific typical keywords. “Rich Lir chocolate” and “Lir chocolate truffles” would be excellent keywords because they are very specific. The more specific a keyword is, the less likely other competitors will be to rank in search engines for it. This enables sites to have a higher ranking, and a higher position in key search engines results.

3 Place keywords in smart places to increase Search Engine Optimization

After the keywords are agreed make sure that they appear in the site Title tag as well as the Headings on the page. They should also be in the body of the web page, but be careful not to overdo the keyword density.

4: Attract Inbound Links

A good link building programme with relevant trusted links from other quality websites can boost your sites’ search engine ranking. Try to avoid paid links back or too many reciprocal links. Stay away from link schemes.