Do you have a big marketing campaign in the works?

When planning marketing strategies it’s always important to ensure you plan correctly for all possible outcomes. Most of us remember some of the worst marketing and PR mistakes and forget the successful endeavors.

Back in the 90s, vacuum company Hoover decided to give away free flights as part of a promotion. The plan, however, backfired horribly when the demand for the offer became too great for the company to manage. Instead of pleased and satisfied customers, Hoover ended up having to pay out millions in legal and settlement fees, and suffered greatly in their public image. What’s worse? This could have been prevented!

A very powerful weapon in your business armory is preparation. And what better way to prepare for a marketing campaign than to arrange in advance for telephone answering services to aid in additional call volume?

Hoover could have prevented their PR woes and a whole lot of financial loss if they had been forward thinking enough to arrange a phone answering service, a cost-effective and highly helpful service, which could allow for the influx of callers and correspondence from interested customers and prevented delays which resulted in some not being able to participate in the offer.

These days, it doesn’t make sense to rely on old methods. Let Hoover be a lesson to you. If you’re planning a big marketing push, and let’s face it you probably are (times are tough and we all need a little extra!), make sure you look at all possible scenarios. Do whatever you can to both reduce your costs and ensure you don’t unnecessarily lose out due to bad planning.

As England continues to repeat its mantra of “keep calm and carry on” many are beginning to doubt whether staying calm really is the right option. But with riots and recession and general feelings of worry gathering around the minds and hearts of most of Britain’s people, the notion of keeping calm does indeed seem a good idea. 

Still, for business men and women, staying calm might not be the only or best option. Instead why not embrace a new mantra, perhaps we ought to “get strong and carry on”? It is time for businesses to learn how to fight back against a wavering economy and come out on top! But how do we do this? How does business stand strong in the midst of a recession?

1. Employ new tactics such as a virtual office address or call handling services. Virtual office addresses are a great way to help maintain authority and professionalism even while reducing office size or staff. You can keep a great address in central London but operate your business from anywhere. Meanwhile, call handling is great especially for medium-sized businesses that need a little extra support when dealing with high call volumes as a result of successful marketing campaigns.

2. Stay up to date on news and market happenings. Ensure your business is aware of rising trends and using these to your own benefit. This includes embracing social media and ensuring your company has a solid online presences as well as an offline presence. As Facebook claims it has invoked a future of sharing, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon if you haven’t already; harness the power of word of mouth and social interactions for your business!

3. Be flexible, and adaptable. In other words, don’t be a “stick in the mud” or any other appropriate cliché. As with the above suggestion, staying strong as a business involves being sure enough of whom you are as a business to adjust to rapid changes in society and economic systems. Be ready to roll with the punches and you are more likely to achieve long lasting success. 

We may be in the middle of a recession, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Some businesses are still doing well, and it’s not just the big businesses either. Medium sized businesses are doing surprisingly well thanks to effective marketing campaigns and money saving tactics such as phone answering services. Why would a medium sized business require extra services for phone answering?

Imagine you begin a new marketing campaign. Your increase in calls and queries should increase as a result. Do you have everything you need to handle the rise in call volume? 

Don’t let great marketing success put stress on your business! Success should never be a negative, or bring struggles to your company. You need to be prepared and maintain a calm, reasoned approach. 

While hiring more employees does create jobs, which is of course a great and welcome thing in this rocky economy, the financial strain it can unnecessarily place on your small to medium-sized business is not worth it. Creating too much strain too early can cause businesses to topple. Therefore, instead of looking to expand your employee base and risking  undue strain on your company, it would be best to choose a more cost effective solution by embracing alternative business ideas such as an answering service and even a virtual office address.

A wonderfully simple and cost-effective recession proof way to handle your business call increase is to bring in the help of a telephone answering service.  Let professionally trained customer service, telephone answering crews answer the calls for you. This way you save time, precious income, and stress from dealing with increased calls; all this while you reap the benefits of increased business and enquiries due to your successful marketing campaigns!

Instead of stressing about the recession and economic woes, take control of your business knowing that actually you can be in control of your future. 

Business is changing. This isn’t just down to global financial crises and system failures, but to the impact of social media and increased digitization of society. Retail in particular is moving off the high street and staking its claim primarily online. 

Current business trends point toward a movement to primarily online commerce transactions. 2011 Christmas sales in store were down this year while online stores saw their profits rise dramatically (so much so that it almost broke the postal system – they were strangely unprepared!). Businesses still operate on the high street but the majority of revenue for companies seems to be moving to the World Wide Web. Empty shops and high street ghost towns are emerging more and more, especially with the closing down of widely known high street presences such as La Senza, Blacks, and Barratts, all making many staff redundant and closing up high street shops.

Even those who previously sought a high rent address in the coveted W1 post code area are recognising the benefits of a virtual office address in London rather than an actual one. It may seem strange to suggest business moves from physical space to virtual spaces. If the world continues to drive forward at such a highly digital pace we could end up in something like “the Matrix”, as digital rather than physical beings that become unaware of the real world falling apart around us.  But for businesses looking for a survival plan in the face of our ever shifting economy and business world, virtual space is the way forward.

Here are three reasons to go virtual in 2012:

1. Trends hint at the way forward: As mentioned above, retail and business trends are pointing toward e-commerce rather than high street commerce as the way of the future. Businesses that have a strong online presence are more likely to succeed despite economic dips and droughts. This means less money should be spent on physical space and more directed toward creating an affable online trading space and a positive social media presence. 

2. Technology is more than a tool now: Much of the technology we’ve created over the past few years has been to make our physical lives easier. Now, technology is changing how we function. We used to be able to function as we had for decades with each of us in our offices, with ties and suits and/or skirts and blouses. However, mobile technology, apps, tablets, and social media has shifted everything. A physical address is no longer a requirement. A mail forwarding address is more cost effective than an office on the high street, and creates freedom for your business. Embrace it.

3. Rental & property prices are on the rise: Inflated rental prices and cost of living, high interest rates and less overall trust in banking as a whole means laying out thousands each month on high overheads for electricity, gas, and equipment is just not sensible. Businesses should be doing everything they can to carry on and overcome unfair pricing and inflated expenses. Online businesses are flexible, more affordable, and less likely to contribute to rising high street ghost town occurrences across the UK. 

Don’t fall behind, stay ahead and take your business into the virtual world. This way even if we do end up in the Matrix, you’re more likely to stay on top.

At the start of 2012, many companies are still fighting against the financial global crisis, the deflated job market, and predicted impending recession (the second in just a few years), by stepping into courageous new business start ups. 

These start ups are not your average businesses of the last decade or so. Most of these new businesses are working with a different sort of business plan, embracing adaptability and new models of commerce such as co-operation, sustainability and innovation.  The businesses that are rising above gloomy trends are those offering something different, like the real estate company working to create and sell more affordable housing or the water company, incorporating both expensive filtration equipment and affordable 20 Litre cans helping the average villagers in India to get access to clean water. Thinking outside the box is vital this year and as we move into the future.

If you’re looking to start a new business or reboot your current one, here are a few tips for business success from 2012 onward:

1. Embrace Crowd Funding: This is a great way to get a business going and avoid interest heavy loans. A company called Great Little Place used crowd funding to get the necessary £10,000 to start up their business, which gave them a real chance to come out on top and get their business going. Without this, it would have been a much rockier start. The great thing about this is that funding from sites like crowdfunder.co.uk keep banks and loans at a distance and allows for the common people to feel involved in your great project resulting in instant social engagement and awareness of your business right out of the gate. You can’t fake that kind of marketing magic.

2. Go Social: Embracing social media as it grows and develops will be vital to your business success. Businesses that turn a blind eye to this will likely miss out on key search opportunities and on positive public opinions that come through social interaction via the internet. As the digital world and tools become more engrained in business and society it’s important not to dismiss social media as merely a fad or as something other people do. Social media is impacting how the world works. Get behind it, engage with people, and make sure your social presence is valuable. This will help your business grow and maintain strength even in hard times. Online shopping aided by social sites is also gaining traction with the majority of Christmas sales happening online this year, rather than in store.

3. Be Innovative: As society changes under the influence of media, technology, and the global financial crisis, innovation and ease of adaptability (and ability to roll with the punches) will become increasingly important. If you can’t think beyond interior focused guidelines and ideas, your business will probably suffer. Especially in the UK, cuts and strain to small businesses are likely to continue for the next few years. If you can work around this and keep your company thinking one step ahead of government’s tactics to give money to big business and penalise small business, you’ll be one or two steps ahead of the "average Joe company" and more poised for success.

4. Green is Good: Yes, green business has been on a rocky road over the last few years and recession hasn’t helped, but green business is also more affordable these days. Cutting down on commuting, and moving out of big cities like London (instead using London Virtual Offices and office mail forwarding services), reducing power consumption, recycling, using less paper, and coming up with environmentally friendly processes, is good business sense. A company that is green or sustainable may also benefit from more positive social engagement and public opinion as most people are aware of the benefits of green practices. So if you’re starting a new business, now is the time to ensure your practices are sustainable (it’s more expensive to do this retrospectively). 

The world isn’t likely to end this year, but we can’t get around the fact that the world economy and financial system continues to be in a dreary place. Spending reductions, a pitiful job market, high cost of living and interest rates means life in the UK is not at its ideal peak performance level. It is a bit of a slog. But that isn’t to say that we should throw in the towel and give into our fates, accepting apocalyptic financial doom and business failure as a matter of course. 

2012 is a year to gain financial traction, to save where you can, and learn how to function better as a business without excess expenditures. The key here is enabling your business to run smoothly and effectively on a tighter budget. Now don’t go thinking you need to cut staff or reduce wages. That’s just scare mongering and there are many things you can do to cut costs without cutting your team. Before delving into bottom-of-the-barrel extreme last resort measures to save your finances and keep your business head above water, keep in mind that there are many great things you can do to reduce costs that don’t involve letting go of valuable employees.

Here are 5 cost saving techniques to keep your business charging forward in 2012:

1. Move Out of the Big City:  Yes, moving offices can be expensive, but likewise staying put in a high rent area when rental prices are skyrocketing alongside gas, electric and hydro costs, can be incredibly draining on your company’s budget. Monthly costs for renting and running an office are rising, especially for central London offices. If you’re worried about keeping that great address, mail forwarding services are a great affordable solution which lets you keep your address but work from wherever you like, or wherever is most affordable for your business.

2. Put the Break on Commuting: This ties in with the first one, but commuting is expensive, stressful, and tiring. Additionally, rail costs have just gone up by a whopping 11% and petrol prices remain high. Now is a good time to avoid commuting as much as possible. Working from home or incorporating flexible work practices to cut travel, including virtual offices and meeting room hires are just a few ways to help you ease into this. Imagine how much you could save simply by staying away from the morning commute. Imagine how much more relaxed you’ll be too without crowded trains, delays, cancellations and/or honking horns and traffic jams.

3. Unplug and Switch Off (whenever possible): Ever heard of “vampire power”? When you leave appliances, laptops, computers, printers, etc turned on over night, your office is literally being drained of costly energy. This can contribute to higher electricity bills and it’s also bad for the environment. If you’re not in a room turn the light off (installing motion detector lights can be useful for this, especially in offices). Make sure you shut computers down as much of your technical equipment as possible before leaving the office. Anything you can do to reduce the vampire power effect will reduce your monthly electricity bill. 

4. Embrace the Cloud and all its wonder: Cloud computing is a great way to reduce the high costs of server hardware purchasing and running. It also doesn’t require a central office somewhere to house it all. A cloud server frees you up to work from anywhere and can help enable greater flexibility for your business. Look into it! 

5. Make Talk Cheaper: Outsourcing your telephone answering can result not only in greater ability to handle a wide variety and greater volume of calls regardless of the size of your business or your opening hours but it also frees you up to spend time focusing on your business itself

Recently, UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared that 2012 would be a “hard year.” He cast a shadow of doom over the entire year in one sweeping assumption based on fearful projections and fatalism. Many businesses are battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst, and we’ve not even completed the first week of the year. I believe Cameron’s words translate loosely to “the sky is falling!” 

Contrary to this broad and dreary statement, many business men and women are finding success through a different tact. New start up companies are taking a chance and launching forward into 2012 with positivity instead of negativity. Why? It’s simple: creativity and positivity increases the likelihood of success while negativity increases your likelihood of failure. 

Fear is something that paralyses us. It shifts our brain from free-thinking creativity factor to our basic survival instincts. If businesses or your employees are operating in a place of fear and negativity, they’re not working from their peak place. They are working with their basic impulses with creativity quashed or diminished due to worry. Fight, flight or freeze impulses are likely to kick in at any time. Is that really what you want for your business?

If you’re looking to improve your chances for business success this year, here are a few tips:

1. Stay Positive at all Costs: Choose positivity above pandering to negative notions or fears, even those shared via media and news. Be realistic but positive. Think creatively and spread optimism not pessimism in your office. This comes through how you react to news, how you treat your employees and how you communicate. Be aware of whether your actions and words are communicating positivity or negativity and woefulness. Positivity will help yourself and your team from sinking into fight or flight mode and will help your business to carry on by working at maximum capacity, not “safe mode.” 

2. Make Sure your Employees are Happy: Do what you can to ensure your employees like working with your company, whether it’s creating an office space that is more conducive to creativity and productivity, allowing more days to be worked from home, setting up a virtual office, or shifting some employees into more suitable job roles, ensuring your employees are happy cannot help but aid your business in being more productive. Happiness in your staff can even help your business to grow (yes, even in hard financial times). If your employees aren’t happy, they won’t work as well and productivity will plummet, which is exceptionally dangerous in a troubled economy.

3. Be Flexible and Adaptable: That old fable about Chicken Little and his fears of the falling sky (or end of the world) were all about stubbornness and unwillingness to accept change, and a little bit of blindness on the part of the poor little chicken who didn’t take the time to understand his changing world. In actual fact, the world was not ending but he gave into his fears. Many businesses go under due to “Chicken Little syndrome”, not unlike Cameron’s declaration noted earlier. However, businesses that are able to be flexible and adaptable to new situations and circumstances are more likely to stay strong even in uncertain times. Businesses that allow more flexibility and incorporate things such as virtual offices, telecommuting, and telephone answering services to free up employees to do more work that they love, inevitably benefit greatly and have happier staff! 

Instead of battening down the hatches and expecting the sky to fall, why not try a new tact with your business and see if you can't prove Cameron (and Chicken Little) wrong this year. Perhaps 2012 can be a year of progress, not pessimism.

Everything is going virtual. We spend more and more time interacting with machines and less time interacting with purely physical space. Many companies are increasingly hosting information on The Cloud network that exists online, ensuring less electricity is used and less cash is spent maintaining numerous large physical servers. You don’t need to buy an actual book now (unless you want to), and CDs are becoming less and less common thanks to digital downloads. This virtual trend is hitting business too, and it's a very good thing!

If you’re a fairly new business, and a small one at that, it’s important to stay forward focused. This means you need to embrace virtual space as much as or perhaps even more than physical space, especially if you’re lucky enough to be a quickly growing business.

In order to stay ahead with your business and keep that fantastic growth happening, there are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind:

1. Keep it Simple: Strategies should be easy to understand and communicated across the team. Keep employees in the loop and ensure your strategies are sustainable and manageable even in changing times and growing business.

2. Think Big: How you think, so you will be. If you’re thinking small you will either stay small, or eventually watch your growth stretch you too thin and end up collapsing the whole thing. As you grow, you want to keep up to date with changing market trends and dynamics. Keeping an eye on the competition will of course help too. Always have a proactive plan for change when necessary and communicate this to your employees when possible or necessary.

3. Be Flexible: Planning for business growth in an increasingly virtual world means stretching those muscles of compromise and intuition often. It also means making strategic financial plans in case growth demands sudden expenditures. Don’t get caught out. A great way to keep costs down is to cut out brick and mortar. This also keeps things flexible and agile. What do we mean? We mean don’t tie yourself down to one office space and dig in too soon. Stay loose and ready to move. Of course the best way to do this is through London virtual office services and telephone and mail forwarding. If you need a physical office space for your team but also require flexibility, going virtual is the best option and will save you thousands each year. 

Times are tough for small business and the economy continues to wobble about. So if you’re one of the lucky ones with a business that is growing, don’t self sabotage by keeping your head down.

Plan ahead, keep your head up, your eyes and ears open, and run forward with all your might. We’d love to help you along the way. 

Today is the first of December and the Christmas countdown has officially begun. That first advent calendar chocolate has been munched. Christmas tunes are pumping over the radio. Magical lights have been flicked on in cities around the country and children’s hearts are beating a little bit faster as they ponder that great day when the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree will give light to piles of nicely wrapped presents. 

If they haven’t already put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards), this is also the time of year that 

children write letters to Santa asking for presents, pleading their case and ensuring he knows just how good they’ve been. The UK deadline for letters is the 14th of December (to make sure he has time to focus on all that present packaging and delivering).

In England the address for Santa is: Santa/Father Christmas, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, SAN TA1. In Canada his address is: Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0H0. It seems many countries around the world have their own special address for Mr. Claus.

Clearly, Santa uses mail forwarding services! It’s not hard to understand why. Different mailboxes in different countries help keep the letters organised which help Santa, and his hardworking team of elves, to sort the mail between each country. It is also very beneficial when it comes to sorting and organising the presents for dispersal too.  

There are many reasons why jolly old St. Nick uses this service and why you should too no matter the size of your business. Here are the two key reasons for getting a mail forwarding address: 

1. It improves privacy: This is especially important if you are Santa Claus/Father Christmas/Kris  Kringle. Surely if the true address of Santa’s house was revealed it would result in treks to his home, which naturally would cause great disruption to Christmas plans and schedules. We just can’t let that happen. 

For small businesses who work from home having work related documents sent directly to your home may not be safe or conducive to a good work-life balance. Having post come via a London mail forwarding address gives you the privacy you need and saves loads of money, which you can spend on other aspects of running your business (or on Christmas presents!)

2. It saves time & money: with the economy being what it is currently, anything you can do to save your pennies is helpful. But in December it’s all the more important to save time as well. For Santa, having several mail forwarding systems in place around the world means he frees up time and money to be spent on Christmas preparations, time with Mrs Claus and time spent helping new Elves to learn the ropes. For him it also saves money on setting up complicated North Pole security or from excess costs from constantly needing to move house to avoid being bombarded by enthusiastic visitors (except of course those who come via Polar Express, they are the exception).

For you, it saves time having to wait for missed packages to be re-delivered (as someone is always there to sign for your delivery) and it saves money by letting you work from home or where you want 

This Christmas, as you’re counting down to holiday time off, navigating the busy streets and shops to seek out presents, decorating your home and working hard to finish up your work before the holidays and new year, consider switching to W1 virtual office services and mail forwarding. to but still keep an address in a great location. This means you can spend more time with your family and have a bit extra cash for those special presents.

Let your resolution this year be to give more, spend less, work hard but play harder, and enhance quality time with your loved ones. That will definitely get you on the “Nice” list.

The 2012 Olympic Games in London are sure to be one of the UK’s most historic sporting events, with people travelling, reporting and tuning in from all over the world. Right now, London is an exciting place to be with projects, stadiums and initiatives being set up across the country to help promote and engage people with this huge event. What makes London 2012 even more significant is the fact that the UK have even been lucky enough to secure the Olympics, seeing as London has only held the Olympics twice in its history, the last being over 60 years ago in 1948. Hosting such a global series of events means two things, there will be vast opportunity but with this there will be huge sacrifice. Fortunately, securing a W1 virtual office will help any business owner take advantage of the opportunities and avoid all of the downsides of London hosting the 2012 Olympic games.

Benefits Of A Virtual Office During The London 2012 Olympics

The obvious upside for businesses and the economy is tourism. Over 320,000 overseas visitors will attend the London Olympics and it is predicted that the boost to UK tourism will be to the effect of somewhere in the region of 2.5 billion pounds. The UK is likely to see an additional increase in tourism following the Olympics, mirroring previous boosts experienced by Olympic hosts Athens and Sydney. This will mean there is opportunity for a wealth of new businesses across the UK, with sport related businesses likely to see the most exposure and benefit. However there are additional key benefits which will come with having a London W1 virtual office in the forthcoming years.

Although London is already a world renowned and respected city, with the Olympics taking place there, the name London will become even more synonymous with success and positivity and having a W1 London address for your business could be an investment which will take advantage of the worldwide interest in London itself. A London W1 address will boast even greater weight and prestige then it already does, during and following the Olympic games. Having a W1 virtual office gives businesses the full benefit of the London effect, regardless of where they operate from within the country.

One of the biggest challenges business owners and staff will face during the London Olympics is travelling. With the increase in visitors to the city and tube routes or roads being diverted or closed, you may just incur a few more problems on that already trying morning commute. If you’re commuting to your office in London, those few months and the resulting boost in tourism are likely to affect your journey around the city. W1 virtual offices will allow you all the benefits of a city office but without that nightmare commute.

W1 office mail forwarding services will ensure that regardless of where you are the country, you will receive your mail in a timely and efficient manner, particularly useful if you’re running a company which takes product returns from customers. Then there’s the huge benefit of virtual office call handling services, allowing all your client calls to be answered and dealt with by a trained professional. For any business who is seriously considering making the most of the unique and diverse opportunities that the London 2012 Olympics are certain to provide, a W1 London virtual office offers the very best in low cost but highly efficient office solutions.