A virtual assistant (VA) can be useful for a small business at any time of year, but especially so over Christmas, when things get busy and people start taking time off for the holidays. Get Ahead VA’s franchisees know how much their VAs are needed during the festive season, and they offer a wide range of services to help out local businesses at this time. Here are 5 key ways that hiring a VA can make a difference to your business this Christmas.
(more…)Category: PR
This year, 27th November will be Black Friday, one of the biggest days for sales and shopping in the pre-Christmas calendar. For many businesses, this is one of the most important days of the year, and that may be especially true this year due to the economic slump caused by the global pandemic.
But for service-based and B2B businesses, the question of whether to run a promotion for Black Friday is a tricky one. Can you run an effective campaign if you don’t sell physical products? What might a B2B business offer instead? If you’re pondering these questions right now, let us inspire you with a few ideas about how to run a Black Friday promotion for a B2B business.
(more…)It’s safe to say that, for most people, this year hasn’t exactly gone to plan – perhaps you started 2020 with big dreams of finally starting your own business, only to have to put those dreams aside in order to make it through the crisis. But the pandemic doesn’t have to stop your entrepreneurial aspirations forever. In fact, opening a franchise could get you back on track sooner than you think.
There are all sorts of fantastic benefits to opening a franchise, but today we’re looking at four key advantages that could make this a great career move for you, even in all the upheaval of 2020.
(more…)At Get Ahead VA, we are privileged to work with a wide variety of clients who recognise the value of outsourcing. Here’s 60 seconds with one of our clients, Ketan Makwana CEO of Enterprise Lab, a professional development agency that specialises in helping businesses grow sustainably
(more…)Looking after customers is important for any business, and using your marketing strategy to attract new customers is important. But in truth, your existing customers are more valuable to your business than your new ones. This is because an existing customer already knows and trusts your brand and is highly likely to buy from you again. It is also a lot more cost-effective to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.
In this blog, we look at why customer-focused strategies work, and which customers you should target.
(more…)This week, as part of our ongoing celebrations for Get Ahead VA’s 10th business birthday, we’re digging into the archives and looking back at some of our most significant milestones over the years. A lot has happened in the last decade, and these are just a few of the highlights that have carried Get Ahead VA from its earliest beginnings to where we are now.
(more…)Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight, we take a closer look at one of these and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month, we’re looking at PR.
What is PR?
PR stands for ‘public relations’, and it covers all the activities your business does to spread information, build relationships and present a positive image of itself to the world. In practice, this means communicating with the media, building a reputation through social media or organic marketing campaigns, managing internal communications, and running damage control if something goes wrong.
(more…)Get Ahead VA is jumping for joy, because at last week’s Women in Business Awards we were Highly Commended in the Enlightened Employer category!
The Women in Business Awards are a celebration of businesswomen in the Thames Valley, Solent and South Coast regions of the UK. The awards are given to women who have made an important contribution to their organisations, at all levels, and Get Ahead VA was thrilled to be nominated for two awards this year.
The ‘Enlightened Employer – supporting women in the workplace’ award is given to companies “that have shown exceptional commitment to gender equality in the workplace.” This includes all areas of business, from recruitment to employee development, “or any other ways of creating a positive and inclusive workplace culture which enables women to excel.”
Press releases are a fundamental part of media relations work and one of the main ways you can share your news with journalists.
But unless you work in PR or comms, knowing how they exactly work and what they can actually achieve is somewhat of a mystery. For instance, just because you’ve issued a release to the media, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get any coverage.
In this blog, former journalist and Get Ahead VA team member, Sanina Kaur, sheds some light on the world of press releases.
Pretty much everybody’s blogging these days, which is a really good thing.
There are many reasons why businesses should blog, from boosting their SEO rankings (because we all know just how much search engines love new content!) to raising brand awareness and positioning themselves as thought leaders.
But here’s the thing…not everybody’s sharing their blogs.
Blog-writing is only half of the equation, the other half involves sharing your posts far and wide. By doing this, businesses can increase the chances of their blogs being read, shared and commented upon.