The Government is coming to the rescue of umbrella company contractors, freelancers and other sole traders everywhere by providing free online branding support.
If there’s one thing that microbusinesses like freelancers, sole traders, and umbrella company contractors always need, it’s helping to get their name out there. For what it’s worth, one of the best ways to do this has been through online branding for quite a while now – and the Government apparently wants to help all the little people out by offering free support for building an online presence.
Some £2 million in funding has been set aside by the Government for a new campaign entitled Do More Online. The new endeavour is specifically for small businesses to find ways to build better presences online; the Government is hoping that this investment will help spur these firms and individuals to bigger and better profits with an eye towards how this will help the overall economy of the UK.
If you ask me, this sounds like a rather good idea, though I’m not entirely sure how it will work in practice. Right now there are more than 20 projects that will be run by Local Enterprise Partnerships that will offer free help in building the online presence of a contractor or small business owner in the hopes it will drum up more business for these individuals. There are regional events on the agenda like networking and advice sessions, and in some markets like Manchester there will be a digital television channel set up to provide business advice in an easy to access, cost-effective manner.
On top of that, there are websites being set up right now that will be offering free information on a number of topics, such as how to use social media to market a sole trader’s website and things of that nature. With the way the business world is shaping up, I think it’s a good move to provide better tools for online marketing, but if you ask me there’s one thing this plan is lacking: revenue to be devoted to the costs of online marketing.
For what it’s worth, marketing businesses online takes advertising funds. The Internet runs on marketing, and while all these new free programs are fantastic I would love to see some funds earmarked to provide online advert campaigns for small-scale firms and freelance workers to promote themselves. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your website looks if no one ever visits it after all, don’t you agree?
