A North East marketing agency has announced that it is on the lookout for 10 new members of staff with immediate effect.
The company, More Than Words (Marketing) Limited, based in North Shields, Tyne & Wear, is looking for 7 part-time B2B telemarketing staff, an experienced copywriter, a sales representative, and a new member of its customer care team.
This good news, announced in the same week that over 10,000 people had disappeared from North East company payrolls during the COVID-19 epidemic, was a result of the partnerships the company struck up with dozens of its training provider clients as well as competitors since March 23, 2020.
We caught up with Mark Fairlie, the company’s Joint Manager Director, to ask how the company had coped during the pandemic and why it had announced this expansion now.
“We made the conscious decision to furlough as few staff as possible at the start of the pandemic”, stated Mr. Fairlie. “We wanted to offer as normal a service as possible to clients and give our employees and suppliers as much certainty as possible going forward.
“While it is true that there were huge sectors of the UK economy very badly affected by the original lockdown, COVID-19 gave many of the country’s business leaders time to sit back and think about what they wanted for their company when the pandemic had been consigned to history.
“The first thing we did after the announcement of lockdown was to approach some of Britain’s most talented and flexible training providers to market the courses they could deliver remotely.
“Working together with these providers, we sent business leaders and owners almost individualized training plans for their companies – for example, we approached tree services and nurserymen businesses with specialised arboreal training courses.
“The employers we got in touch with took up our training provider partners’ offers with enthusiasm. It goes to show that British business leaders and owners value their staff and value investing in training them”.
The company believes that there will be a period of unprecedented economic growth in the 18-24 months following the return to normality. They believe that there is a “wall of cash” which companies and individuals have hoarded during the time and this is behind the timing of their expansion.
If this prediction is true, it cannot come true soon enough for many B2B marketing firms. At the height of the pandemic, many marketing firms’ turnover was down up to 43% on the same month in the previous year.
According to recent statistics published by the Data and Marketing Association, 59% of marketing company bosses state that the second most important priority for the sector in 2021 is “recovering from the coronavirus pandemic”, just slightly behind “improving diversity and inclusion”.
Mr. Fairlie stated that “we know that many of our friends and colleagues working in the B2B marketing sector have had a hard time of it in the past 12 months.
“While on paper we are competitors, the amount of cooperation and cross-pollination in the industry between data providers and marketing services has always been significant. This has always been an amicable industry to work in because we all need access to each other’s skills and data to provide the best services to clients.
“Speaking personally for us, we’ve been helped a lot by our friends in the industry during the past 12 months and we’ve been happy to help a lot of our friends out too. The bigger our sector is, the healthier the overall economy.”
