You can support Armed Forces community – and they can boost your business

Your organisation, whatever its industry, sector or size, can become a powerful force for positive change at a regional and national level through the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme (ERS), a scheme which acknowledges employers that provide exceptional support to the Armed Forces community and Defence.

Once employers have signed the Armed Forces Covenant they can apply for the ERS Bronze award. The Silver level then recognises employers who actively demonstrate support, and the Gold level is for those who are advocates.

Silver and Gold employers are typically recognised for having supportive HR policies for Reserves and Cadet Force Adult Volunteers (CFAVs). By offering employment to service leavers, granting flexible leave for service spouses and partners before and after deployment, and supporting Reservists, you help to ensure that men and women who have done, and continue to do, so much for our nation are treated fairly and with respect.

Those in the Armed Forces are given world class training to develop essential core, transferrable skills such as leadership, management, planning, problem-solving and communication, directly benefitting those who employ them.

Best practice can look like:

• Employment of Reservists and support through flexible HR policies.

Employment of regular service personnel at the end of their engagements and support for their resettlement, in collaboration with the Career Transition Partnership.

Employment opportunities for service leavers with more challenging transitions including the wounded, injured and sick.

Employment of spouses/civil partners of service personnel.

Joint development of skills in key areas such as engineering, medical, communications and cyber security.

Career opportunities and support for CFAVs and Cadets.

Tackling disadvantages faced by service personnel in the consumer market.

Encouraging supply chain partners and business networks to do all of the above.

For more information, email Cat Suckling on wm-reed3@rfca.mod.uk or visit www.wmrfca.org.

Ask the Expert

What is public relations (PR) and what do we do? Put simply, PR increases visibility, showcases your services and products and done the right way, increases your sales too.

PR is often seen as something of a dark art, but it’s a lot more straightforward than you’d think! It's simply a service which increases awareness of your business in front of potential clients.

At R&Co Communications, we write page-ready copy and we ‘sell in’ stories to journalists for use in print and digital publications.

This includes local papers, the business-to-business (B2B) press or press related to your industry. The logic is simple: third-party endorsement is more valuable and trusted by the reader than advertising is. We’re often asked whether we can get full control over what a journalist writes, or whether we can see the article before it’s published. Our answer is always the same – yes you can, and that’s called an advert! What you lose in editorial control, you more than make up for with third-party endorsement. When a trusted news brand showcases your work and this is repeated over time, that trust passes to the consumer when they come to decide on putting their hand in their pocket. At R&Co we also specialise in search engine optimisation (SEO) – the art of making your website appear higher in Google searches than your competitors.

SEO is about optimising your own website for keywords so people searching for your services are more likely to find you.

It’s also about gaining trust by getting high-quality websites to link to you.

Why should you take this seriously? Because the first place people go to research anything is Google – and because your serious competitors are already doing it!

Our third key specialism at R&Co is social media. We’re all familiar with social media, but did you know you can also use it to advertise?

Organic social media posts don’t get the reach and engagement they used to, but paid social media puts you in front of new users.

Whether you have a budget of £10 or £100,000, we create eye-catching social media campaigns to deliver brand awareness and new business leads.

PR gets people talking about you, SEO ensures they can find you and paid social media helps drive business leads down the marketing funnel.

R&Co was established in 1979 and was previously known as Newsline PR. It is a full-service PR agency with clients in a range of B2B and B2C sectors including veterinary, property, security and logistics.

For more information about R&Co, please call us on 01926 888308, email info@rcomms.co.uk or visit www.rcomms.co.uk. You can also search for R&Co Communications on LinkedIn.