MORE than 40 North Yorkshire businesses attended a free masterclass in growing their enterprises online.
The businesses from the Richmondshire and Hambleton districts took part in a touring Google Digital Garage day designed to help them market themselves in the digital age.
Two workshops, delivered by Gori Yahaya (cor), Google’s head of training for the Digital Garage, covered creating the best websites and digital marketing techniques.
The event, held at the Holiday Inn Scotch Corner, was attended by Rishi Sunak, MP for Richmond, who had helped organise the training with Hambleton and Richmondshire district councils and broadband provider Superfast North Yorkshire.
He said: “These were great practical training sessions for businesses keen to grow via marketing themselves online and I was pleased so many businesses took the opportunity to gain this vital expertise.
“I am very grateful to Google for coming here. No other area in North Yorkshire or the North-East has had the benefit of this expertise.”
One of the businesses at the event was Dust Bunnies Cleaning Services run by Sarah Willis, of Leyburn.
She established her small business 11 years ago and it now employs 13 people.
She said: “I found the sessions really useful. It was a really good opportunity to find out about a range of digital business services that are available and free.
“It didn’t just cover what Google did but also how facebook and Twitter could be used to find new customers.”
Dust Bunnies recently received a £1,000 business grant from Richmondshire District Council to purchase carpet and oven cleaning equipment. District Cllr Karin Sedgwick of Leyburn attended the event and expressed her thanks to Google for coming to the district.
The Scotch Corner event was part of Google’s Digital Garage project – a commitment to provide digital skills training to 200,000 small businesses across the UK by the end of 2016.
Government research shows that SMEs with a strong web presence grow more than twice as quickly as competitors, create more than twice as many jobs, and are 50 per cent more likely to sell outside of their immediate region.
By encouraging and supporting a variety of businesses to use the Internet effectively, from entrepreneurs and one-man-band start-ups, to larger companies, the workshops aim to prove that, with the right training, any business can become a digital business.