Business Media Club: Eight years on with plans for the future

02 Nov Business Media Club: Eight years on with plans for the future

After nine monthly meetings in 2021, our Business Media Club reaches the end of its eighth year and our first as an online club.

More importantly, the wonderful people who have attended most or all our meetings this year now have the opportunity to put everything they have learned and developed together into one holistic communications and marketing plan for 2022.

Each meeting has focused on a specific theme leading onto the next one and matched with relevant skills.

That means, aside from ideas and inspiration and of course the all-important sharing of best practice, which the club has thrived upon over the past eight years, you amass in-depth knowledge and your own thoughts on crucial aspects of what needs to form a marketing plan that can work for you.

Why? Because you’ve invested the time and effort to fully think through and start working on key criteria to drive your business forward – and we do things the right way around. The plan comes at the culmination of acquiring knowledge and skill building not vice versa.

And do you want to know the real irony? Marketing plans are some of the most boring and pointless documents I have ever seen – crammed with irrelevant claptrap that bear no relation to how to grow a business, how to communicate or take a business to market.

Frankly, they are a con sold by marketers whose business is to sell marketing plans and hope their clients rely on them as a crutch.

That’s not how we do things at the Business Media Club, which explains why we continue to grow year on year. This year some 20+ business have participated in the programme. We don’t want them to cling on to us limpet-like for life. We want them to fly.

That’s why our final meeting focuses on helping them condense their thoughts together into a coherent plan to grow their business in 2022.

Of course, many of the topics we have discussed this year will already have been put into action. I know that we have changed the outlook and attitude of many of our club attendees and that they have networked naturally among one another rather than this being the sole virtue for attending the club – the single club in the golf bag of most networking groups.

So, we’ve covered strategy, authenticity, originality, culture, messaging, PR, thought leadership, user generated content, disruptive marketing, customer pathways, pitching and presenting and the protective backstop of a reputation management plan – facets that fit snugly into a marketing plan devised your way rather than synched into an ill-fitting straitjacket template.

Not that these are the only themes up our sleeves.

Next year, as ever, we’ll tweak our meeting themes and specific communications and marketing skills to offer an enhanced service to club attendees. Let’s face it, there is no shortage of ways to take a business to market or build those business necessities – trust, reputation and integrity.

The Business Media Club has always been about so much more. The people who attend the club – who share ideas and enthusiasm at each meeting – are the real stars. Without their contributions the club would be nothing.

That’s why our eighth anniversary meeting is a double celebration – our chance to say a final ‘thank you’ for everything they have achieved this year and a wider celebration of the club and all it stands for.

We’re also asking our valued business colleagues to join this special meeting to see how we do things, to congratulate our latest cohort and to make a donation to our chosen charity, Worcester Foodbank, to spread goodwill as we approach the festive season. We hope you’ll join us.

Putting it all together – Our eighth anniversary meeting – Combining our previous sessions into a holistic marketing plan – is the meeting theme for this month’s Business Media Club on Friday, November 26 (10am-midday), repeated on Thursday, December 2 (2-4pm).

Book via Eventbrite for November 26 and December 2.

For further information about the Business Media Club visit our dedicated page.

Chris Green