Set your 2020 vision at the Business Media Club

18 Sep Set your 2020 vision at the Business Media Club

Six years and counting…

That’s how long the CGM Business Media Club has been running and as we celebrate our sixth anniversary we’ll embark on a new 2019-20 programme by encouraging members to set their own 2020 vision.

20/20 vision means an entire sight assessment and that’s exactly what we’re recommending. It’s hard to set goals, targets and milestones unless you know where you’re heading and, more importantly, why.

The club focuses on three main facets:

– Communications and marketing training;

– Professional development;

– Quality networking in our own ‘all egos left at the door’ sharing setting.

But it is also about spirit and skill rather than mere functionality.

As the cornerstone of our forthcoming 10-month meeting programme, which we believe is our best and most ambitious yet, we’re going to focus on a key word – culture.

Developing a winning culture is more significant than being merely different – it is about intrinsic origins and the values that drive a business (mission), the ethos it works to (purpose), and its direction of travel (vision).

So, we’re embarking on a cultural journey – not high-brow, but organic.

Number-crunching digital marketers would flatten us out to be the same. If we all do the same things great results will happen to us all. Not so.

Sure, some functionality is important, but what really sets us apart is our origins and authenticity.

Great things can happen when people work to shared values. That’s why the club will feature a success story each month.

In September our theme is called Mission Control and the success story is the NASA space programme. NASA’s ambitious target was to land a man on the moon before 1970 and it achieved this remarkable feat with an average employee age of 27.  

Setting your own 2020 vision is also about lift off – proper goalsetting setting but also stripping things back to the bare essentials – who we are, what we want to be and the values that will get us there.

We’re analogue beings in a digital world – made in our very essence to be creative and proactive. We have skills to promote, products we make and service to provide.

Digitalisation can be convenience led – fast, simple, portable and adaptable – but too often it is purpose built to take the skill and creativity out of things.

To ‘photoshop’, for example, means more than enhancing the look of an image but to have manipulated it beyond its original form.

But we rail against this. It cuts against the grain of our origins and originality is something we fear is under threat.

Being original and creative matters to us as makers and doers – so in October we’ll give you permission to free your creative self by shaping the message(s) that are right to promote your business. 

This matters because what we say is fundamentally more important than the methods and means we choose to use to say it.

The specific skill we’ll look at is devising intuitive website copy and other means to set out your stall.

In November, we’ll focus on learning to listen to what our audience (be it customers, fans, voters etc – anyone we need to buy-in from) is telling us.

Arguably the most valuable skill of all, finding out what our customers want, is vital and shaping customer experience (CX) pathways is crucial to winning business (being a winning business being able to win new business).

January’s meeting will focus on creating a point of difference – by being disruptive – ways we can use imagination to create our own gap in the market and competitive advantage by daring to be different, doing better than our rivals, shaking up the market and changing the game, by doing things in our own way that customers appreciate and will buy (or buy in to).

In February, we’ll look at how you can market this approach via ‘owned’ marketing methods (the stuff we can control, like our social media pages, for instance) and Content is King – producing quality content – and lots of it.

We’ll take this further in March by switching the focus to winning trust and buy in specifically positive, profile-raising PR. This is known as ‘earned’ marketing and achieving publicity though editorial choice. The stronger our story the better chance we stand.

Talking of which April’s meeting is Storytelling. Creating our own unique narrative. We’ll focus on blogging and video blogging to show how you can raise your own profile and reputation.

We all know life’s a pitch. It is hard to win or grow your business unless you can convince people to buy – so learning to pitch, present and propose is May’s meeting theme when we’ll explore the fear of public speaking and how to overcome it.

June’s meeting focuses on protecting your image and reputation and how to copewith a crisis. Let’s face it, things can helter-skelter out of control in minutes online these days. We’ll provide a best practice guide.  

Finally, in July, we’ll put all these facets together in one co-ordinated plan with everything in perfect harmony.

It’s going to be a great new Business Media Club season.

Why not join us at the CGM Media Centre in Worcester on Friday, September 27 to help celebrate our sixth anniversary and set your own 2020 course? And, if you like what you see, stay with us throughout the year.

You can book to attend via Eventbrite and find out further details via our Business Media Club page.