Birmingham City shows where to go for local Businesses growth

Birmingham City shows where to go for local Businesses growth

In mid-September, we saw the latest Business Growth Show event take place at St Andrews (Birmingham City Football Club).

The event which is one of many events being held in the West Midlands throughout the year was well attended in excess of about 350 people throughout the 6 hours which the event took place.

Upon arrival, we saw a few familiar faces such as Nathan Roberts from Blue Cube Media, brothers Phil Savva and Chris Savva who each run their own individual property lettings and management businesses, and Baljindra Butter from BSB Internet Consultancy Ltd.

However, we did meet some new faces such as Paul Painter who is a photographer by trade, having never met or spoken to Paul before we did have quite a lengthy chat about the legalities and ownership of images – or to put it in simple terms ‘copyright’.

Many local businesses fully realise the importance and the need to market their business, but part of our talk focused on the importance of standing out with marketing.

All too often businesses will use the most basic images, ‘bog standard’ for those from the Black Country, often little realising the fact that such images can devalue a company its products and services in the blink of an eye.

The example which Paul highlighted was if you wished to use an image on the contact page of your website which image would you go for? a very high percentage of businesses would plump for the person holding a phone to their ear – which is the same image that many other businesses will use on their websites. How would that make you stand out from the crowd?

Photography plays a big part in a business’s marketing strategy, yes it has a cost, yes it might be an inconvenience to get images done – but it’s something that businesses need to consider when looking at effective marketing within the West Midlands and beyond.

Paul also highlighted a negative drawback in using stock images, whereby an incident relating to the use of stock images at a high profile exhibition. From memory, it involved Microsoft and Dell who both had display stands next to each other, and both bizarrely enough had used the very same image within their exhibition displays.

People worked quickly to address the embarrassing situation by arranging for replacement bespoke images to be used. The costs involved in doing this at such high speed cost each company approximately £10,000 each. We hasten to add that both Microsoft and Dell agreed to change their images as it was deemed unfair for just one company to bear the hassle, cost and embarrassment.

Marketing in the West Midlands can be done in a variety of ways, but ideally, you need your own tools so that when you turn up to events such as the Business Growth Show you’ll stand out for all the right reasons.