As we’ve only got a couple of days to the Christmas break (and I’ll be right back after New Year!), I hope you don’t mind me getting slightly introspective and bringing you up to date with how things are developing here at Business Marketing Online. We’re still a very small, specialised consultancy, and I expect it to stay that way, but in 2011 we’re aiming to refocus, and to expand our activities in certain areas.
Firstly, I’m delighted to say that after the holiday, we’re being joined by my old friend and colleague Rob Hancocks, who I worked with at Pro-Talk, and before that on Industrial Technology magazine. About eight years ago at Pro-Talk we had two brilliant products – Manufacturingtalk and Engineeringtalk – but they never really took off until we sent Rob out to spread the word. In a conservative market (and that’s exactly what marketing in the UK industrial sector is), it’s no good expecting the world to beat a path to your door, even if the world knows what a great party is going on inside. Thanks in no small measure to Rob and the team which eventually joined him, Pro-Talk was the success story of the decade in the B2B publishing sector, and is still going strong today.
Over the course of 2010 it’s become quite clear to us which way the wind is blowing, and we’re going to stop trying to be a jack-of-all-trades to our clients and concentrate on what we’re best at, and what the market wants, which fortuitously happen to be the same thing. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow. So there will be plenty of services which we’ll no longer be offering, including website design, which we did far too meticulously to ever make a good living from. But don’t worry, I’ll still be writing about the broad spectrum of online marketing here! And for any of our clients who are interested in SEO work, blog creation, website design, technical writing, video production, graphic design or any of the other services you’ve asked us to do over the past two years, we’ll maintain a close relationship with good people who we can point you towards.
I’m sure many of you – clients or readers – will be talking to Rob Hancocks over the coming months, but if you’d like to talk to him now, he’s at rob@bmon.co.uk.