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If the market won't come to BBEx, we'll take BBEx to the market
23 Jun 2008
BBEx: The future of BBEx was decided at a meeting at Mercator Media last Friday 20 June. BBEx is going to adapt to move with the times and match the current market conditions.
'From the various discussions we've had with the industry and with the target audience, it became obvious the manufacturers and importers wanted us to keep BBEx,' said Mercator Media managing director Andrew Webster. 'But the target audience is no longer interested in attending BBEx.'
And while the engineering and fabrication sector of the marine industry has found a home at the Seawork exhibition with all the major yards and builders visiting, he added, the retail and chandlery sector's information needs clearly have to be addressed in a new way.
'So if the market won't come to BBEx, we have to take BBEx to the market,' said Mr Webster. And the obvious way to do that is to use the internet.
Boating Business launched its website and the BB NewsUpdate at BBEx in 2007. From a few thousand page views a month, our website traffic has quadrupled as the industry realised we were first with the news that matters to the UK.
We now have over 40,000 page views every month. That's from a database of just 3,500 subscribers. We've built our UK internet database from scratch. So we know they are all qualified industry professionals and decision makers.
Just the kind of people you need to tell about your new products and services.
Our existing weekly NewsUpdate will continue to provide the news that's important to the UK leisure marine industry - alongside the monthly printed version of Boating Business, of course. And both will soon be joined by the BBEx Product Bulletin.
The BB website will carry a real time list of new products. The day we receive new product information, it'll go onto the BB website. The information will be freely available to everyone via the BB home page and hot links will be available to manufacturer/distributor/wholesaler websites.
Every week there'll be a dedicated BBEx Product Bulletin sent to our entire internet qualified database. It'll be BB news on Monday night and the BBEx New Product bulletin on Tuesday night.
And there's more. We've built up a series of industry awards through Boating Business and BBEx and we're working on plans to keep those awards going. So BB and the industry will continue to recognise those companies and people who have made a difference.
Watch out for more information as we finalise the detail of the bulletins and the awards ceremony. The BBEx future looks rosy - and it's coming soon to a PC near you...
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