Be Inspired

It's not often that the Five Mile team escape from the office but the local Basingstoke Business Link event Be Inspired '09 took place on Thursday and it was an excellent opportunity to leave the code looking after itself, whilst we enjoyed a well earned day away from the screens.

For us, getting involved in a local business event such as Be Inspired is probably long overdue. Like many small businesses, we often find ourselves missing out on valuable networking opportunities, simply because we are working too hard. But the world of the web designer becomes a lonely place if you don't get out there and meet the people, especially those on your doorstep. And so, along with a bit of new found confidence in our ability to communicate without using a keyboard, we set ourselves a challenge. Two weeks, a marketing campaign from nothing and a jump into the deep end with a booking as exhibitors for the Be Inspired '09 event.

Who are you?

At Five Mile, we have never really made the time to drum up some 'master marketing plan' as such. Our services have always been clearly defined to our clients and most of those clients have come via personal recommendation. All well and good but the problem with this way of working is that when you step outside of your circle of clients, even on a local level, people have no idea who you are and that can obviously mean it is more difficult to grow.

Exhibiting at the Be Inspired event represented a great opportunity to raise our profile, to get our face out there. But delivering an exhibition campaign, even one this small, can feel very daunting when you know that over 1200 attendees are set to turn up. Especially for people like us who don't get out much and don't do print or exhibition campaigns! So we started by asking ourselves two simple questions, how do we promote who we are and what we do and what do we want to get out of the event?

100% web

Since we knew that we wanted people to remember us, we needed an exhibition stand that would get us noticed. It was not just the case of hiring a stand, purchasing a banner and setting our objectives for the day, it is all about the hard work that you need to put into coming up with the right campaign. You need to make sure that you are exhibiting in the most relevant way possible. We wanted to make it instantly clear that we are 100% web and that we really care about the way the websites we build work for our clients. So we decided to take the common sense approach for our campaign - keep it simple and don't try to be something that we’re not.

Love your website...

As a result, we came up with the 'Love your website...' campaign and judging by the level of interest we received on the day, along with the great conversations we were able to have, it certainly felt like the message had worked well for us. The campaign was approachable, friendly and touched on the key questions that most website owners have. Prior to the event we felt a little apprehensive about how our first ever turn as exhibitors would turn out, as it happens, we thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would strongly recommend it to other small businesses like ours.

In terms of the sales opportunities that might have come out of the day, it is obviously too early to evaluate. By going into this event with the simple goal of communicating our message and letting people know we exist, has made the exercise really worth while. Our confidence in our ability to promote what we do has been lifted and in many ways it has helped us to better understand how we fit in on the local scene. Above all else, what we have learnt from this experience is that we are a very good web design company who should be a lot less afraid to shout about it a little louder.

Be inspired, Five Mile certainly was!