Clicks and Mortar
Location
Unipart House
New series of events focuses on helping businesses to compete using Internet resources
How do ‘real world’ companies compete with low cost, low overhead internet businesses like Amazon? A new series of events sponsored by Oxfordshire Business First and Bicester Vision will bring together the experiences and knowledge from Oxfordshire business people who are doing just that.
Called “Clicks and Mortar”, the events will focus on the issues and opportunities available to business people who want to use Internet resources more effectively to grow their businesses.
The events follow on from the ‘Practical Innovation’ series that was held during the first half of 2012 in venues across the county. At those meetings, web-based companies were consistently referred to as examples of innovative thinking and ‘game changing’ ideas.
The events also revealed that local companies – from recruitment firms to hotels – were using web-based tools to grow their businesses faster than and more effectively than they had before.
According to Oxfordshire Business First Chairman Frank Nigriello, the enthusiasm and imagination of the business people at those events has sparked the ideas for “Clicks and Mortar.”
“We met people who were attributing £20k – £30k extra revenue to spending a few hours a day on Twitter. These aren’t giant global enterprises, in most cases they are small businesses who offer a high value product or service. The web helped them build relationships, reach audiences and cut some their costs. All that translates to benefit on the bottom line,” he said.
“Online trading is nothing new to Oxfordshire businesses. We have some leading companies in almost every sector for whom the digital superhighway is their main route to market. But research has indicated that there are still many companies that are not fully exploiting the benefits they can get from using the internet more effectively.”
The new series will begin on October 24th with an opening event at Unipart House in Oxford beginning at 6.30 pm. Each session will feature two 20 minute presentations from Oxfordshire business people and will be followed by a discussion session.
Events are planned to be run monthly. The full schedule will be published on Oxfordshire Business First’s website.
All events are free, but attendees are asked to pre-register on the Oxfordshire Business First website or by contacting Denise Moffatt at denise.moffatt@unipart.com.
