Marketing Focus

Business Development
It’s been a time of considerable change for the BVAA’s Marketing function - the last few months particularly.

Our former Marketing & Comms Manager left and I took over a number of his Marketing related duties. Our long-time Chairman of the Marketing Committee, Laurence Kettle (Rotork) also stepped down after magnificently leading this activity strand for many years. In January 2016 the group appointed a new Chair, Tim Guest (Zoedale) and additionally the BVAA Board extended and reassigned the Marketing Group to focus on ‘Business Development’ rather than steering our marketing function. So a few changes to be going on with!

Supplier Day
One of our greatest success stories this year has to be the new ‘Supplier Day’ held in October in Brighouse. Our plan was to bring together a small number of the major manufacturers in the association together with a range of our supplier members, and give them the opportunity to ‘speed date’ with a view to facilitating future business together.

A free-to-attend event, it proved far more popular than we’d ever imagined! Nearly 120 ‘1-to-1 meetings’ were facilitated, with many more informal ones in the mini exhibition next door. We received hugely positive feedback on the day and afterwards, and will definitely run the event again.

Valve User
The success of BVAA’s very own Valve User (VU) magazine continues to astound. Nine years since its launch as a very modest 24 page newsletter, the magazine now regularly tips the scales at 120+ pages.

The strength of the magazine has to be its core ethos; to be a service to members and readers, not a profit-generator. Unrivalled in its coverage of valve industry news, application stories, product launches and company profiles, the magazine recipients are predominantly in the customer base, with an opt-in readership – not many publications can claim that, and very few indeed can legitimately claim to be produced – at a subsidised rate - solely for the benefit of the membership of a trade association and their customers.

C.35,000 hard copies are produced each year, with many thousands more appearing on the BVAA DVD – and of course there is the dedicated, new-look valveuser.com website, where the accumulated 2000+ articles live on forever.

Members tell us they win business through VU, and BVAA recruits many a member from it too. More importantly, our customer base is, via VU, perhaps the best informed in the world.

Exhibitions
Offshore Europe
The bi-annual Offshore Europe show in Aberdeen in September was eagerly awaited by many, largely it has to be said as a bellwether as to the state of the oil and gas industry and particularly the UK Continental Shelf. Busier than many anticipated, the show was nevertheless quieter than the previous event and confidence in that important valve sector appeared somewhat dented.

On the up side, BVAA were able to see, in just a few days, almost half of the companies in membership, making it a particularly pleasurable and fruitful event for the Association.

Such was the sector malaise, a decision was made early on in the year at BVAA to rein back from other international oil and gas related events, so Offshore Europe was our only major external exhibition this year. I did however attend the PILOT Share Fair event (also Aberdeen) in November and had some useful dialogue with our members’ customers.

Desktop Exhibitions
Always popular with members, we managed to host three ‘desktop’ exhibitions towards the latter half of the year. These included one at SNC Lavalin in London in September, a return visit to Bechtel London in October, and another new venue in Score Europe’s Brighouse facility – an event that spun out of the post-desktop debrief at Score’s Peterhead event in February 2015.

There’s no doubt the UKCS downturn has led to a slow-down in EPC project activity, and consequently our plan to extend the number of desktop events in 2015 was affected.

Market Reports/Intelligence
In November BVAA circulated that latest edition of our free-issue annual ‘EIF Report’ on the global valve industry. One of our most popular services, this includes a comprehensive 5 year forecast covering 63 of the world’s most industrialised countries. The data is classified by nation, end-user industry and product type.

Our monthly series of ‘industry intelligence’ emails continues to grow, with more and more data sourced by ourselves. This bulletin includes news and project awards from the power, chemical/ petrochemical, oil & gas, and water industries. Well received, we look forward to adding content to it during the coming months, and perhaps additional market reports.

Product Sourcing
We appreciate finding a new supplier can be an uncertain exercise so, through our product sourcing facility, we make sourcing the best of the British Valve industry easy for our customers. The tool contains information searchable by product type, company name and brand name, (including the manufacturer’s and any distributor’s details) and can be accessed via the BVAA homepage, www. bvaa.org.uk. It’s also distributed on our DVD via VU, at Exhibitions, events and via our extensive contact network.

Huge orders are reported to have been won through the service, so it’s important for members to keep their data up to date, and for customers to note this service can save hours of time trawling the internet for potential new suppliers.

Published: 17th February 2016