BMB Awards 2020: UPDATE

Dear Friends and supporters of the Business Awards

Due to the events of the last 12 weeks the T&A and the Bradford Means Business team have taken the decision not to proceed with the Business Awards for 2020 planned for July. We are all focused on business recovery and want us all to be back in a place to celebrate once again in 2021. The Awards will relaunch in January and we thank the sponsors that had kindly signed up to support the awards this year and look forward to your support in 2021 when we promise you the awards will be bigger and better than before. Bradford Means Business meanwhile carries on as normal, updated 24/7 online www.bradfordmeansbusiness.com and the next print edition is planned for July and hopefully me and one of my team can hand you a copy personally by then!

As we move to the recovery phase out of COVID-19, The T&A, LOCALiQ and Bradford Means Business are working closely with businesses across the district helping them to prepare for the new future.

During the early weeks of Lockdown we ran a ‘Supporting Local Business’ campaign, with hundreds of free adverts running in our news titles helping those still open for business. We have since launched a new eCommerce website solution to allow shops and businesses have an online shop as well as a physical one and have one at a discounted the price, we have put in place low cost payment options and added in a £3k marketing budget to help each business launch their business online.

This week as many look forward to opening up soon we want to ensure that customers fall back in love with their local shops, businesses, goods and service providers once again. We want to help connect businesses back up with the customers they have lost and for customers to fall back in love with the shops and services they have done without for almost three months. Watch out for more details next week…

As many know this has been a challenging time for us too, we have faced the same commercial challenges as the rest, had to furlough a large proportion of the workforce, whilst still meeting a huge demand for news and information as audience figures to our websites have reached record numbers, we turned the masthead blue on Thursdays, saluted our NHS heroes and ensured that trusted news and information continues to get through both in printed copies delivered to your local shops, home delivery through are loyal army of newspaper deliverers, supplying free copies to those most at risk and having to totally isolate and feeding the demands of our websites. So together we have shared the pain and let’s work together to share the love and get businesses back up and running as soon as it is safe to do so.

If I can help you and your business in any way please drop me a line here and we can meet up, virtually of course…

Love LOCAL Business with the T&A, LOCALiQ and Bradford Means Business.

Steve Lowe

Sales Director