When businesses first talk to me about thebestof Eastbourne, one of the obvious questions is:
Our marketing support starts from £40 + VAT per month, with our most popular package costing £129 + VAT per month.
But simply giving you five prices doesn't really explain what you're paying for.
thebestof Eastbourne works differently from a traditional marketing agency. We don't divide every hour we spend building audiences, improving the website, supporting the community and creating opportunities into individual client timesheets.
Instead, our business members collectively support a local marketing platform designed to benefit everyone within it.
We invest in building the audience for thebestof Eastbourne collectively. Your level of membership determines how many opportunities your business has to be seen by that audience and how actively we can work alongside you.
Our most popular package is Silver Marketing Support, from £129 + VAT per month.
Silver is where the relationship becomes much more than simply having access to the platform.
Your business becomes one I am actively looking out for.
I learn what you're trying to achieve, keep an eye out for useful opportunities and consider how the different resources available through thebestof Eastbourne could support you.
You have an advocate in your corner.
That might mean identifying a useful content opportunity, strengthening an area of your online visibility, spotting a valuable connection or recognising something happening locally that could benefit your business.
Many businesses may never need anything more than Silver.
And that's absolutely fine.
There is no expectation that joining thebestof Eastbourne starts you on an upgrade ladder.
Think Silver could be enough for your business? Let's have a conversation about what you're trying to achieve before you decide.
Gold Marketing Support starts from £189 + VAT per month.
Gold builds on the advocacy and visibility of Silver by giving us greater opportunities to put your business in front of relevant audiences.
It also gives us more opportunities to learn.
Where measurable marketing activity is being used, we can start looking at which messages attract attention and what appears to resonate with our audience.
Rather than producing reports simply for the sake of producing statistics, I would much rather use useful data to answer questions such as:
Did this message work?
Did people respond?
What could we learn from it?
Could we improve it next time?
The aim is to gradually identify the path of least resistance between your business and the people most likely to need what you offer.
Platinum Marketing Support starts from £269 + VAT per month.
Platinum gives us greater scope to think ahead.
As well as everything sitting beneath it, we spend time understanding what you want your business to achieve over the coming year and identifying opportunities through thebestof Eastbourne that could support those plans.
This isn't us taking over your marketing strategy.
You know your business.
The value comes from combining that knowledge with what we know about our audience, our local connections and the opportunities developing around Eastbourne.
At this level, we also have greater scope to ask:
What could we create or pursue that would help this business?
Sometimes the right opportunity already exists.
Sometimes it doesn't yet.
Not every business needs direct marketing support from me.
Some already have marketing expertise internally. Some have more time than budget. Others simply want a credible local presence and access to the resources available through thebestof Eastbourne.
That's why we also have Core Essentials from £40 + VAT per month and Bronze from £59 + VAT per month.
Core Essentials gives a business its essential presence within the platform.
Bronze creates a broader foundation, including greater category coverage and therefore more opportunities for the business to be relevant across the website.
These aren't inferior businesses receiving an inferior service.
They're businesses choosing a different level of involvement.
And this is where the collective model becomes particularly important.
Even at our entry level, your business sits within the same local ecosystem we're continually working to strengthen.
We spend time bringing people to thebestof Eastbourne, maintaining useful local information, promoting events, supporting Buy Local, building relationships with community organisations, managing local audiences and answering enquiries from people looking for help.
That work isn't individually invoiced to every member who might benefit from it.
It is made possible collectively by the businesses supporting thebestof Eastbourne.
We are independently funded. We don't rely on grants to fund the community work surrounding the platform.
Our business members make it possible.
And the stronger and more useful thebestof Eastbourne becomes for local people, the more reasons people have to engage with the businesses within it.
Want to be part of that without needing hands-on marketing support? Core Essentials starts from £40 + VAT per month.
There is another important part of the model.
You can get involved.
Every business can leave us to get on with promoting them to the best of our ability within their package.
But the businesses that bring their expertise, stories, knowledge, events, offers, reviews and ideas into the relationship give us more to work with.
If you've got more time and knowledge than marketing budget, that's useful.
We aren't looking for opportunities to charge you every time you contribute something valuable.
Done for you costs more.
Working with you can cost considerably less.
The more I see of your business, the more I understand what makes you different and the easier it becomes to recognise an opportunity when one appears.
Networking isn't simply access to a room.
It's access to the connections being built around thebestof Eastbourne.
Places at individual events are naturally limited, and not every member has the time or desire to attend regularly.
But I meet businesses and organisations constantly with our membership in mind.
If somebody is looking for a service and I know a member who appears to be a good fit, I can tell them about that business whether the member happens to be standing beside me or not.
And when I know somebody particularly valuable is planning to attend Business Boost, I can alert a relevant member and give them the opportunity to be there for a personal introduction.
The more I know about your business, the better those connections can become.
Because reporting takes time too.
We could spend significant amounts of every month attempting to attribute every website visit, conversation, introduction, social post, article and recommendation to individual members.
But that time has a cost.
I'd rather put as much of the available resource as possible into creating useful marketing activity.
Where measurement can genuinely teach us something, however, I absolutely want to use it.
A particular offer, event, article, campaign or message can give us something contained to assess.
Did people click?
Did somebody enquire?
Did one message perform better than another?
Those are useful questions because the answers can influence what we do next.
We measure what is useful to measure rather than consuming members' marketing resource trying to measure everything.
Because I want to know the businesses behind the listings.
When somebody asks me for a recommendation, I don't want my only answer to be:
“Have a look at the website.”
I want to understand enough about our members to recognise when one may be particularly well suited to what somebody needs.
That means we consider the existing membership when reviewing new businesses.
Paying for a higher package does not buy category exclusivity, but neither are we interested in filling the directory with large numbers of near-identical businesses simply because they are willing to pay.
The aim is to maintain a useful mix of businesses offering Eastbourne genuine choice.
That protects the usefulness of the Business Guide and, importantly, the trust behind the recommendations we make.
Someone might ask me for a recommendation today and decide to check that business out.
They might come back months later and ask me for something completely different.
If the first recommendation served them well, the second recommendation starts with more trust.
Over time, that matters.
The value of a trusted local recommendation isn't simply the moment somebody clicks a link.
It's the reputation built through years of helping people, supporting businesses, answering questions, working with community organisations and trying to make thebestof Eastbourne genuinely useful.
Our members sit inside that environment.
Because businesses don't all need the same thing.
I learned very quickly after starting thebestof Eastbourne that some businesses wanted a strong local presence while others wanted considerably more of my involvement.
My time and energy are finite.
Rather than charge everybody the same amount and continually bolt additional services onto their membership, the packages allow businesses to choose the level of support appropriate to them.
That also protects the quality of what we provide.
We cannot promise intensive involvement to an unlimited number of businesses.
The package structure lets us balance the membership, the available resources and the opportunities we can realistically create.
No.
There is no natural progression you are expected to follow.
A business could join Core Essentials and remain perfectly happy there for years.
Another might choose Silver immediately.
Someone else may increase their support because they have an ambitious period ahead and later reduce it again.
Your package should fit what your business needs now, not where we think you ought to be.
You can upgrade when you need more support and downgrade with one month's notice when you don't.
No.
We recommend businesses give thebestof Eastbourne at least twelve months because opportunities and business cycles change throughout the year.
What works for a retailer approaching Christmas may be completely different from what matters to a seasonal business during the summer.
It takes time to understand which opportunities genuinely benefit an individual business.
But we don't want businesses trapped in an unhappy working relationship.
If it isn't working, you can leave with one month's notice.
And if the timing simply wasn't right, you're welcome to come back later.
We want it to be easy to join, easy to change and easy to leave.
Not with the package table.
Start with your business.
Our initial Business MOT is genuinely free.
It's an opportunity to talk about what you're trying to achieve, what's getting in the way and what you could potentially do next.
Sometimes the most useful advice I can give a business has nothing to do with buying something from me.
If there is something thebestof Eastbourne can genuinely help with, we can then look at which level of support makes sense.
You don't need to know whether you're Core Essentials, Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum before we talk.
Tell me about your business first.
Then we can work out whether we can help and what level of support, if any, gives you the right balance of visibility, involvement and investment.
Book your free Business MOT and let's start with what you want your business to achieve.
