B2B International is all geared up for this year’s charity Duck Race! Bramhall & Woodford Rotary Club is hosting its annual duck race and family fun day at Bramhall Park, Stockport, this Sunday (19th May, 2013). The event is in aid of local charity Beechwood Cancer Care Centre.

B2B International is sending its own duck – see picture above – to join in the festivities and to hopefully win the corporate duck race! Special thanks go to Katie Parmenter, who is not just a talented member of our interviewing team but also a fantastic artist who has decorated our duck so beautifully!

Hot on the heels of its best ever year for growth in 2012, when turnover expanded by 28% to £5.1 million, business-to-business market research and business intelligence agency B2B International is setting more records.

The company’s rapid growth has continued apace in Quarter 1 2013, posting its best ever start-of-year figures. Revenue surpassed £1.7m, a huge 108% increase year-on-year. The quarter was also the second best quarter in the company’s history, after the £1.9m achieved in Q4 2012.

Since its formation in 1998, B2B International has continued its record of growing its revenue and making a profit for 15 consecutive years.

CEO Matthew Harrison explains, “It is hard to single out highlights from these results as revenue in the UK, US and Asia-Pacific all increased by over 100% on Q1 of 2012. In addition, our medical division has seen enormous growth since summer 2012, and the proportion of our revenue represented by ongoing contracts rather than ad-hoc work has increased fivefold in less than 2 years.”

The company, whose main offices are located in Manchester, London, New York and Beijing, has aggressive plans to continue its rapid expansion. In the past year it has doubled the size of its data processing department and continues its recruitment drive for high calibre graduate research analysts.

BIG, the Business Intelligence Group, in conjunction with the ICG, is hosting its second Northern forum of 2013 in Manchester on 5th June. The event, entitled ‘Look underneath your nose’, is all about using a little bit of imagination and insider know-how to get a head start on your research requirements. In short, there is an enormous amount of intelligence out there at little or no cost, if we only look for it.

The guest speaker is B2B International founder and director Paul Hague, and we love that the event is marketed as the chance to “hear one of the most seasoned (pickled?) market researchers on the planet” speak of his experiences about getting information for next to nothing. What more can we say?!

If you’re interested in attending this event – and why wouldn’t you be? – it could be the best £5 you’ve ever spent! For more information, please visit the BIG website.

We alluded to this the other day, but infographics are everywhere these days. As if to reinforce our point, we recently came across another one that we found interesting, courtesy of B2B Marketing, which we wanted to share with you today. This infographic, which draws on data from the 2013 B2B Marketing Social Media Benchmarking Report, deals with the state of B2B social media at the present time. We hope you find it interesting, too.