Lessons I Learned About My Small Business — and Myself — in 2020

Do you feel as if you are emerging from a great fog and seeing the blue sky for the first time in a long time, like I do? As things started to shut down in March 2020, I realized our team needed to shift how we were servicing our clients and make it a priority to help them figure out how to pivot their offerings immediately.  My goal was to keep my whole team working through the crisis and to keep 100% of my clients. 

Recently, I’ve had time to take stock of what my business has experienced during the past 10 months and I’d like to share some of the ways I stayed on task to achieve my goals and stay sane during this time:

• Stay confident. I entered the pandemic with determination, not fear, knowing that I had built my company lean, nimble and built on strong pillars and this would keep us going strong until the crisis lessened. 

• Stay connected. Through the pandemic, I continued to network and reach out to those I knew would provide me with support. It’s crucial during difficult times to continue to invite people into your circle who can be your sounding board and cheerleaders. I dug in and made sure I was making time to join virtual Zoom networking meetings, call on clients and check in on treasured contacts.

• Stay organized. I made sure I had a To Do list for me and my team every week but kept it supple enough to change if need be. I had my team write down weekly goals and set up weekly meetings with clients to stay in touch and in the loop with our clients’ needs.

• Stay true to your mission but...stay flexible. This last one is probably good advice for any entrepreneur, even when you’re not in the middle of a global pandemic. Shift and pivot when you need to. Keep an open mind and know when to put your head down and move forward and when to come up for air and reassess. I strove every day to be the reed and not the oak.

I’d love to hear what you have been doing to keep strong and run your business during this challenging time.

Jessica Maarek, is the Founder and Owner of Red Root Marketing. This agency specializes in social media marketing for small businesses and nonprofits and focuses on community driven content creation and engagement. 

How to Keep Your Company's Feeds Fresh

Engage Your Audience:

Keeping your audience/followers engaged is very important, especially at this time when people are feeling disconnected. Interactive posts can be many different things. Don’t limit yourself to just one type of interactive method! Some methods include: asking your followers to comment on their thoughts in the comment section, answering a poll in an Instagram story, or asking your audience to respond to a question. These interactive posts drive up engagement by rallying the community by asking for their input. For example, one of our clients at Red Root Marketing, the SUDC Foundation, posts stories asking their audience meaningful questions and asks their followers for their input.  Next time you have information to put out to your followers try one of these methods to get them more involved and feeling heard, rather than just announcing something. 

Develop How To’s and Tutorials:

How to’s and tutorials are an impactful way to share helpful tips to your audience and gain great traffic and engagement. Whether you are a limo/car service or a medical company, you can always find something to put together to help your audience. Even a simple photo showcasing a tip from your company can be helpful to your clients. Remember—you are the expert in your field and you have lots of expertise to share. Show your audience what you know.

Post Short and Interesting Videos:

You want to create something that will grab your followers attention, and fast. These quick snippets can potentially augment your numbers and engagement on your feeds, increasing shares and likes. Create something people will enjoy posting to their own feeds.

Hold a Contest/Giveaway:

People cannot resist a free gift, it’s true! Running a giveaway can drive engagement up drastically. Ideally, the prize for the giveaway should be related to your brand (ex: giving away one of your company products or a membership to your business). It is important to link the giveaway item to your company or a local business which will create good faith between you and that business and other community partners.

Team Up with Other Brands:

Teaming up with other brands is called co-marketing. Co-marketing is a win-win situation for all participating brands. Make sure you are looking for brands to partner with that are not direct competitors but have a similar target audience. Teaming up to partner with another brand can be beneficial for all involved parties as you will be putting them in front of your audience and you will be put in front of theirs. You can offer a joint Zoom call offering expertise from both industries or even develop a joint service that you can offer, expanding your palette of expertise. WIN/WIN!

By Alexa Ferragine, Red Root Marketing, Social Media Operations Manager

Why Community-Driven Social Media Marketing is Crucial for Your Small Business or Nonprofit

If you understand the importance of a healthy, vibrant community, then you’ll have the mindset to harness the power of social media marketing. Social media marketing is not only about getting your content online in a branded and consistent manner, it is also about connecting your messaging with the potential partners and affiliates around you who have their own audiences who need to know about YOU. Instead of thinking first about what content to create, we turn the paradigm on its head and think about our community, our audience and who needs to know about each post. Once we think about our audience, we develop a tagging strategy; only then do we begin to create great content.

Community is important for small business owners and nonprofits because it’s the backbone that supports us. Community helps these entities to amplify their messages. Innately, communities want their downtowns to thrive and they want the people who build businesses in these places to succeed. Being an entrepreneur or running a nonprofit can be like working in a vacuum. You wear all the hats and there’s never enough time in the day to think about your marketing and social media and get feedback and perspective on what your messaging needs to be. This is when you know it’s time to harness your community and connections and let them amplify your messaging and help you get in front of your prime audiences.

When you use social media as a vehicle to connect with other businesses, community groups and influencers, your social media marketing becomes very powerful. This is what hyperlocal really means. It means learning how to connect with people in your community, real life relationships being created and nourished and ultimately magnifying your message through reciprocal local support.