COVER STORY and also a drop in sales if we’re not pushing.” The store sells candles and other mostly locally sourced gifts from local artists that are made with sustainability in mind. She teaches candle-making classes, a skill she discovered during an Airbnb experience after coming to Minnesota from west Africa 20 years ago, graduating from Roosevelt High in Minneapolis and then the University of Minnesota. She also sells them in bulk to local stores in larger quantity orders. Until as recently as early 2020, it hadn’t been a goal of Friedrich’s to open a store like this, but she started selling to wholesalers while also working full-time as a mental health practitioner. “I liked my job,” she says. “I didn’t intend on quitting my job within the first few months of my business, but that’s what happened. A lot of wholesalers don’t want someone who is just doing a hobby.” Now she wants to open the gift stores in other up-and-coming, fast-growing suburban cities and find a warehouse where she can expand the wholesale portion of the business. “A lot of those people have to travel out of their city to do stuff,” she says. “My hope is someday to have a place like this closer to them, so that if they want to just go shop for a quick gift or take a candle-making class and go home, they don’t have to make a whole day out of it.”
Experiment and try things
Friedrich’s social media instructor was Pam McCurdy, founder of The Marketing Troupe, a local publicity and consulting firm. McCurdy says social media can be hugely effective, but people need to know their audience. For example, a restaurant selling hamburgers will do most of its sales to people living within two miles of the venue. A lawn service also has about a two-mile radius. So, make sure messages are targeted toward those folks. A restaurant with more of a special occasion feel, on the other hand, might have a further reach. “Are you connecting with your neighborhood?” she says, adding that if you own a store in Minneapolis “don’t try to get people to come from Duluth to your shop.”
CONTACT: BRIAN BELLMONT is president of Bellmont Partners: 612.255.1111; brian@bellmontpartners.com; www.bellmontpartners.com. ALISON BUCKNEBERG is a strategist with Words At Work: ali.buckneberg@wordsatwork.com; www.wordsatwork.com. ROSELINE FRIEDRICH owns of Roseline’s Candles: 612.840.8958; roseline@roselinescandles.com; www.roselinescandles.com. PAM MCCURDY is founder of The Marketing Troupe: 612.839.3932; Pam@TheMarketingTroupe.com; www.themarketingtroupe.com.
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Get back to the basics, McCurdy says. Tag locations as much as you can. It helps manipulate algorithms. And the best spots for specific businesses to market vary by industry. Although an accountant might do well using LinkedIn, McCurdy says Instagram typically is the best tool for small businesses, especially if it has visually appealing merchandise. “They’re life and death for small business,” she says.
Wild wild west
While social media can be a great and inexpensive way for businesses to get found, McCurdy adds that companies should “look at the whole toolbox.” E-mail marketing or some other strategy might be the right answer for others. Alison Buckneberg, a strategist with Words at Work, says now is the time to be creative, to try new strategies — or old ones that might not have worked in the past under different circumstances — to stay in front of people. “Reinvention, pivoting and being nimble are the name of the game,” she says. “One of the things we’re recommending to clients right now is don’t be afraid of having a marketing fail. It’s the wild, wild west out there for marketing these days.” Marketers, she says, are being tapped for results in a lot of areas right now, ranging from diversity and inclusion to finding employees to finding sales leads. That leads companies to sometimes try campaigns that paint with a broad brush. She’s found the opposite to be more impactful. Words at Work worked with one local small manufacturer on a paid LinkedIn campaign. The first post was more general, aimed at letting the larger audience know of the company’s existence. A subsequent post went out later to a much more niche subset of the original audience advertising a large piece of equipment the company sells. “Within the first 24 hours they had 15 leads,” Buckneberg says. “That’s the type of lead generation they would typically enjoy from a trade show. They would expect to get 15 really solid sales qualified leads within a day.” And they did so spending only around $2,000. When marketing on a budget, she adds, digital can be a very good friend. But depending on what the business is, Buckneberg recommends being open-minded and willing to throw caution to the wind, at least a bit. “Try a LinkedIn campaign. Try a Facebook ad. Try an E-blast in a publication you haven’t worked with before,” she says. “Sniff out new ways — or maybe even old ways — go back to direct mail. Find some of these other tactics that might not have worked in the past, but you’ve always been interested in trying and explore them. You have to stay in front of people.” But don’t necessarily try to reach everyone at once. Those narrowly tailored campaigns often end up being quite successful. It’s not, Buckneberg says, about the size of the splash. “It’s about getting the right splash.”
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