How a Small Business Found Success by Prioritizing Communications

Published by Ashton Elder

Ashton has an M.S. in Marketing from Florida International University and has been working as a marketer for over five years. She is currently serving on the University of North Florida’s Department of Communications Professional Committee Board. Ashton has been a guest on several media and marketing panels throughout her career. She also holds a degree from the University of North Florida where she studied political science, journalism, and mass communications. Prior to working in marketing, she worked as a journalist for several news outlets and publications, including an internship at NPR where she produced several radio features. This site features a collection of her articles and radio features from her career in journalism. This site also features some of her insights and projects from her career in marketing. Ashton’s background in journalism has provided her with a solid foundation on which to build enhanced media and social media strategies to provide creative, innovative marketing solutions. Ashton also has first-hand experience with brand design and brand building. Ashton also works on an array of marketing projects from social media to email marketing and everything in between. View all posts by Ashton Elder

In a TED talk at the University of Chicago in 2013, Google’s marketing expert Nick Scarpino laid out his guidelines for marketers on how to prioritize their communication efforts. His advice is especially helpful to those who market for small businesses and nonprofits. He mentioned a few key “must have” areas and I have found a few of those to be especially important through my experience as a marketing coordinator for a small business. I have outlined them below along with the process which led to our success in these areas.

Utilizing Your Physical Location

In 2019 my company moved its office location and we set our goal to transform our office in manageable stages that would be both time and budget friendly for a small business.

We began with a simple and cost friendly paint job. Our first major step was to paint the accent wall which faces our storefront in our signature brand color, the EXIT teal or Pantone 321 c. We

allocated time and money in stages for our office redesign into our annual and quarterly budgets.

After the statement wall was finished we moved onto purchasing and installing our signage and then moved to planning meetings with brand and corporate interior design consultants. The next stage was set aside for the transformation of furniture, art and other decorative elements to reflect our personal brand.

Engage Customers Within One Community

Scarpino emphasized that you don’t have to do everything when you engage with your community online. Over a three year period I have sought to master our presence on social media one platform at a time. When I took over as marketing coordinator in 2017, I found that while the company held accounts on multiple platforms they had yet to put out content on many of them. They also were not consistent or branded in their content on any platform. Scapiro states in his Ted Talk, that small businesses and nonprofits do not need to master multiple platforms but instead should focus on mastering one. The goal to master one platform at a time was key for our company when it came to developing a system to regularly put out branded content and engage with our online target audience in a meaningful way. I shifted our focus to Instagram in my first year realizing that the real estate industry had made a major move to that platform. In my second year I sought to integrate our existing social media with our WordPress blog and drive likes and follows through target advertising and social media contests.

In my third year I was told to make video a priority and focused on developing branded video content and promoting our YouTube channel. This year I am tasked with developing our email marketing systems.

This process was only successful for the small company I work for because it followed what Scapiro laid out in his plan.