By Kristin Meeks
Running a nontraditional business for the past 12 years and working with clients from the health care field to professional athletes, Kristin Meeks, owner of WV Social Media, thought she had seen it all when it came to business techniques, marketing and interpersonal communication. That was until the pandemic hit.
Meeks started the digital marketing agency in 2011 while living on the border of West Virginia and Ohio. She started working with nonprofits and small businesses and gradually grew into the go-to social media consultant for marketing directors and agencies.
In the days and weeks after the first shutdown, Meeks wasn’t sure what her business would look like moving forward. She was approaching her 10-year anniversary and wasn’t sure if she was going to make it. Then, the phones started ringing, clients started emailing and new people started showing up in her direct messages on social media and the contact form on her website. In the span of a few weeks, she was on more Zoom calls than she had been on in her entire life.
Reflecting back on her time with her clients in the trenches of the pandemic, helping them troubleshoot, pivot and find better solutions, Meeks can pinpoint three distinct actions her clients took that helped them come out successfully on the other side of the pandemic, successfully.
1. Reinvented themselves.
Some people are who they are, and they can’t see past that to help themselves. We can sympathize with those people but also understand that can be a recipe for disaster in the middle of a crisis. Clients that took the news of closure in stride and took a moment to step back and adjust the sails were the ones that continued to keep their heads above water.
“I knew we had to do something. Video classes were always something we wanted to do but just never found the time. The shutdown gave us the time,”owner of Full Circle Yoga located in Vienna, WV. The only full-service hot yoga studio in the Mid-Ohio Valley had students wanting to continue their practice. The studio took advantage of the need for online classes and launched its on-demand series. Even after the doors opened back up, the on-demand online series stayed and is offered to anyone in a monthly subscription plan.
2. Took a new spin to ecommerce.
Meeks had been trying to convince her product-based clients to sell online for years. She encouraged them to sell differently. But time and hesitation always won and most had not yet taken this route. From influencer marketing to Facebook Live sales, online services saw a huge increase from March 2020 well into and after the holiday season. The clients who took that leap of faith saw the most success and no longer had products in their stores with no shoppers.
Shop owner Marvin Edwards let his employees take the lead. They chose certain items from vendors at the Rustic House Antique Mall and featured them on Facebook Live Sales. The sales generated revenue for both the vendors and the shop during a time where shoppers were encouraged to stay home.
3. Adjusted the rules.
As entrepreneurs, boundaries must be put into place. For many, they’ve been working on this for years, so when the pandemic hit and all the rules went out the door, there was some obvious push back from clients.
Clients that put boundaries in place such as they only ship on certain days, they don’t take orders online just via phone, etc., had to rethink if that was going to work for the new normal. Sometimes a hard conversation had to happen with some of them. The concept of meeting your customer where they are was taken to a whole new level during the pandemic. This wasn’t the easiest thing for many of them to do, and some chose not to, and some closed their doors for good. However, the ones that decided this wasn’t the year they were going to go out of business were the ones that started providing delivery, porch pick up, curbside service, extended hours; these clients went out of their way to accommodate their customers.
The biggest thing we can all learn from almost the past two years is that as entrepreneurs we must continue to adjust the way we do things. In the world of digital marketing, this is something that is done every day. The hope is that fellow entrepreneurs can see the silver lining in this and how their business can survive other twists and turns along the way.
About the Author
Kristin Meeks launched one of the first social media companies in West Virginia—WV Social Media—in 2011. She has consistently helped nonprofits and small businesses in and out of the state with their digital marketing efforts. You can reach her at 304-834-0764, kristin@wvsocialmedia.com or www.wvsocialmedia.com.
