As social media marketing continues to be a crucial tool for small businesses to reach their audiences, it also becomes more overwhelming to keep up with. It can feel impossible to know the ins and outs of all the new apps, platform updates, and algorithm changes, especially while you run your own business. This is how many Rock Hall, MD-based businesses felt about social media–which is where the PPR Strategies team came in!
Rock Hall is a small, waterfront town commonly recognized as a fishing and boating haven for locals and tourists alike. A charming factor of Rock Hall’s downtown area is their “village” of small storefronts that emulate the tiny homes you might see on HGTV, so this area is truly one-of-a-kind. Our team could see the unique appeal of each business on Main Street, but these entrepreneurs were looking for manageable ways to level up their social media presence to increase their visibility. Thus, Rock Hall Main Street approached us to bring our expertise to the local entrepreneurs. After all, at PPR Strategies, we’re not standard-issue marketers; we’re Main Street advocates to the core!
Our work with Rock Hall Main Street involved five seminars to discuss various areas of social media marketing for small businesses. The goals of this partnership were to provide helpful information on the current social media landscape and offer strategies, guidelines, tools, and ideas for Rock Hall businesses to implement and build upon. We know that all businesses have different audiences or approaches, so we emphasized the importance of crafting social media strategies that work best for them.
PPR Strategies kicked off this training series with an in-person presentation to provide an overview of our top social media and traditional marketing tips. We also offered an introduction
to helpful artificial intelligence tools to assist with marketing, writing, and video editing tasks. The best part? We met so many incredible businesses face-to-face and walked away with a better idea of how we could help them grow through the rest of the project. Our team was flexible and asked for suggestions from attendees so we could customize each week’s presentations to address their greatest needs and concerns.
We conducted the next four sessions via Zoom, and we recorded each for the businesses that couldn’t join us in real-time. At the first webinar, our social media marketing experts dove into an overview of Canva, a free and user-friendly design tool. We then discussed strategies and approaches to planning social media content at the following session. Here, the PPR team worked to establish long-term solutions rather than short-term “fixes” to the most common issue businesses face: finding time to work on their social media marketing. This included organizational suggestions, such as crafting social media content calendars and keeping a simple, adjustable strategy in place. We also offered an array of content ideas (with examples from REAL small businesses, not large corporate brands) to provide creative inspiration.
The final two webinars built upon our content creation and planning sessions to provide best practices for using Facebook and Instagram, which are the most popular social media platforms business owners gravitate towards. We addressed common questions about various platform features, such as the purpose of Instagram Stories, and provided advice on crafting personalized posting schedules based on user behavior.
By the end of our 5-week-long project, 25 Rock Hall businesses had attended at least one of the four online seminars PPR Strategies offered. (That doesn’t include any businesses that couldn’t attend the live sessions and opted to watch the recordings instead.) Laurie Walters, at Main Street Rock Hall, boasted, “Working with Sandy and her team at PPR Strategies was a delight. As a whole, they were approachable, capable, and quick to respond to all communications.”
The PPR Strategies team was happy to play a role in empowering Rock Hall’s small businesses for this training program. We are eager to follow their journeys as they continue to grow and showcase their businesses on social media!
