Supporting Small Business Saturday with 2020-Conscious Marketing!!

Local SEO | Marketing Industry

Image credit: Elvert Barnes

“Conscious spending with the community can contribute to neighborhood sustainability.” — Christine Araquel, The Park’s Finest

I encountered this quote from a restaurateur on the American Express Small Business Saturday website, and just these few words called a vivid image to my mind: local business owners and customers gazing together toward the horizon, hoping to pierce the clouds of COVID-19 and see them clearing away, revealing communities that are still standing, and still capable of sustaining our hometowns, our cities, and our dreams.

72% of consumers believe they will frequent neighboring businesses more after the crisis is over, but that will take all of us doing our part now to ensure as many SMBs are still there to greet us when better days return.

In Q4 of 2019, I used my column to encourage local business owners to start having meaningful conversations with customers about how “conscious spending” at independently-owned enterprises impacts local quality of life. Buying local affects everything from mental and physical health, to emergency services access, diversity, democracy, and climate change.

In 2020, it’s time to turn up the local SEO industry’s dial on conscious spending. Today, I’m urging every business owner and marketer to consider dedicating space to a concerted educational campaign on the topic on their websites, social profiles, local business listings, reviews, and real-world interfaces. Your work, and mine, depends on sustaining independently-owned local businesses through and far beyond Small Business Saturday. With the right strategy, we can make an impactful effort together.

What is Small Business Saturday?
American Express created Small Business Saturday in 2010 in response to the Great Recession. This annual event invites communities to shop at small, local businesses on the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Small Business Saturday’s date this year is November 28th.

Americans spent $19.6 billion at independent businesses on Small Business Saturday in 2019. In 2020, AmEx is placing special emphasis on shopping locally to help SMBs remain viable amid the challenges of the public health emergency. AmEx is also strongly encouraging shoppers to support Black-owned independent businesses this year.

Practical tactics for Small Business Saturday preparation
To ensure your local business is ready to welcome the maximum number of shoppers on the big day, check these off your list:

Do a quick audit of your website to be sure all contact information and hours of operation are current and accurate for each location of your business.
Do the same for your local business listings on the major location data platforms.
Write at least one Small Business Saturday Google Post to explain your special offers for the day.
Post a Google Q&A about your participation in Small Business Saturday.
Publicize your Small Business Saturday offers on your social channels.
Respond to any recent reviews that mention Small Business Saturday.
Make use of any appealing partnership deals you qualify for by participating in AmEx’s official Small Business Saturday program.
Make use of AmEx’s tutorials on topics like contactless payments, answering COVID FAQs, and implementing digital shopping.
These are all standard good practices to ready your company for this major shopping day, but amid the severe challenges of 2020, it’s time to go beyond common techniques.

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In one of the latest developments, Udemy — which provides a marketplace currently numbering some 130,000 video-based courses across 65 languages, ranging from learning Python or how to photograph better, through to mastering mindfulness and business analytics — is raising up to $100 million in a Series F round of funding that would value the company at up to $3.32 billion.

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Dutch-born Sid Sijbrandij built a developer-tool business valued at nearly $3 billion without ever opening an office. Now he’s cautioning companies against doing telecommuting halfway.

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^Sid Sijbrandij knows the perils of working from home. In 2018, after years of toiling exclusively from a small room in his 47th-floor apartment in a San Francisco high-rise, the entrepreneur developed foot problems. So he moved in a treadmill desk alongside his Zoom-friendly green screen and three monitors. 

But GitLab’s CEO says the problem isn’t remote work, but how it’s practiced. Unless you’re employed by one of the handful of companies that have fully embraced the new work reality, Sijbrandij (pronounced see brandy) thinks you’re probably doing it wrong. His radical take on remote work: It’s effective only if you go all in. Partial measures will create tiers of employees who will split the workforce over time, driving away top-performing remote workers who don’t want to compete with lesser-achieving on-site colleagues. “We’ll see some companies . . . go back [to the office] and try to make the best of it, and I think they’ll struggle,” he says.

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