Why we left our company roles in our 20's to start our own
One evening my future business partner and I were on Google Meet, spinning aimlessly in our office chairs as we tirelessly waded through the list of business names. “No, that doesn’t have enough of a WOW factor,” “I’m not sure that really reflects us as the business owners,” we said, going back and forth. After listing out our values, who we wanted to help, why we wanted to do it, it appeared we were not one of the lucky ones who were magically struck with a genius business name.
I then heard a quick laugh through my earphones. Clare, sitting 1,700 kilometres away in Melbourne from me in Brisbane, had assumedly experienced a light-bulb moment. “How about…” she started, “okay I know it’s cheesy but, what if we combined ‘Empower’ with a “PowerUp? You know, like in Mario Kart where you get a PowerUp and you get ahead of all of your competition!”
From that moment on, it stuck. EmpowerUp Marketing is the name we continued with, and it’s a wonderful reminder to us every day of why we started our digital marketing business to support SMBs.
The marketing struggle small business owners face
Witnessing multiple micro and small business owners in their struggle to find the right information on marketing caught our attention as a problem worth solving. After speaking with several of our clients who were transitioning out of a relationship with a marketing agency, we noticed a common theme. Business owners, looking to be hands on, to learn and to grow their business feeling in control, were left at the mercy of agencies who simply delivered results and charged tremendously for it.
Understandably, the cost of overheads loomed above the agencies as they quoted, yet the clients were the ones who suffered. Lack of explanation, lack of understanding and not taking a beat to explain how and why a certain marketing activity was executed just seemed to be the norm. We noticed that SEO and Content Marketing was particularly out of reach, and it was far easier for agencies to hand over complete content or SEO results, not explaining why to business owners. Given the space is rapidly developing and the value placed on good content throughout the marketing funnel is increasing, providing access to this activity and its benefits was one of our main goals.
This is where we aim to be different. After all, people start a business to be in control of something they love to do, to seize the opportunity and make it their own. Why take that away?
Our goal as marketers is to form relationships with our clients where we can share our expertise and not gate keep it. We strive for a relationship where we can support our clients’ ideas, provide valuable resources, empower them and grow their confidence to build their businesses.
Our very first client was a micro-business owner striving to provide healthy and nourishing ready-made meals, having only a social media platform. She is the perfect example of someone wanting to make it on their own, wanting to learn everything they could to grow their business. We provided comprehensive audits, recommendations and strategy sessions to her, building on the ideas she had and matching them to a solid marketing action. We watched with pride as her social media account grew from 173 followers to over 1000 followers, in less than a couple of months.
How do we Empower our clients?
We focus on connective marketing. To us, connective marketing is about getting in front of the right people in the right place. It means looking at the entire journey, and making sure the business’s customers have a great experience all the way through. SEO and content marketing is a huge part of that, which is why it’s our main focus.
We always want to be educating and encouraging our clients to think of how SEO and content marketing connects with everything else. One huge benefit of being a marketing generalist? You get to develop skills across the board. This is why we are able to offer advertising guidance, email marketing, social media marketing strategies, reputation management, website assistance and much more to our clients.
We know the saying, knowledge is power… but it’s through that knowledge being yours, built off the foundation of your passion and your ideas that you are truly empowered in your business.
