Small Business Spotlight – April 2023: HIVEMINDED Marketing
Company name: HIVEMINDED Marketing
Person in charge: Sheri Walsh, Founder and Digital Marketing Strategist
Year founded: 2020
Tell us about the history of your business:
Our beginning isn’t the funnest thing to talk about. While we dreamed of starting HIVEMIDINED Marketing, we never expected to start in 2020. After our owner Sheri lost her husband, she needed to make big decisions about her family’s finances. At the same time, the pandemic pushed our entire world into chaos. Local businesses closed their doors, unsure if they would reopen.
We looked at the tragedies around us and wanted to do something about it. Determined to shape the struggle into something good, Sheri invested her savings into this company so we could support our community. Now the three of us know our work matters. We help owners spend more time at home and less time working through their marketing struggles. We help marketing directors with limited staff fill in skills gaps. We offer affordable consulting services for businesses with a limited budget but big goals. We love what we do.
Describe the services your organization provides and what makes you unique:
We are a full-service, creative marketing and digital advertising agency. You can look at us like a collection of niche skills sewn together by expert marketing strategists to create a tapestry of options your company needs to meet essential business goals. What makes us unique is our approach to partnership. We become a part of your marketing department and integrate ourselves into your team. We are not just an outside vendor that wants to get the most with the least amount of effort. Every partnership is built on the idea that either we both win or neither of us win.
Our services include marketing strategy, brand management, SEM management (SEO and Paid Search Advertising), creative design, social media management, content marketing, web design, and print marketing.
We are unique: We help small businesses compete with bigger businesses by taking a holistic approach to marketing. This means we use our skills to support essential business goals at every level of an organization. We get to know our clients, learn their big and little goals, and how achieving those goals can add value to the lives of the people around us.
Tell us something people might not know about your organization:
We have a passion for helping mom and pop shops with restrictive marketing budgets. To continue servicing these important local businesses, we are in the process of developing a set of tools, guidelines, and how-tos that make expert marketing more accessible to everyone.
What is the biggest challenge facing your organization now, and how are you working to overcome that challenge?
New developments in AI marketing are shaking up the industry in both good and bad ways. On one hand, creating content is easier now than at any point in our history. On the other hand, society collectively lowered the bar on our standards of quality content.
The true winners will be the businesses that know how to use AI to supplement their existing marketing team - not those that use it to replace their human workforce. I believe we will see an avalanche of good-enough, yet ultimately unsatisfying content passing as “good marketing.” Since marketing is about building relationships, we need to ask ourselves how well AI can facilitate meaningful connection – not just how well it can mimic human connectivity.
What is the best business advice you've ever been given?
Equal business stature is not an option in healthy business relationships. Either you have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, you are susceptible to predatory partnerships. If your client values their time, energy, and effort more than yours - you do not have equal business stature and you should run.
In our first two years this was a big issue for us. We were just thankful and excited to get to work. We didn’t know how to protect ourselves from clients that entered into the relationship with a “let’s see how much I can get from them” mentality, and we overworked ourselves for little benefit in return. Our real growth happened when we gave ourselves permission to say no.
