Small Business Season: our way to give back

2020 has been unlike any other year. This especially true for its holiday season. Traditionally the most important time of year for any business, this season was particularly crucial, as people spent less time gift shopping and rummaging through stores and more time indoors.

While challenging, Covid-19 also reminded us of how important it is to support the community and the small businesses that keep it together. The health restrictions are crucial to keeping everyone safe, but their effect on businesses everywhere and small businesses, most of all, has been undeniable.

As a company built specifically to meet the needs of small businesses and help keep them in business, we felt like we had to find a way to give back to our customers and the SMB community as a whole.

This is how we came up with Small Business Season, a campaign that harnessed our existing audience and resources to boost sales for small businesses during the strangest holiday season of the past few decades.

As part of the campaign, we asked our customers to share their special holiday offers and let us promote them on our website and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, using the hashtag #SmallBusinessSeason.

Over a span of two months leading up to the holidays, we promoted 12 special discounts offered by 10 businesses across the country. This was an amazing opportunity for us to celebrate the diversity and ingenuity of the small business community we are so proud to serve.

We posted about each business on our social media channels, including links leading directly to their websites. We then used paid ads to target each business’s unique audiences. For some, this meant a niche audience located within a specific geography, while others serve a wide range of customers across the 50 states. The results were overwhelmingly positive. \

With our sponsored help, each of the 10 businesses reached an audience of thousands of potential customers who viewed the ads between 10,000 and 100,000 times. This resulted in anywhere between several dozens and hundreds of clicks leading directly to their websites and online shops.

Among the small businesses we helped promote was Colony House Liquor, which offers top-notch beverages. Through Melio’s social media posts, Colony House Liquor’s holiday promotions were seen by prospective clients nearly 75,000 times, resulting in around 650 clicks leading directly to its online store.

“As a result of the campaign, we received multiple orders from across the US, which is something we don’t see very often,” Max Alperstein, manager at Colony House Liquor, said. “Melio’s campaign helped us reach new audiences nationwide.”

Vnyl offers record collectors around the country a monthly subscription box that includes three vinyl records, catered explicitly according to their tastes. Our campaign brought news of their service to prospective subscribers who were exposed to the ads nearly 35,000 times.

Another unique business that took part in the campaign was Hippo and Bunny Books, an independent publication run out of New Jersey by a mom and dad team. The couple has written, illustrated, and recently published a first book inspired by their two young daughters and their favorite stuffed animals. Their fluffy characters were viewed around 15,000 times by young parents targeted by our campaign.

Our campaign concluded several days before Christmas with the promotion of Happy Cork, a Brooklyn store offering a wide selection of black and minority-owned wine and spirit brands. Our ads helped it reach an audience of nearly 5,000 unique users on Facebook alone and a total of almost 100,000 impressions across the four social networks.

We feel privileged and humbled to have been able to do our bit for our customers and the small business community during this challenging time and hope this will become a long-standing tradition.

See you next year, in Melio’s #SmallBusinessSeason!