This Girl Grew Her Digital Advertising Biz With a $25Okay Successful Pitch
Digital Marketing Guruin Stephanie Smith spent the summer of 2020 teaching black-owned companies how to manage their own digital ads – for free.
“When COVID happened there were a number of small and medium-sized businesses that really needed to refine their digital strategies to stay alive. That became my goal for the year: to help them stay afloat during a difficult time, ”she says.
“And then, with everything that happened over the summer, Black Lives Matter, I decided to focus some of my time just on my own business to make sure our dollar grows and businesses get to the point who they are can sustain, scale and bring more money back to our community. “
Smith, now a digital marketing veteran, originally wanted to be an engineer. During a summer internship, she sat next to the marketing group and changed her career course forever. “What they were doing was way cooler than my very boring spreadsheet,” she says.
An entry on her college job board led to her first job at Blinq Media. “They taught me from the ground up how to read numbers, how to report, how to trend, data. Everything I needed to really be a media person, I learned from them, ”she says. “There I fell in love with the idea of digital advertising.”
Smith spent the next 10 years running media for various agencies in the Atlanta area, working with big brands like Coca-Cola and Capital One. Then, three years ago, she decided to focus on her own business, Digital Insomnia, also known as Social by Steph.
“I decided to put this experience in the pockets of small and medium-sized businesses. Just because you don’t have to spend $ 20 million doesn’t mean you can’t apply some of these best practices to your campaigns on a smaller scale. “
Smith quickly realized that there was a greater need than her service business could meet.
“What I noticed is that even if I can give business owners and entrepreneurs all the information, skills and knowledge they would need to manage their own ads, it was still scary to spend their own money on. “
And then Smith came up with the idea of creating a simulator called SiMMY that would allow people to learn and practice before they have to spend their hard-earned capital.
“With this tool, users can learn how to manage ads without spending real money, so they can learn the strategy behind them, how to set them up, what decisions to make, what tweaks to make, and how to analyze the numbers. And then you also go through scenarios to practice different campaigns until they’re comfortable enough to get into the real market, ”she says.
The platform begins with the placement of Facebook and Instagram ads and will eventually expand to other platforms such as Google, Tik Tok, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The prototype should be ready by mid-April, thanks to the funding she received as the winner of the Black Women’s Roundtable’s Take It To The TOP Entrepreneurship Challenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5GoGyVOhkc
Smith won the national grand prize in the December pitch competition for black women entrepreneurs along with HBCU Grand Prize Winner Nasyah Oxner of Brushfoote Beauty and Girl Preneur Grand Prize Winner Juantre Gray. Smith received $ 25,000 to invest in her business.
“Actually, a friend sent it to me and told me to apply for it. And I said, “Oh yeah, that sounds stupid.” So I applied and thought this was a really good opportunity, ”she says.
The wins were critical to Smith’s ability to develop her digital marketing simulator: “When I won that pitch, I was able to jump straight into what was needed to develop, or at least the prototype or MVP for my platform.”
“For many business owners, finance is usually the hardest part of the bottleneck. Therefore I am very grateful that I can implement my idea with it. “
But the money wasn’t the only benefit. Smith also found a network of supporting women entrepreneurs among the other finalists for the pitch competition.
“We exchanged all ideas and received feedback in real time. So yeah, that definitely had a lot of advantages. And there are a couple of women I still emailed with; We stayed in touch. “
Smith hopes to end 2021 with plenty of feedback from beta testers so that the platform gets smarter and adds more features – and maybe even attracts its first paying customers.
“I’m really looking forward to this year,” she says. “I think there is a great opportunity not only to grow my business enormously, but to help a lot of people.”
