In today’s context, the rise of women in business is celebrated as it gives hope to all aspiring women entrepreneurs. Today we share the unique success story of, Jami Eidsvold, who founded Smarty Social Media in 2013. Let us journey through her story in this article.
Becoming an entrepreneur
Jami had worked for years in various digital advertising agencies and witnessed first-hand how difficult it was for moms to manage the expectations in a traditional agency while also having the flexibility to be there for their children when it mattered with no judgment or guilt. When she got pregnant with her first son in 2006, she was working extremely long hours chained to her desk, and many of her friends were starting their families and giving up their careers to be stay-at-home moms — Jami thought there had to be a better way!
Her education and background were in Public Relations, but her passion was digital marketing. After Jami’s son was born in 2007, she decided to become an independent contractor/consultant and offered her services to local agencies specializing in agency marketing and PR as well as influencer marketing (this was right when bloggers were taking the stage as the first digital influencers).
For the next six years, she grew her consulting business exponentially out of the bedroom of her home. She learned social media marketing from the bloggers she was working with and started to introduce strategies and tactics to clients she within the medical device space. Before she knew it, she had hired multiple consultants (also working moms) to support her and in turn, they became experts in social media marketing for highly regulated healthcare companies.
It was at this time, that Jami could see a new agency model that could function remotely, with an array of talented consultants and allow the flexibility to balance work life with home life. She took a leap of faith and opened up Smarty Social Media in the fall of 2013.
The Idea for the Business
During her time consulting on social media marketing, Jami regularly came across really smart traditional executives and marketers who just could not wrap their heads around social media. She regularly found herself needing to coach and teach them about social platforms in order to sell in these new cutting-edge strategies. She knew how important it was, especially in regulated industries, to help educate. The agency she wanted to build would need to be a combination of teaching social “smarts” and pitching “smart social solutions” as an alternative way to execute digital marketing, thus the name Smarty Social Media.
The vision behind Smarty Social Media
When the team first started out, the vision was to create a boutique-style virtual agency comprised of smart and talented women, who also happened to be moms, and give them the opportunity to thrive in a flexible work environment. Jami believed that heart and hustle made up for the lack of a more traditional model and suited the ever-changing world of social media marketing. Smarty is all about connection, staying firmly connected as a team, and lifting each other up to explore their full potential, while also using the power of social media to connect people to brands and products.
Overview of the company and its offerings
Smarty is the only social-first agency to specialize in health and technology innovation marketing. Their mission is to tap into the power of social media to connect life-changing innovations with the people who need them. Smarty harnesses the power of social to help their clients find creative solutions, grounded in data, to make connections that drive action. In their daily work, they bring the real-time insight and perspective that social media provides to every business challenge. While they see first through the lens of social, the team of seasoned marketers have the experience to work across the marketing mix and tap Smarty’s bench of specialists and partners to create fully integrated campaigns.
Smarty Social Media’s full suite of services empowers them to embrace and act on real-time consumer and customer data, be experts in all aspects of paid social advertising, and execute creatively with the very specific and ever-changing regulatory guidelines of their clients. Social is a window to their audience. They pay attention to the conversation. They see what is unsaid. And then find the whitespace that their clients can thrive in.
Smarty has three key service areas as follows:
Smarty Intel brings together a decade of experience and a wealth of data that is used alongside a suite of proprietary intelligence tools to identify the insights that drive strategic recommendations.
- Social Listening Analysis
- Social Platform & Competitive Landscape Audits
- Campaign Analysis
- Discovery Sessions and Workshops
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Social Brand Development
- Strategic Planning
- Social Strategy including platforms, content, customer experience, paid advertising
Smarty Solutions embodies the services that clients trust to bring their marketing to life within highly regulated environments.
- Social Media Management – best-in-class client service, platform management, content publishing and performance reporting
- Creative + Content – creative conception, content creation, social photography, video production and user-generated content
- Influencer Marketing – influencer/KOL partnerships & management, creator campaigns & licensing, content integrations and creator social shoots
- Customer Experience – channel security, brand reputation monitoring, customer service and community management
- Event Marketing – event activations, social production/content capture and event social amplification
- Performance Marketing – paid social, paid search, programmatic and email marketing. Their work extends to traditional media such as direct mail, connected TV, OOH and other traditional and non-traditional channels with a trusted network of partners
The Social Academy provides practical, customizable and scalable social training programs that help individual leaders and their teams understand the social media space.
- Workshops and clinics, training programs, executive and healthcare providers (HCP) education, speaking engagements, 1:1 strategic coaching, social media guides and social media toolkits
Staying innovative in a competitive market
The advertising landscape is ever-evolving, providing challenges and opportunities along the way. As a social-first agency, Smarty Social Media is energized by constant change and takes a test-and-learn mindset to responsibly try new things. They recommend earmarking a portion of the budget to experiment as part of an overall performance-driven approach to media planning.
Embracing change that comes via advertising or marketing, in general, is built into their DNA – social as their foundation demands that they constantly monitor trends, changes, and regulations and be ready to pivot quickly. Smarty has a robust in-house content team adept at creating with a video-first approach and prepared for a shift where creativity is more important than targeting. They create space for the team to be curious and explore new ways of doing things and have begun leaning into AI for efficiency and limitless creativity.
Smarty is flexible in their approach and accept that while the end goal is to always drive their clients’ business forward, how they get there will constantly evolve.
Strategies to scale the business
Over the past two years, Smarty has grown to over 30 employees and entered a new stage that required an honest look at its systems and the operations needed to scale the business. Jami worked to build the right leadership team and invested in critical areas to support growth.
- Outsourcing core business operations to trusted partners: Bookkeeping, Accounting, IT, Human Resources, etc. allows scale while managing overhead expenses.
- Creating strong internal business operations, project management and communications systems and tapping the latest SaaS business platforms to fuel them: Asana, Slack, Dropbox, Harvest, Google Business Suite, etc.
- Establishing strong SOPs and internal playbooks/handbooks to streamline operations and systems.
- Regular tracking of hours and bandwidth then constantly restructuring for growth, putting the right people in the right places with the structure and processes to support them.
- Leveraging strategic partnerships and freelance resources to scale up and down as needed.
- Treating agency marketing like a client – dedicating time and resources to drive publicity, marketing and business development efforts.
- Investing in leadership and management skills training as their agency continues to grow and they bring in the next generation of Smarties.
Defining personal and professional success
Jami says, “At Smarty, success is measured by revenue and profitability, living our values as an organization and individually, and improving our company culture that we define as #TheSmartyWay. Every year we set overarching goals for our organization and have each department and employee ladder up their individual goals to the organization’s goals. Goal setting is a core part of our culture to allow for both organizational growth and the professional development of our team. We report against our goals transparently during quarterly business review meetings and use employee goals to recognize, reward and promote team members throughout the year. We also conduct client NPS surveys and employee satisfaction surveys throughout the year to ensure we are on track.”
Keeping up with the changing market trend
The market is always changing and social media moves at an even faster pace of constant evolution. Smarty Intel is the social listening and insights service at Smarty that they apply to clients’ strategic work, while also ensuring that they have an ear to the ground and socialize new trends and marketing conditions as they happen.
Smarty shares market and social media trends weekly via an internal wiki and with their newsletter subscribers and clients monthly.
They meet as a team quarterly to determine what trends and performance data are relevant to their clients, and proactively apply it to their work. Reporting across a wide range of clients also provides relevant data that can be helpful in seeing early indicators of change and new trends.
Future plans and aspirations
This year marks Smarty’s 10th anniversary and they are commemorating it with a fresh new brand to securely establish their positioning as a leading health innovation marketing agency.
Conscious leadership has been a big focus of the leadership team this year, and they plan to roll out agency-wide training across all levels of the organization for better empathy, self-awareness, inclusivity, support and open communication.
Fostering a positive company culture
Connections are at the heart of everything Smarty does. They are a truly collaborative team with a deep culture of support and accountability.
Jami describes #TheSmartyWay as living our values rooted in head, heart and soul:
Head: Fearless ownership represents our commitment to lead with excellence, deliver quality work we are proud of, and do so with full transparency and accountability. We focus on solutions over problems and are committed to doing what is right, not what is easy.
Heart: Boundless Connection demonstrates our belief that collaboration is the key to unlocking limitless potential, and true collaboration means embracing diversity of thought and perspectives across our team, clients, partners and other stakeholders.
Soul: Intentional Creation begins from a position of empathy and respect driven by the belief that we can help give important innovations, audiences and ideas a voice through creativity in the marketplace.
Team culture at Smarty is fostered by endless collaboration via SaaS communication platforms, regular in-person team meetings, never-ending brainstorming sessions and 1:1 huddles. They also aim to create opportunities for connection with quarterly team-building virtual events, in-office activities, team retreats, charitable givebacks, and the quarterly Smarty Hero award for demonstrating company values and daily shoutouts on Slack.
Women’s participation in entrepreneurial spaces
Jami shares that she has witnessed so much positive momentum and growth of female entrepreneurs over the last 10 years. When she first started Smarty, there were very few women (especially working moms) who were empowered to build their own empires and do it their way. Female energy is so important to the business to balance out all the male energy that has traditionally filled the space. It has been so inspiring to watch women take chances, own their power and embark on the entrepreneurial journey. She would love to see a world where we all support each other, celebrate girl boss wins collectively, and continue to make progress.
Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Ten years ago, Jami, a working mother embarked on a journey to find a better and more fulfilling career path. With unwavering belief, she took a courageous leap of faith and established her own agency. Looking back, she acknowledges that if she had possessed the knowledge she has now, the journey would have been smoother, but perhaps not as rewarding. Along the way, she encountered numerous challenges, made mistakes, and poured her heart and soul into her work. However, as she reflects on the past, she realizes that it has been a truly fulfiling adventure, and she wouldn’t change a thing.
Reflecting on a decade of growth, she has learned that perseverance is key. Despite the obstacles and setbacks, she has discovered the power of resiliency and the ability to overcome challenges. Additionally, she has come to understand the importance of building a strong team. Surrounding herself with talented and dedicated individuals has been instrumental in achieving success and weathering storms. Over time she has learned the following lessons:
- Seek help and mentorship – early and often
- Get comfortable in chaos
- Be a part of the solution– know when you’re the problem
- Leadership is a responsibility that must be owned across the organization
- Perspective is everything
- Focus on life integration instead of time management
- Ride the flow of your business vs fight it
- Find your people and treat them well
- Always stay true to yourself and your values
Conclusion
As she celebrates the agency’s 10-year anniversary, she is overwhelmed with gratitude for the invaluable experience she has gained. She acknowledges the incredible individuals who have joined her on this collective journey, as well as the highs, lows, and everything in between that have shaped Smarty’s path. Through her journey, she has gleaned many important lessons that she hopes to share with other female leaders through mentorship as a small way to give back to the community.
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