In 2022, I helped my clients serve their ideal customers better and give them value in the shortest possible amount of time.

Here are some numbers.

In 2022:

• I worked with 8 clients for an average project duration of 1.5 months. Here’s what a typical engagement looks like.
• I ran 40 customer interviews. That’s just over 24 hours total spent talking to my clients’ customers. A full day!
• I parsed 69 interview transcripts, including those of the interviews I didn’t conduct myself. I need between an hour and an hour and a half for each transcript to fully process it, so that’s, um, just over 100 hours on parsing alone!
• I analyzed 375 customer survey replies. It takes me on average two to three minutes to parse the themes from each response, so that’s between 750 and 1125 minutes total, or up to 19 hours of non-stop analysis.
• And to analyze, crystallize and prepare recommendations based on all that data… Can’t even begin to count the hours. Won’t even try!

In 2023, I have plans to do so much more!

2022 has been my best year yet, both in terms of fulfilling work and the income I earned from doing it.

It’s a nice trend that I hope continues next year. I’ll make dang sure of it.

Onwards!

-Katya Ryabova

SMM Headqurters owner

The post 2022: A Year in Review appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

What can I say?

When I was writing a similar post just a year ago, I hoped 2021 would be different from 2020. There was a sense of hope and of turning the corner despite the COVID-19 pandemic still raging. It was supposed to be a new year in which vaccines were arriving and businesses were coming back to life.

So 2021 *was* different from 2020 but it was a different shade of dark—it felt like an incredibly hard, endless and at times a hopeless year that seemed to pass in a blink of an eye.

Putting my business aside for a moment, I want to acknowledge the collective and individual suffering we have all been going through this year. The COVID death toll around the world; the discovery of unmarked residential school graves in Canada; the ongoing threat to abortion rights in the United States; and more, and more, and more. The barrage of tragedy seems at times endless and with the new omicron variant swooping in just before the holidays, the outlook on the beginning of 2022 is looking grim.

But.

I believe things will get better. Not as quickly as I may want, but they will. And after all, I’m not here only to complain about 2021 but also to summarize the good that happened in it—and there was plenty.

How it started

SMM Headquarters entered 2021 as an agency focused on SEM and PPC as its core service. I, as its owner and lead consultant, grew my portfolio of Google Ads clients, maintained and expanded my certifications, and looked to the future as a PPC expert.

Little did I know that in spring my professional world would once again flip upside down with the certification I earned in Customer-Led Growth. It opened my eyes to the many possibilities in overall strategy and direction of growth that so many companies miss by forgetting to focus on their customers.

The possibilities exist not just beyond paid ads but alongside them too. The Customer-Led Growth framework reminded me why I couldn’t help certain clients reach the best results when we simply didn’t know who we were talking to and how we were trying to reach them.

So I think it counts as another pivot when I decided to go all in on CLG.

How it’s going

So far, in the second half of 2021, SMM Headquarters and I:

• Focused on understanding my clients’ customers and the strategy to reach them as a whole;
• Worked on intensive, Customer-Led Growth informed projects for several SaaS and non-profit clients in partnership with Elevate;
• Stopped accepting clients for “straightforward” Google Ads management projects that didn’t include at least a component of Customer-Led Growth to do research and identify customer “jobs to be done”;
• Conversely, I moved away from discussing Google Ads in my newsletter, LindkedIn and Twitter, talking more about growth, research and strategy instead.

Right now, I am working on marrying the knowledge and experience I have with Google Ads to Customer-Led Growth. CLG for PPC, anyone?

Exciting? You bet!

What’s in store for 2022

Reading my end-of-year posts is a great reminder that I’m notoriously bad at predicting what’s going to happen.

(This is also a great lesson to learn when doing customer interviews—never ask your interviewee to predict the future as people will usually be wrong!)

I can only plan for a year filled with determination and working smart, not hard. My eyes are on the prize of bringing the customer to the fore of my clients’ attention. Building a product or service with your best customer in mind can be a life-changing decision that transforms an entire business. I would like to see more companies adopt customer-led thinking while recognizing the challenges it brings and the changes it requires.

Not predicting anything more than that or else I’d read this post in a year and think, “Oh my sweet summer child Katya, little did you know…”

Although I’m sure that’s going to happen regardless.

Season’s greetings to you and yours 🎄

I wish you all a wonderful new year filled with hope, new opportunities, prosperity and, most importantly, health. Please take some time off, rest and disconnect. You deserve it.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and I will see you in 2022!

With love,

Katya Ryabova

SMM Headqurters owner

The post 2021: A Year in Review appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

What a year, huh? 🧼

First and foremost, I truly hope that you and your loved ones have stayed healthy, safe and in good spirits despite the hardship and the tragedy of the pandemic.

I know you were affected. We all were. Many of us made sacrifices we never thought we would have to. There has been a lot of ugliness and polarization in the world besides the general suck that’s COVID-19. Still, I hope we’re turning the corner and learning our lessons!

Our clients were hit the hardest.

The first lockdown in Toronto affected us deeply yet indirectly. The business itself was never in danger—I have always run it from home and have made enough pivots —but its impact on my mental health shouldn’t be understated. It was bad, for a while. Yet, I wasn’t the worst off.

Small businesses—the very clients SMM Headquarters serves—felt the weight of the closures first and suffered the most. I commend each and every one of them for emerging, more determined than ever, on the other side.

The business was not immune to financial uncertainty. But the darkest times gave me the biggest opportunity to work on the business itself, re-focus and re-evaluate. I was far from calm and collected throughout but, ultimately, the first wave of COVID-19 shaped my business more than ever. What’s more, with the easing of restrictions, our clients slowly but surely resumed their operations, getting their own customers back and reaching new ones.

2020 has been the most successful year for SMM Headquarters to date. I am deeply grateful for the clients we have served and started serving in the midst of the pandemic—I have never and will never take that for granted. Thank you.

What changed in 2020 🌑

I’ve been fortunate to work on so many meaningful, exciting and deeply fulfilling projects with clients from so many sectors. From non-profits to ecommerce, we made some outstanding things happen on social media, with Google Ads and Facebook Ads!

In 2020, paid ad consulting became the core tactical service of SMM Headquarters. I also introduced the big and bold strategic package that you will hear a lot about in 2021!

I haven’t announced it explicitly, but I have also stopped offering social media management to new clients of the agency. I’m still very, VERY happy to consult on issues related to social media, especially when it comes to strategy. But all the social posting, calendaring, and planning is no longer a standalone service you will find on our updated website.

Fret not! If social media management is something you need, I have a fantastic network of powerful, talented women in marketing. If I can’t help you directly, I for sure know someone who can. 2020 was the year that taught me the power of community—I would never hesitate to show up and ask for help again.

What’s in store for 2021 🌕

2020 was a pretty sh*t year overall, but it was the reset button I needed to figure out the purpose of SMM Headquarters and to take it to new heights. Which is pretty much the plan for 2021!

Next year, the focus will be sharp, the work will flow, and the ads will get clicks like never before. I plan on publishing more, not just on Instagram and here on the blog, but on LinkedIn and in my newsletter as well.

At the same time, I’m remembering that plans are just that—plans. Life happens despite them. So whatever life throws at me, at my business and at my clients, I know we’ll deal with it. Together.

My warmest wishes to you and yours!

I hope that you have found something to be grateful for this year as well. I wish you great health, lots of love, abundance in life and business, and the best of wishes for the new year. Please take some time off and allow yourself to rest. We’ve all earned it.

✨ And then let’s see what kind of magic we can make happen in 2021! ✨

With love,

Katya Ryabova

SMM Headqurters founder

The post 2020: A Year in Review appeared first on SMM Headquarters.