Page 29 - BusinessWest January 24, 2022

Elizabeth and Lennie Appelquist say local small businesses — like their clients — are the economic drivers of communities.
involves ensuring the consistency of all representative information found across the web.
“When someone is looking for a service, a product, a restaurant’s hours, the site should load fast, and then there should be a very clear path to the information they’re looking for,” Appelquist said. “A trend we’re see- ing with a lot of small businesses is making sure they take control of all of the places where people can interact ... their data becomes their brand, and so every touch point on the web, on other third-party websites,
on their website, when someone answers the phone at the office, it all becomes representative of what their brand is. If it’s inconsistent, that just says inconsistency to the consumer.”
Changing Times
Cider House Media felt the severe impact the pandemic had on small businesses, experiencing client cancellations and a decline in activity at the beginning of 2020. It had just launched its largest-ever online adver-
“All of a sudden, every business that was out there trying to figure out a way to reach their clients realized they needed to be online, and they needed to understand what they were doing. They needed to understand how online marketing worked, how their social-media worked, and how ads worked.”
tising campaign, and an uncertain marketplace led the Appelquists to question if they were going to survive. However, after a few months, they started to see an interesting shift in their business.
“All of a sudden, every business that was out there trying to figure out a way to reach their clients realized they needed to be online, and they needed to understand what they were doing. They needed to understand how online marketing worked, how their social-media worked, and how ads worked,” Lennie Appelquist said.
This resulted in a transition from their initial decline to a sudden flood of business. It has been almost two years since the Cider House Media staff have been able to get together in the office, but business has essen- tially stabilized.
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Even so, the pandemic has caused them to rework their philosophy and really think about how to help their clients leverage the internet and people’s habits to
bring in business
while simultaneously
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