MICHIGAN, USA — This holiday season despite the countries financial hardships due to the pandemic, a fall survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers stated people are expected to see holiday shopping increase this year.
At least 24 Michigan Main streets have decided to participate in a statewide social campaign using the hashtag #ShopSmallOnMainSt to encourage residents to shop locally, according to Grand Haven City Press Release.
Jeremy Swifney, a Grand Haven local main street representative told us how it’s worked for their city this year.
“The SBA, kind of got some funds to the cares act, and then that money, they set aside and said how can we best influence our small businesses,” Swifney said. “This year, particularly like the ability to focus on Small Business Saturday maybe wasn't there. We needed to be like all hands on deck moving forward and in terms of …how do we make sure that our businesses survive? So they said hey let's set this money aside Let's help out these small businesses through this avenue.”
The SBA is federally funded and they usually supply their funding to small businesses.
Swifney told WZZM that SBA reached out to local main street representatives around the state with Michigan's Small Business Developing Center also working on these smaller campaigns.
Businesses that were Main Street accredited got access to marketing assistance in order to help them get social media campaigns rolling.
“Our district has around 76 retail shops, somewhere around 35 restaurants. We overall, including service industries have 330 businesses so the best bang for the buck is to help somebody who's already looking out for all of them all and that's kind of where they decided like this will be the best spend for us,” Swifney said.
Swifney told us that Grand Haven businesses didn’t want to emphasize the previous executive order rules as their way to encourage consumers to change the way they shopped this season, instead the SBA's marketing strategy helped them create their own voice and message to the community.
“We wanted to talk about how we can positively impact our local businesses and how we can make sure that they can remain open from now through the holiday and beyond…The community support is what has allowed businesses to remain open especially in Grand Haven and the level that they have a number of communities have seen more turnovers see more of our vacancies and we have not yet.” Swifney said.
Rich Baker, The President of The Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce told us about the second largest city in Michigan’s social media approach to encourage residents to shop locally.
He maintained that their main focus was also to keep the businesses still open ‘alive’ after surviving multiple restrictions, with their #supportourgrbiz campaign.
Baker said, “A huge percentage of the annual sales for a small business happened during this window of time during the holidays. You know, typically slows downs in a normal year really slows down retail sales in January and February because people have just had the holidays and done a lot of buying. And so the holiday season really helps businesses get through that slow period In the wintertime.”
In order to fill the need, a lot of local businesses statewide have transitioned to offer curbside pickup, local delivery, or even mailed items to keep up with and prepare for the holiday orders. But because of marketing and advertising dollars, consumers are more likely to see large box store deals.
Both cities are hoping these social media campaigns will impact where neighbors go to buy there electronics or winter clothes this year.
“Based on what everybody's saying online, based on what I was seeing downtown. I'm seeing people come out for the local businesses, come forward a little bit stronger than in years past and that's really good to see you know hopefully throughout the holiday season people don't just do that on a one day basis, they don't look at Small Business Saturday and say well I did my thing and Small Business Saturday,” Swifney said.
Black Friday officially launched the holiday spending season, with Small Business Saturday coming right before Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday.
Swifney and Baker said they are encouraging people to spend as many of those big spending holidates within their community.
“Each dollar spent locally roughly 60% of that goes back into the local economy and that's definitely not the case is anywhere from 10 to 20% of the box retail shops so you know your money will go further back and you need it and that's really what's going to help our communities,” Swifney said.
In addition, Baker also told us that the GR chamber is still trying to push their latest grant program for businesses this holiday season.
“We've been doing the Small Business grant program with the county and that is wrapping up very soon we're getting down to the end. That has to be allocated before the end of December. And so getting that all those resources out into the hands of small businesses is very important to us as well,” Baker said.
The Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce partnered with Kent County to expand the counties grant program which was made to assist small businesses affected by the Nov.18 MDDHS order. The Small Business Recovery Program application ends November 30th and can be found here.
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