What I Love About Working Locally
I was born just a few villages away from where I ended up living as an adult, so the businesses local to us mean more to me than some far-off company.
Ange Swan
Digital Director
An opinion piece from Ange about why she loves working with local businesses.
The Beautiful South West
I’ve spent a huge part of my life in the South West, I love the area and that passion for the location helps me work with businesses based locally.
Somerset is a truly beautiful county, I’m based up in Somerset near Taunton, but the Sonder team is spread across Somerset and Devon - and we branch over into Dorset with Fellingham over in Seaton, just a stone's throw away.
Not only is it a wonderful place to work and live, but this area also has such a variety of small and medium businesses that we’re never short of a new type of website to build.
Understanding the Customers
It’s much easier to be on the same wavelength as the people we’re working with, as we also run a small business in the area we know the unique challenges and exciting opportunities around the South West.
It’s also really helpful to have my finger on the pulse of local life so that we can market our customers' businesses with some local knowledge, a little local terminology and a greater understanding of where and who we’re targeting.
If your business is in a really small village like ours, it’s important that the people marketing for you know where the local hot spots are, anywhere that isn’t a good use of your budget to target and whether your services would be popular in any given area.
Sat Navs want you to drive like a local, I say you need to market like a local.
Image by David Milton The Watchet Town Crier
Getting to Know You
Being so close to most of the businesses we work with, we can easily visit their premises. Seeing shops, products and meeting the human behind the business first hand really helps us to get a deep understanding of what the business is and what it could be. Being able to see things IRL as the kids would say (in real life for all us adults) really helps with the design and functionality of a website build.
It’s not just about the initial meeting, the website set up chats and meeting a client for the first time, it’s also about keeping in touch, having the opportunity to run things past us if you’ve had an idea and talking through business decisions which might affect your marketing. We’re here to help, it’s in our interest to make sure your business succeeds and being nearby makes that process much easier.
It Works For Me
As a working mum, our clients being in our local area really works for me. It means I don't ever have to travel too far from home to visit for a business meeting and that should my kids need collecting from school or preventing from burning down the house, I’m not too far away to handle it.
We also work from home mostly; we have regular side-by-side days as a team but for most of the week we’re all in our home offices spread around the South West. This also helps with having two kids whilst both me and my husband work full time. The inconvenience of school home time and the huge amount of holiday kids get is hard to manage without someone having the flexibility to work around the kids needs.
That’s the main reasons why I love to work with local businesses. We do have a few special clients that are further afield for some reason or another, but the majority of our nearly 200 clients are in this amazing part of the world.
Here at Sonder, we pride ourselves on understanding our own local geographical demographic and living and working here gives us a solid understanding of how our client's businesses work, as well as what their customers want.
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Posted by Ange Swan on December 7th 2020
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Contact Address: Sonder Digital, 37 Seaton Down Road, Seaton, Devon EX12 2SB
Company Registration No: 07456740
Registered Office: 9 Mountway Road, TA15LR
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