Deep South Media’s Kate Pearce explains the importance of relationships in business…
If the pandemic has taught me one thing, it is the power of relationships.
Being cooped up at home for months on end has tested even the most loving family relationships and my hat goes off to my friends who have homeschooled their children.
Business relationships have also been tested and underlined for me the importance of building strong relationships with clients from the outset.
Providing an arms-length service for a wide variety of clients is what I love most about the work I do. Delivering comms services means I am immersed in the business without being tied down by the day-to-day activity.
Like my colleagues at Deep South Media, I am in the privileged position of getting to hear from the owners and bosses about their hopes and aspirations for their company or organisation.
One of our clients runs a beautiful south coast hotel. Millions have been spent returning the Queens Hotel in Southsea to her former glory and 2020 looked set to be an important year for them.
But by the end of March 2020 I was issuing public announcements about the hotel’s temporary closure; owner Farid Yeganeh reluctantly said he would need to put our account on hold.
Having established a good working relationship with him and his team, I said I fully understood and would be there if they needed any help with social media activity during the lockdown.
It started with a couple of posts and over the days and weeks steadily built as the hotel took in nurses and reached out to the community by cooking meals for hundreds of vulnerable people every week.
Before the end of the month, the owner told me to invoice, and he was happy to keep paying for our services even though the doors were closed to the public.
Now, as we begin the tentative steps taking us out of the third lockdown, I felt honoured when Farid mentioned that Deep South Media was the only supplier they had kept on the books.
The lockdowns have been really tough for many businesses and hospitality has been particularly hard hit.
The Queens Hotel saw the number of social media followers rise dramatically during the pandemic and when they were able to open the hotel for brief periods in 2020 – the following they had created remained loyal and supported the business.
As preparations are made to come out of the latest lockdown, and we look ahead once more, I am really looking forward to seeing clients again in person building on the relationships we already have.
And meeting, for the first time, the new Deep South Media clients I have started working with in recent weeks.
