Black Lives Matters. And with this emphasis has come a renewed focus on Black Owned Business (BOB). We are generating more orders and opened more dialogue with customers than any other organic method. But buying Black is only the tip of the iceberg. BOB for clothing or food will be continually in demand. But is the BOB makes wedding dresses or kitchen utensils, you will probably (or at least hopefully) not need these products for sometime. Purchasing is a great first step, but there is more we need from you to encourage others to purchase Black.

• Leave Reviews. It is great that you have found a BOB because of your local network on social media. Even better, you have shared that business with your circle of influence. But what about the people outside of that network. How will they know about your purchase and the experience you have received. Luckily, that solution already exists, it’s called a review. You leaving a review allows other potential buyers to gain an inside look about their purchase and helps with making that final decision of purchasing from us. If you write a detailed review of the product or service, that will last much longer and build a bigger impact on future purchaser decisions. The best platforms to leave a review are their business profile on Google, their Facebook Page or on their TrustPilot account should they have one.

• Leave feedback. Supporting Black Owned is incredible and we thank you for purchasing from us. Now allow us to understand, what did you like? What did you not like? What can we do to improve? What did you love? Tell us the impact our product or service has had on your life. You may have experienced purchasing from somewhere else before us and have valuable insight into the different type of experience you received. This feedback will allow us to improve our service, build a better business, or even provide that extra encouragement knowing that someone, somewhere’s life has been impacted for the better. Make the feedback clear and specific so we can take action and build an even better business.

• Social Media Engagement. In order to stay relevant, we constantly creating social media content. Whether it be on Facebook to Twitter, LinkedIn to even TikTok, we are always creating something. And these posts often go through writes and rewrites, design changes, proofreaders, scheduling apps and more; It takes a lot of work and effort to create all this content. A really simple method of recognition is simply to follow us and engage one of our posts. A comment that you loved the post or even as simple as an emoji demonstrates acknowledgement of our time and effort.

Let me go back and say thank you for buying from BOBs, and let these ideas in no way detract from that. But following these steps will support us that one step further and become the industry leaders in our respective fields.