The story behind Melio’s Small Business Season

Melio’s vision is “keeping small business in business”. It’s one of the major driving forces behind what we do. Every feature we release, product update and even the articles in our blog, are all geared to helping people manage their small business payment needs.

In 2020, we launched Melio’s Small Business Season, a way for us to get more eyes on our users’ businesses by promoting them on social media. This was especially important during the first year of COVID, as so many businesses had felt the financial impact of a global economic shutdown. The campaign was a hit with a number of business owners signing up to get their products seen.

This year, we decided to go a step further by opening the promotion beyond Melio’s existing customer base and letting every small business owner out there know: we want to get you more customers!

It all began with a look at what we had to offer. Our team of social media experts was the first place we turned, knowing that what had worked for us in 2020 would work well in 2021. Add to that a significant budget to promote the ads, professional writers and designers to create polished content, and an analyst to track it all, and the concept was set in stone.

So began Small Business Season. On September 13th, our team launched the campaign with a landing page, email and social media ads. Slowly, the entries began to come in, snowballing within weeks. By the beginning of October, over 200 small business owners had entered to have their businesses promoted. And the entries were still coming in not just from Melio users but also from small business owners around the country.

From vegan pet stores to science fiction publishers, virtual web consultants to construction companies, everyone wanted to get an ad created just for them. By the end of November, our team began the exciting task of promoting hundreds of small businesses with highly targeted ads on social media.

But we’re not done – as part of the promotion, we added one more thing to our long to-do list: The Melio Small Business Season Index. This online index showcases those who entered our promotion with their logo, website address and a description of their business. This extra level of attention ensures everyone who entered gets more visitors to their websites and, we hope, more paying customers.

Have we met the goal of keeping small business in business? Well, we like to think we’ve taken a pretty significant step in that direction, and we’ll keep going through the end of the year, well into 2022 and beyond.