The mission of the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce is to create value for our members through leadership, education, advocacy and networking, and to move the business community forward by promoting shared interests.
For us, that looks like providing opportunities for leaders to grow through Leadership Frederick and other programs, offering business educational opportunities, advocating for our members in local and national arenas, and doing what we can to support our members as the strive to reach their own business goals.
That includes helping to support your marketing and business growth goals.
Though we are unable to significantly participate in your business’s marketing campaigns, we aim to support our members and their marketing efforts, particularly their digital marketing efforts, in some specific and easily accessible ways. Here’s how you can take advantage of that benefit.
How You Can Use The Chamber to Support Your Business Marketing Initiatives
Access our marketing knowledge.
The easiest way to do that is to sign up for one of our marketing courses. These courses are offered throughout the year and provide you with basic understanding and best practices for using the most popular digital marketing platforms. You can find upcoming marketing course dates on our events calendar.
In addition to a wealth of great information, once you complete a course, you’re also admitted into our exclusive Digital Marketing Support Group where you can get more information and connect directly with our digital marketing specialist who is always willing to answer your questions in this forum.
Read our Insights blog.
Obviously you’ve figured this one out already, but the goal of our blog is to provide a wealth of information for everything business. We discuss past and upcoming events, give advocacy and policy updates, share thought leadership articles, and work smarter pieces as well. Not sure where to look for marketing related articles? Here are a couple that might help: What Our Members Need to Know About Using Facebook and Instagram for Business and The One Question You Need to Ask Yourself Right Now if You’re Not Using Instagram for Business
Connect with us on social media.
While we don’t allow direct submissions for our social media pages, we do actively support our members by sharing their posts and pages. We do Follow Friday posts where we feature members in order to encourage our readers to follow them on social media. We are also always willing to re-share member social media content that is submitted to us as it fits into our posting mission and schedule.
Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter if you use those platforms for your business.
Share the right kind of news with us.
We get a lot of submissions and can’t possibly share everyone’s content, but we do try to fit it into our posting schedule and be as equitable as possible to our members. We never create original posts about our member events or news on our social channels, but we do share things that are submitted via our news submission portal and we re-share (or retweet) posts created by our members on their own pages frequently (you can share links to your posts via any of our social channels by direct messaging us or tagging us in a post you’d like us to see – don’t send us emails about your events or news, those tend to get lost in the shuffle).
Our primary goal is always to add value into the social space, so we explicitly look for opportunities to do so whether we are sharing our own news and updates or that of our members. So what news is the right kind of news? The kind members of the public can truly benefit from or celebrate with you. Awards, recognition, special events, and awesome discounts/promotions are the type of things we find to be most beneficial and engaging for our audience. We don’t share news of new hires, or general business elevator pitches about our members. We’re excited about these things for you, we just know that our audience isn’t going to respond well to them on our pages so we don’t post about them.
Think about contributing to our blog and/or newsletter.
It’s a great way to promote yourself and get what you do in front of our fans and followers. We accept articles for consideration for our blog and we also allow advertorial submissions for our newsletter. If you want to contribute a blog post, reach out to Amanda Rodriguez to discuss your idea. Generally, we accept well written, informative articles for our page (they can’t just tell people how great you are) in specific topic areas. If you need help working through your topic, email Amanda Rodriguez (arodriguez@frederickchamber.org) for some ideas. You can also reach out to Jen Gerlock (jgerlock@frederickchamber.org) to discuss pricing and posting requirements for our advertorials.
Respond to our calls for feedback.
If one of your primary marketing goals is brand awareness, getting featured is a great way to make that happen. We do numerous member features each year. Sometimes we put out calls in our newsletter, often we post on our Facebook page or Instagram channel asking for member feedback. Respond to these when you have something insightful to share and you could be featured in an upcoming post! It’s an easy way to get your business in front of more people, and it doesn’t require anything from you but your honest opinion!
Frederick Chamber Insights is a news outlet of the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce. For more information about membership, programs and initiatives, please visit our website.
Member events featured here are taken directly from our member calendar.To be sure your events are included, please submit them into the calendar at least 10 days before the event day.