We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Amber Hitch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Amber below.

Alright, Amber thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

I became a stay at home mom 10 year ago. It wasn’t something I ever planned on doing, but definitely felt led to leave my corporate role. Fast forward and our daughters are now 7 and 10 years old. We had recently just started a fun family side business, Music City Squeeze, a fresh squeezed lemonade stand. In doing so, I would spend time searching on Facebook and Instagram and other local pages for events that would be a good fit for us to be a vendor at . In doing so, I realized there were so many cool events, and even businesses that I was just completely unaware even existed. So when Alex, one of our three founders, brought up the idea of starting a local email newsletter for the city of Mt Juliet, it was an instant yes for me. I knew the amount of time and energy it took to find out what was going on locally. So many businesses share in so many different ways, that it’s almost by accident that you find out what’s going on – or often times not until afterwards. So we share our weekly email newsletter as a friendly, casual, but always informative resource for our community. We are never political, and always positive. We don’t share EVERY single event happening, but the ones we think you’d find the most interesting. We love being this free resource for our community, and in doing so, have also become a spotlight for local businesses to advertise and share their messages, services or events to their desired audience.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I feel like I told most of my story in my last question, but I’d want readers to know that there is so much passion behind this newsletter. We truly want to be a simple, easy to read email that you look forward to opening each Tuesday morning. We don’t write lengthy articles. We know your time is critical. We hit the high notes quickly, but almost always share a link that you can click to for more information if you’re still curious. We love sharing a volunteer opportunity each week – aiming to provide a local, easy to attempt way to give back that doesn’t feel too overwhelming. We also love being able to share about local non-profit organizations that may not have the ability or resources to get their names out in the community otherwise.

Our goal is to continue to grow our subscribers – and the only way we can do that is by letting our local friends, businesses, and community members know that we exist! We’d love for you to subscribe, and share with your friends. We also love partnering with local businesses and providing them sponsorship and advertising opportunities to get in front of the people they’re trying to connect with.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

What I’ve found is that by BEING engaging on social media, people will tend to be more engaging in return. Finding the right businesses that will collaborate with you on a post, casts a larger net outside of your current followers. Sharing their messages, commenting on their posts, creating videos of their businesses. All these tools give you more content as well as fosters the relationships with those businesses.

I’ve also found that the videos and captions that I create, off the cuff, but straight from the heart, are almost always more engaging than the ones that are scheduled and curated through canva or another program.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Most of our audience has been built on creating videos and content of the things and places we think they enjoy the most. We do it in an aesthetically pleasing way, but also very realistic. We try to provide a POV that seems like something that’s sort of behind the scenes and not too scripted or staged. Trying to use the same tone as our newsletter with sharing local and being a resource for our community to look to to keep them connected.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mtjulietbuzz.beehiiv.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mtjulietbuzz?igsh=czdyeGgzb3J0cmxq&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1DwuxACtjm/?mibextid=wwXIfr
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-smith-hitch-75379474?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

Image Credits

lydia l photography