We were lucky to catch up with Caitlin Durning recently and have shared our conversation below.

Caitlin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Meraki means to put your heart and soul into your work, that is exactly how we help our clients show up authentically, teaching them how to get in touch with their intuition and find content stories to share in every experience they encounter in their business and life.

Caitlin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started my company after I had launched an instagram campaign for a local non profit that went viral over night – we were able to take their account from 18K to 500K in under 30 days and also raise 75K for the non profit in the process. I realized how powerful social media can be for business owners, and I started getting clients word of mouth form the success. These tactics that I used are the same as when we help our business owners do today, following what feels best for them in their business and creating a plan that will work to help them create ideal client communities online. We allow our business owners to stay in their zone of genius, not have to worry about social media at all. So they can spend more time with their families, and on their business. I also graduated with a PR degree while I was in college I was working with business owners to help them get on TV, market themselves and build their brands, in conjunction I also started investing in businesses at age 15 out of unfortunate events that occurred in my life at the time, this has allowed me to learn about business at a very young age, and definitely helped me launch my company as well.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

I am a specialist at creating relationships, however it has to be genuine for me. I love the people that I work with so it comes naturally to keep in touch with them online, this has allowed me to foster relationships and by also letting go of my expectations of the relationships its allowed me to keep my mindset open to any and all outcomes, which has begun to create a much more engaging and long term relationships with my clients.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

When I first was asked to launch a campaign at my last job I was so young, about 22 years old, and I was extremely nervous. I was loosing sleep over how I was going to make this work. I spent time researching and thinking back on previous events I had ran that were a success, even if this was virtual I knew we had to start prepping 4-6 months out of the campaign launch. We started connecting with our targets for the campaign threw instagram, we also started working with launch partners to help spread the word, it was very exciting, and I could feel the momentum building. It was then that I pitched to my team that we should do a instagram giveaway, structured like the ALS ice bucket challenge, nominating to help spread the word. My team agreed but wasn’t thinking that the outcome would be what it was. It was on me to make this work. I launched the giveaway and by the time I cam in the next day the instagram was flowing in with notifications, I knew I had to keep the excitement going – so I started reposting and shouting out the people that was tagging us, encouraging them to tag more friends and it was starting to really work well. The numbers started going up and up, we went from 100K impressions at the start of the day to almost 1 million over night. By the end of the 30 days we were reaching 13 million people through impressions, and the money started flowing it. It was so exciting, and this was when I really started to see how much my planing was impacting the success, it was the first time I started to actually believe in my self.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.merakimediamanagement.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meraki_media_management/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GetSocialwithMeraki
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-cynthia-durning-903530131/
• Twitter: NA
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqC38tG8SDAqksO-dFsnymg
• Yelp: NA
• Soundcloud: NA
• Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-end-in-mind-personal-development-for-entrepreneurs/id1550833764
  https://open.spotify.com/show/1OUbo8NsYYUHcfv8ODCh9B

Image Credits

This wont let me upload so I will email them