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

Alright, Karol thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you think folks should manage their own social media or hire a professional? What do you do?

Keeping up with social media trends has quickly become one of the biggest challenges a small businesses can face when it comes to promoting their services & products. Every day there is a new feature, an algorithm update, a new social media platform in hopes of becoming the next big thing, a new way to contact influencers, etc…

Over this past year, we have had to learn how to properly navigate all our social media channels in order to ensure and optimize results from any of our ad campaigns currently playing. It may sound silly now, but learning how to communicate on reels vs on tiktoks requires a lot of research and time. For us, it took more than 8 months to even get lucky with one of our social media strategies and everyday we keep learning how to continue to optimize them.

It’s amazing how sometimes our reels content will perform extremely great on Instagram, but when we uploaded the same video in TikTok, it would have less than 100 views or engagement.

We have a very small team, it’s just 4 of us. We do not have someone dedicated to manage our social media, we tried it once but quickly realized it was not the right move for us because it turned out to be too expensive at the moment. In reality, having someone dedicated to your social media means you need to have someone on a payroll, additionally, you need to add an extra thousands of dollars per month to have that someone set up social media ad campaigns that will take half of your marketing budget per month. On top of that, you need to add the rates of potential influencers you might be looking to work with, which have all been growing incredibly fast. When you look at all of those together, you quickly realize you have almost no budget left for anything else.

In order to get a better result and save more budget for other marketing resources, we decided to implement a content creation strategy among our team. We set one day aside per week, usually Mondays, to create content for the entire week. Aside from that, each of us needs to deliver one video per week, which we often create at home. This gives us about 10-12 videos per week to be used on social media as stories, reels or tiktoks.

This has helped us allocate our budget better, and keeps us organized, so that our videos actually deliver useful content and tips for our viewers, helping us increase our following while keeping our current viewers engaged.

As a small business, I would not recommend hiring agencies or content creators with high rates if its not under your budget. There is nothing wrong with starting organically and slowly. Nowadays, there are many resources available that make your content creation easy, such as using Canva, video editor apps on the phone, Cinematic function on iPhones, $20 microphones on amazon for better audio, etc… Not to mention, you can google or youtube anything nowadays, all you need to do is organize yourself and set up time aside for this.

Karol, 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?

Habits Skin Lab is a hidden gem in Miami, our boutique skincare spa caters to all self-care lovers out there.

We focus on holistic skincare, which means we focus on treating the skin from different approaches. Our facials include face tools to help promote circulation, boost collagen and naturally sculpt the skin.

We are mostly known for our amazing Buccal Facial Massage and our Face Cupping Tone & Sculpt Facial. We have a wide range of skincare products we swear by when it comes to treating the skin, we make sure all the ingredients are good for you and provide effective results.

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

Word of mouth is your best friend if you are in the beauty industry. It’s the most effective and least expensive approach when it comes to marketing.

For us, we focused a lot on creating a community. We try to get feedback from our clients and encourage them to spread the word, when you have a good and high quality service, it becomes easy for them to want to give you that referral.

We also have special days to encourage them to bring someone in. For instance, on Thursdays we do BFF DAY, bring your best friend along and both will get 15% off. This helps us reach new clients organically and therefore grow our clientele with people that appreciate our service and look forward to it by coming in with someone that already loves it.

Any advice for managing a team?

Stay true to yourself and be honest with your team. Owning a small business is no easy task. There are good and bad days, and you are only human. Let your team know that it takes a village for your business to work, and that you need them to care and value the business as much as you do, because it is their home too.

Let them know how much you appreciate them, they are as much part of your business as you are. As a small business, you only have budget to hire a few people if any, make sure you value them, train them and listen to their feedback, ideas and concerns, it’s all about building the right team.     

Contact Info:

• Website: https://habitskinlab.com/
• Instagram: @habitskinlab