Rise Above with Alisha Kumar: Women-Owned Online Businesses on SiteGround

We dedicated the month of March to inspiring women entrepreneurs who turned their ideas and passions into full-time businesses. Our Women-owned series features amazing women from various industries, including hand-made pottery, web development and design, and tour photography. And all those powerful females trusted SiteGround to host, build, and grow their websites.

We’re excited to share the story of another one of our customers. Alisha Kumar, founder of thesocialproject.ca – an all-in-one creative agency. As part of our mission to inspire people worldwide through the power of the web, we wanted to share her story so that you can learn from her experience. Let’s dive in.

The Start of The Social Project

From a business aspect, Alisha found a gap in how businesses use social media to achieve their marketing goals. So she took that opportunity and founded her creative agency specializing in helping brands with their marketing efforts through social media to increase brand awareness and sales.

However, The Social Project was inspired by one leading personal question: “How do I break the barriers of being in rooms where nobody else looks like me.” Being in the marketing industry for over 12 years now, Alisha struggled to find a way to stand out in the industry as a woman, and more notably, as a woman of color.  She aspires to change the marketing industry “because it doesn’t look like me at all.”

Your Website is Your Storefront

When people are browsing, you want to be that one website that they stop at. Looking back on her brand identity back in 2017 – being all rose gold with a heart in the logo – Alisha didn’t find it authentic; instead, she felt she was trying to fit in with the current scene. She had to rethink her branding “because I can’t show up for a business that isn’t representative of me.” As a result, she returned to the drawing board and refined her brand into an edgier look that fully embodies her.

Initially, Alisha was hosting her website with another company. However, after the rebrand, her web designer suggested using SiteGround, and after the switch, “I honestly haven’t had a problem at all.”

Tips for Social Media Engagement

Being a social media expert, Alisha remarks that “social media isn’t about you, it’s about your audience.” Listening to your audience, learning what they want to see, and knowing what they want to learn is essential for success. There is a lot of social listening to do.

Social listening refers to monitoring your brand’s social media channels, explicitly tracking mentions of your brand, customer feedback, industry trends, and more. With social listening, you can produce the kind of content that followers want, develop new ideas based on trends, have a better customer experience by interacting with customers directly, and consistently adjust your strategy to best fit their needs.

On Being a Good Leader

Alisha believes that good leaders should be good listeners. They should listen to what their team has to say and contribute to their ideas. Working with a team means you will use the strengths of each member, making the whole better than the individual.

As for being a good leader to your business, Alisha says, “remember why you started.” It’s so easy to get lost in the little things, and businesses should go back to why they started in the first place. Focus on your company’s original mission and what you hope to achieve with it.

Create Your Agency Website

If you have been thinking of starting your own agency, you have to have concrete ideas of what type of services you would provide. Ideas, while important, are not enough. Start a business plan for your new agency, which includes picking a niche, defining a target audience, creating a value proposition, and considering how you’ll earn money. Then you need to go online! Most of all, give your ideas a chance and as Alisha says, “no risk, no story.”

Your branding is influenced by your personality, which in turn influences the tone of your copy, your color scheme, and your fonts. With SiteGround, you can have that complete freedom, coupled with amazing tools to build, host, manage, and launch your successful business website that reflects who you are. Our high-performance platform will make your site load up to 500% faster thanks to our proprietary technologies crafted for top speed and security. We also crafted our own account management software that provides an outstanding user experience, along with superior efficiency when managing one or multiple websites. With the right partner you can take that leap without thinking “what if” down the road.