Get To Know AMR's CEO & Founder, Analiese Ross
If you follow AMR Digital Marketing on Instagram or TikTok, then you know Analiese Ross as the bright, bespectacled face that pops up on your feed a couple of times a week to relay social media advice in the catchiest way possible.
Her expertise on all things followers, hashtags, and engagement is in fact unbeatable. She knows every trick to every platform and can ameliorate an un-optimized profile in about a minute.
But the day-to-day reality of her job as the CEO of this company is about much more than being a social media expert. Analiese is juggling the requests of dozens of clients, pouring over analytics, editing content across platforms, checking in with her team, putting out fires, and generally ensuring that AMR is producing the best content out there.
Oh, and by the way, — she’s not even 30 years old!
As a new addition to the team, I was so curious to know how Analiese has managed to execute this impressive and robust business in such little time. So in a throwback to my old life as a reporter, I sat down with her for an interview!
Q: When did you first become interested in social media, and how were you using it?
Analiese: I was a marketing major in college, not from a great passion for marketing. I found it to be pretty dry and not super inspiring. Social media very much existed when I was in college, but we didn’t speak about it once in my entire four years at school as a marketing major.
Everyone was using social media, and businesses were using it also — but it wasn’t something that we talked about at all in my classes.
I started looking for jobs, and at this point, I was really only using social media for personal use. This was in 2016. It was kind of the beginning of the rise of influencer marketing. Bloggers were just starting to discover how they could use social media to really elevate their blog, and how that could become a channel for business in itself.
I found that just fascinating, not necessarily because I had AMR in mind for a business, just because I had no job and no idea what I was going to do with my life.
It looked like (these influencers) all had amazing lives — because everything looks amazing on Instagram — and I found it so fascinating that you could build this life for yourself on Instagram that was, one, so appealing to general people, but also that they were catching the attention of big brands.
Q: So, when did you start AMR?
Analiese: I was doing odd jobs. I started working for this moving company doing manual labor. My parents’ neighbor had a friend who was a professional organizer, so I was like, “OK, why not.”
I was doing that for like six months. One of the people on their team was doing social media, and they quit. The woman who owned the company was like, “Analiese, you’re young. Do you want to do our social media?” At that point, I just used social media for fun, but I was like, “Sure, I’ll do social media, why not?”
I started doing it, and I had all the time in the world on my hands. So I just dove into it. I was thinking about how businesses would pay influencers. So why couldn’t a business be an influencer?
They just needed to post once a day, every day. So I basically took their feed and fully designed it the way we actually design our clients’ feeds now — I planned it all out a month ahead of time. I wanted it to look really consistent and look good.
Then I started doing the growth part. I wanted them to grow because I wanted them to have influence. I wanted them to have a community. This business had been around for six years and they had 300 followers and about 600 posts. So I decided to turn their account into a blog, basically.
I started researching how to grow an account. How do I take this account with 300 followers and turn it into something people want to follow and want to engage with? And I grew the account to 20,000 followers in a year.
My boss started referring me to all these people in Boulder who were asking her about her social media. So basically in that year, I went from doing her social media to having 12 clients here in Boulder that I was working with.
That’s when AMR was born.
Q: When did you know you needed to start hiring employees? Was that tough to maneuver as a new business owner?
Analiese: Yes. My goal at AMR is to help small businesses make as much of an impact as they possibly can. As a small business owner myself, it’s really exciting when you reach that point where you’re like, “Oh wow. I’m super maxed out.” You're always trying to reach that point because there’s always that feeling that you could lose everything tomorrow.
Reaching that point feels like safety. But when you keep going, you get to a point where you start to hurt yourself a little bit. And then you start to hurt your clients. There’s a healthy limit to how much work one person can handle, and I tend to push 50% past that. I learned I needed help when my clients started suffering from it.
The hardest part of hiring is actually the first hire and the first hire for a new role.
Q: What do you think has been the key to AMR’s speedy growth?
Analiese: I wholeheartedly believe that we can grow any brand on social media with the same success we’ve grown AMR. I think it’s a matter of some core tactics that we use and the way that we approach social media, and the way that we’re using it as a tool. That’s a duplicatable process, which is why I feel so confident in our business model.
I hear over and over how different we are, and it comes from me not knowing the norms of traditional advertising.
My idea of growth for AMR is not about working with larger and larger accounts. It’s about working with clients that have a more meaningful impact, that are more likely to go the lengths, so we can go the lengths with them. Not a lot of people play that long game.
No one is putting small businesses on a level playing field. The only place that there is a level playing field is when it comes to purely organic content when there isn’t an ad spend. And this is where small businesses can still win, and make an impact.
AMR has never had a lot of competition. Everyone wants to get these big accounts, and no one really is fighting for the small businesses. No one is out there offering good services for them.
No one wants that to be their niche the way that we do.
Q: What kind of background work is involved in social media that most people wouldn’t know about? What does a typical workday look like for you?
Analiese: The part that most people think about when they think of social media is the content. They know they have to post. The quality of content can range vastly. The place where most people go wrong is they get desperate for sales and try to sell everything in their content.
The more that you try to sell, the more that you turn people off on social media. We see ads all the time. We are constantly being sold to, and if we see businesses try to sell to us on social media, we are immediately going to zone it out and write it off as uncredible.
They have to treat their business almost like a media company. What can they give their audience that will make them want to subscribe?
Let’s say you sell chair massagers. What your audience wants to read about is how de-stressing is going to increase your productivity or tips on how to de-stress at home. They don’t want to hear about a new promotion every day. That’s not going to get them in the store.
You can have amazing, amazing content. But if no one is seeing it, it actually doesn’t matter and it’s a complete waste of your time.
So what we’re doing behind the scenes most days is going out and engaging with new people. You can target based on location, based on complementary businesses. Liking, commenting, targeting those people, so they look at your content. Or you can target based on people’s followings. You can also target with hashtags. We are actively doing that on behalf of our clients every day.
I spend a lot of my day on calls with clients, looking at analytics. All of our content is proofread internally, by at least two sets of eyes. That’s a big part of my job. Plus all billing with our finance team, going over the monthly forecast, and all of AMR’s marketing.
Q: Are you still able to enjoy social media in your personal life? Or does it feel like you’re working?
Analiese: The AMR account always feels like work to me, and it is always work. I have my personal account, and that does feel like a personal account. It’s not aesthetically pretty.
Social media is such an on-all-the-time thing. So you really do have to create separation for yourself in order to enjoy it.
I definitely don’t use it a lot because it is very dominating, working on it. But I find a lot of joy working in it, still.