EAST Students Lead Marketing Efforts for Small Businesses

Last Updated:1/2/2025

Student Contributors Emma Kelley and Katelynn Reed collaborated to tell the story of how struggling local businesses in Paragould reached out to EAST students to help bring in customers.



Social media is a growing industry and has become crucial in promoting businesses. While social media may seem like an easy thing to some, for small businesses, social media can be hard to grasp, especially when small business owners have to switch gears and learn to think in terms of graphics, posing correctly, posting for the right audience, and encouraging engagement.

Some small businesses in downtown Paragould have noticed how much social media influences sales, so two local small business owners, Susie and Nate Archibald, decided to bring their social media problems to EAST at Paragould High School.  

In coming to this EAST program, the Archibalds said they “feel like downtown businesses are dying.” This is obviously a big problem for a smaller town like Paragould because small businesses are the heart of a small town. 

Susie owns Applicious, which she started about five years ago. Applicious specializes in gourmet apples and chocolate treats. They also offer 16 flavors of scooped ice cream, freshly squeezed lemonade and craft coffees.

Susie said that creating Applelicious was an “accident.” Originally, Susie created her business inside of her home because one random day, she started craving a caramel apple. So, she started making them to sell to friends, and from there her business grew. 

After about three years in business, Susie decided to begin adding other treats to her menu, which then led her to realize working out of her kitchen wasn’t cutting it anymore. “It was never in my plans to do something like this,” Susie said. “I was blessed to find my cute little building at the perfect time and here we are today!” 

Nate owns Cultured Man, also located in downtown Paragould,  and states that he started his business because there were no places for men to shop in our small town. He opened Cultured Man three years ago.

Big companies know how to get information out to the right people at the right time while smaller companies struggle to figure out who their audience is and how to get information to them. However, according to Susie, it is often more challenging for small businesses to stay ahead on social media.

“Social media is the future of business success,” Susie said. “I am in no way tech savvy and definitely could use help on learning how to navigate the world of social media, which has become the number one way to promote businesses these days”. 

After noticing that Cultured Man’s social media was lacking and that it could be affecting their business’ success, Nate connected through Facebook with Paragould High School’s EAST facilitator.

For Nate, learning from the EAST students how to be consistent with his social media presence was important. “Social media drives business, either to the store or the website. Consistency is by far my weakest thing.” 

After Nate had contacted the EAST program, students Emma Watson and Jaylee Reed reached out to Susie to see if she had any interest in learning more about social media.  After getting in touch with Susie and Nate, these EAST students sat down and took all of this into consideration while observing social media accounts. 

They compared the small businesses’ social media accounts to the bigger companies' social media and came up with the most lacking attributes of the smaller businesses’ social media.  They turned all of this information into a multi-day training for these two small businesses. They then realized that they could take this training to multiple small businesses and specialize the training to each business. 

With this realization, and because Paragould EAST believes every business has its own story and needs a successful social media presence, the students headed downtown to visit some other businesses to offer the training. 


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