Amanda Kern shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Hi Amanda, thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us. Let’s get into it: What do you think is misunderstood about your business?
I think people assume SEO and content are just about stuffing keywords into blogs or social posts, when in reality, it’s so much more strategic than that. We’re really into psychology as a company right now. Everything we do starts with understanding human behavior, like what people are searching for, what makes them click, and what makes them trust a brand enough to buy. SEO hasn’t been about gaming an algorithm for a long time. You need credibility and connection, especially with AI-driven search changing everything.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Amanda Kern, founder and CEO of Emerald Content, a moody digital marketing agency based in Columbus, Ohio. We specialize in SEO-first content strategies that help brands get more eyeballs on their business, whether that’s through search, social, or storytelling.
What makes Emerald unique is our blend of data and creativity. We build strategies that connect what people are searching for to what makes a brand genuinely stand out. Our team helps small businesses stay visible in both traditional search and the new wave of AI-generated search (GEO), which is changing how people discover and trust businesses online.
My background as an educator influences everything we do. We’re big on making SEO and marketing understandable for business owners who feel overwhelmed by it. Right now, we’re growing fast, expanding our white-label partnerships with other agencies, and we just opened our new downtown Columbus office.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. Who taught you the most about work?
The principals I worked for as an educator taught me the most about my work as a leader…for better or worse. I had incredible principals who modeled empathy, structure, and calm under pressure, and I had nightmare principals who showed me exactly what kind of leader I NEVER wanted to be. Both experiences shaped how I run my business today. The good ones taught me really important lessons, mainly that leadership is actually service to your team. Leaders lead the charge as far as where an organization is headed because of their expertise, but in the day to day, they are ultimately there to support the people executing that vision. That might look like connecting the team with new resources, problem solving sticky points in existing processes, and most importantly, listening to the team when something isn’t working. Leaders should eat last, meaning good leaders put the team and their interests first before themselves. This is why women make exceptional leaders; in my experience, men don’t think to approach leadership this way, whereas any woman with a family does this basically every day.
Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
There are moments when I think back to how nice it was to clock out at the end of the day and not carry the weight of whether a whole organization succeeded or failed. But giving up is genuinely not in my DNA. I am the most competitive person I know (it’s a blessing and a curse), and once I set my sights on winning at something, I get really locked in. I’ve set my sights on becoming the best marketing agency for small businesses in Columbus. I’m quite literally obsessed with that goal, I live and breathe it every day, and physically don’t think I’m capable of giving up. More importantly, it’s not just about me anymore. My team, my clients, and my family depend on me to succeed and lead them towards abundance, and I’m 110% committed to continuing to make that happen.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
That making beautiful creative is an end goal in and of itself, even at the cost of performance. This approach sucks the life (and money) out of small businesses who don’t know any better, they just know they need help with their website or their brand, and they put their trust into an agency to do that for them. Creative agencies without an interest in how well your project or content performs, the ones who want to build something beautiful and expensive and are completely disinterested in helping you measure KPIs, are to be avoided at all costs for small businesses. The best thing you can do for yourself as a small business owner is to work with a partner who has a vested interest in your data and can lead you through the process of analyzing it and using it to help make decisions about your marketing. This isn’t the era of Mad Men anymore. Marketers in this day and age deserve to be held to a measurable standard.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. If you laid down your name, role, and possessions—what would remain?
A good chunk of my current identity is tied up into my role here at Emerald, but there’s so much more to me. I’m so fortunate to have a loving partner and family and an incredible group of girlfriends. I’m intentionally building my business such that it’s sustainable and I (and my team) can enjoy quality time with the ones we love instead of drowning in work all the time, because that sucks. I love to read and paint and go on adventures to places near and far from Columbus. I’m a spiritual person, and I have my own very personal relationship with whatever lies beyond this reality. If you stripped me of my name, role, and stuff, I’d be left with my circle of loved ones, my skills and knowledge, my memories of traveling the world, and my faith that there are forces we don’t understand in this universe that love me and have helped me find my path.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://emeraldcontent.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emeraldcreativecontent/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-kern-a96ba2224/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571738292594
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@amanda.reads.horror
Image Credits
All images can be credited to Emerald Creative Content.
