Using GMB to support small businesses through challenging times

In the 70s my parents started a holiday business on the site and built eight cottages, each one named after one of their children. I came back home in 1998 after working in Dublin and decided to start baking, taking courses and helping my mum. I began a tearoom in one of the cottages and it proved to be a really sustainable business model. Now, I run the business with my husband Pascal and we are very popular, particularly with walkers and holidaymakers. We’re known for our locally sourced produce, homemade Irish bread and salads that we grow on site.

My business means friends, family and home to me.

We started using GMB at the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020. At the beginning of COVID, we started a takeaway / ready meal service and GMB was a great way to let people know that we were open for this. We also revamped our website and created an online shop, which we were able to feature on GMB to drive traffic. I also realised that I was able to completely change the ‘look’ of our business by uploading new photos of our food and our tearoom - people buy with their eyes! Finally, I was able to reassure customers by highlighting all the new safety measures we had put in place on site.

Our takeaway / ready meal service became wildly popular and we would sell out in minutes as local customers rang through GMB. We have also had lots of new customers come to buy baked goods, saying they loved our photos on GMB. I have been most surprised by the fact that people have found our family holiday cottage business through our GMB page and it is now completely booked out for July and August.

COVID has been hard but I think that it has perhaps changed us for the better. I want to keep this momentum going and grow our digital footprint even further.

In 2020, we were lucky enough to be part of the ‘Grow With Aldi’ campaign, which meant that two of our bread mixes were stocked in stores nationwide for two weeks. They were such a success however that Aldi asked us to extend to six weeks. Thousands of people from across Ireland were buying the mixes in their local Aldi then finding us on GMB and buying directly from us on our online shop - it was amazing.

We intend to improve on things like Adwords, we have a new website for our cottages and one of our aims is to get our business found very easily.

As a result of using GMB, Sales for Jinny’s Tearoom and Bakery are up approximately 30%.