Detroit small business owners know social media is essential. Showing up every day is the hard part.

Trice Clark makes something every day. She just does not always have her phone set up to record it.

Clark is the founder of Kraftologie, a Detroit creative learning lab where every workshop seat has been filled through social media. Her business is built almost entirely on Instagram. She recently won $100,000 in the Comerica Hatch Detroit Contest by TechTown and is planning to open her first dedicated space in Detroit's District 5. But keeping up with content creation while also running the actual business is the harder part of building a social presence.

"The challenging part is the offline portion," Clark has said. "I make things every day but don't always set up my phone to record, and by the time work is done, the moment has passed."

She is not alone. Across Detroit's small business community, social media has become as necessary as having a storefront, and the gap between knowing that and doing it consistently is where a lot of businesses are stuck.

The owner of Fierce Styles, a Detroit hair and beauty business with just over 80 followers on Instagram, films between appointments, posts before-and-after transformations, and builds a client base one video at a time. "Social media has played a huge role in the growth of my business," she said. "It's allowed me to showcase my work, connect with new clients and build trust before they even sit in my chair."

The stories behind those numbers matter, but so do the numbers. Research into the Detroit small business landscape shows that more than half of local business owners have changed how they operate around major events, using social content and targeted promotions to capture foot traffic. Roughly half of those reported increased sales. Nearly four in five said they plan to repeat the approach.

Detroit has hosted several major national events in recent years, and each one has highlighted the same pattern: the businesses already active on social media captured visitors who were searching for local spots in real time. The businesses that were not visible on those platforms often missed the wave entirely.

Black Tech Saturdays, a Detroit organization working with Black entrepreneurs and professionals, has built a program of workshops, mentorship, and cohort-based training to close that gap. The work is practical: how to tell your story, how to use digital tools, how to make content that reaches new customers. The organization's focus reflects a broader recognition that the skills gap holding back some businesses is not a question of effort or creativity but access to the right training at the right time.

Clark's Kraftologie will add a physical location to what has been a business run almost entirely through social content. Her path from Instagram to a $100,000 prize and a brick-and-mortar space in Detroit is the kind of blueprint a lot of city entrepreneurs are trying to follow. The platform did not build the business for her. But it put her in front of every person who eventually walked through the door.