Fayetteville native Michael Aazam, a freshman at  UNC Chapel Hill studying business administration with a focus in marketing, is already leveraging real-world experience that many marketing majors don’t gain until. This summer, he’ll be returning home to formalize a project that he first started working on as a junior in high school. 

When his parents opened Fayetteville Wholesalers off of Bragg Boulevard, Aazam took the lead in managing the business’s social media presence. From there, he found a passion for utilizing social media to help other local small businesses drum up new customers via online exposure. 

“I founded ‘Michael Markets Fayetteville’after identifying a critical economic hurdle in our city: the ‘awareness gap.’ In a high-turnover military market, local boutiques and restaurants are losing out to national chains not because of product quality, but because of a lack of sophisticated digital marketing,” shared Aazam. 

To date, Aazam has produced pro-bono promotional work for 70+ local entities to prove that high-level storytelling can drive local foot traffic. 

This summer, Aazam is transitioning the project into a professional marketing agency specifically designed to help Fayetteville’s “mom-and-pop” staples compete with big-box budgets.

Instead of doing a single video for dozens of businesses, he plans to structure his work more like a small agency, managing ongoing social media for a select group of clients. This summer, beginning in June, his goal is to run about five full accounts on a three-month plan, focusing on strategy, content and growth over time rather than quick-hit exposure.

“I’ve worked with a ton of clients, but you really can’t do too much when you’re making one or two videos,” he explained. The new model is designed to let him test how far he can take a business’s digital presence with more time and focus. 

Aazam is currently finalizing his marketing and pricing plan and intends to start by reaching out to businesses he has already worked with, offering a more comprehensive engagement for the summer.

Aazam’s core product is short-form video – Instagram Reels and TikToks – which he views as the most effective way for small, local brands to reach a broad audience. 

“My long-term goal is, hopefully, with these accounts that I grow, I can really build the experience that I need…and then after that, seeing how far that goes, if this is a successful summer, there’s really no reason why I can’t integrate it into a hybrid [model]. I could come down once a month over college, record and then edit there so I can continue the business. Then, after that, [I] could really turn it into [an] agency. I mean, Fayetteville is a perfect place to run your own ad agency or social media agency. There’s a huge opportunity for that,” shared Aazam. 

Aazam is skilled at helping businesses build brand recognition and establish a stronger identity that is easily recognizable to clients the first time they enter the door.

“A question I get a lot is ‘How do you walk into a business and make them a video, even though it's sometimes your first time going there?’ It comes down to the brand itself. It's a vision in the consumer's mind. And I would tell you that actually walking in there the first time is sometimes even better for me, because I am unbiased and completely just aware of what it looks like from the consumer perspective,” remarked Aazam.

“The biggest thing I look for is: what catches my eye when I open the door? When I open up the menu, what catches my eye? I ask them, what's their biggest menu item? What is their biggest seller? A lot of what the brand conveys will be shown when you go in person. You don't have to do too much digging. And if you do have to do a lot of digging, that often is a problem…A lot of business owners understand brands, but it's sometimes subconscious, where you have to bring it out of them a little bit and say, ‘This is the biggest point. This is what catches my eye.’ So it's a little bit of having that vision, but also understanding that business owners will tell it to you,” added Aazam. 

By offering short-form video marketing and account management tailored to local needs, Aazam aims to demonstrate that a young entrepreneur with a focused strategy can help reshape how Fayetteville’s small businesses show up online.