Marketing pro launches ‘Ask the Latina’ mentoring app with free coaching from Verizon

When Terry Beltrán was a student at Michigan State University, she remembers being the only Latina in her industrial engineering program. In difficult moments, she felt she could have benefited from more support. “I always look back and think, had I had a role model that looked like me, it would have made a difference,” Beltrán says.

Today, Beltrán, who lives in the greater Detroit area, is an entrepreneur with decades of success under her belt. In addition to holding marketing roles at several major Fortune 500 companies, she also launched two businesses as a solopreneur. Vista Latinos helps brands target Hispanic audiences; Beltrán Media provides marketing expertise to Hispanic-owned small businesses.

To help the next generation, Beltrán decided to create a mentorship app called Ask the Latina, which connects Latina professionals to Latina students hoping to start careers in STEM and finance. As Beltrán points out, Latinas are underrepresented in those fields. “I felt like that needed to change,” she says. And although Beltrán runs two thriving media and marketing companies, she turned to Verizon Small Business Digital Ready to gain valuable skills she needed to create the app.

The most impactful aspect of the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready program, Beltrán says, was that it connected her to an “awesome” engineering mentor, who helped her figure out how to price the app and sort through proposals from developers. “[My] mentor was already part of building apps as an engineer—it was like a perfect match,” she explains. Beltrán was early in the app process, working on wireframes, which are like blueprints for an app. By working with her mentor, Beltrán was able to bring the app to reality—called minimal viable product in the field—and reduce the development costs by 25%, she says.

A one-on-one session with a Verizon Small Business Digital Ready finance expert also helped Beltrán realize that launching the Ask the Latina app would necessarily be different from her other ventures. Her businesses are service-oriented, and after the finance session, Beltrán realized, “This was a totally different area … I’m going in and developing a product this time, not a service.” A financial structures course helped her create a new business model for the app.

Through additional self-paced and live courses, Beltrán learned to hone her social media strategy, including using social media to target mentors and younger mentees. She says she increased followers on one social media site by 50%, hired a social media content creator, and redesigned her website to include Ask the Latina under her umbrella brand.

Indeed, Beltrán found that even with her experience and record of success, Verizon Small Business Digital Ready offered new learnings – and ones she was able to apply to all three of her current ventures. “I think that the nice thing about Verizon Small Business Digital Ready, is it’s actually great for anybody in any stage of their career, any stage of their business, whether they’re startup or further down the line,” Beltrán says, “because I find that there’s something in there for no matter what stage you’re in."

Verizon Small Business Digital Ready is part of Verizon’s goal to support 1 million small businesses by 2030 with the resources to thrive in the digital economy. Visit CitizenVerizon.com to learn more about the company’s responsible business efforts. To sign up for Verizon Small Business Digital Ready, visit digitalready.verizonwireless.com. An individual user's experience may vary and results are not guaranteed.