Is your business suffering due to the COVID-19 outbreak? Are you looking for ways that you can adapt to the situation, and help to keep your business afloat?
The team from our team is here to share eight ways you can stay ahead of the Coronavirus outbreak in this article.
Here’s a quick summary of the points we will be going over:
- Just in time Lead generation, learn how to find leads and customers ahead of time
- Build a website that is designed and adapted to providing your services during the current situation
- Leveraging online tools to market your solutions with COVID-19 in mind
- Learn how a website can ensure your services will still be relevant post-pandemic
- Create a website that provides solutions to the challenges identified for your business
- Create several scenarios and create planned solutions for them
- Crete alternative delivery solutions to maintain daily operation
- Upgrade tech in a mindful manner in order to keep communication with customers and team members flowing
There will be many businesses unable to adapt the above changes efficiently, and those are the ones that sadly will be lost before the end of the pandemic. But hopefully, these tips provide some extra pointers for those that are able to continue operating.
Finding Leads and Customers Ahead of Time
Many businesses are focusing on the here and now, and struggling to maintain a normal running operation, this could be your opportunity to build a new network of prospective customers. Putting some time and effort into creating a site that is designed to capture leads and provide them to in a way that you can capitalize on that resource either for yourself or by selling that information could lead to a new stream of income. Lead generation as a business is quite lucrative for those who are skilled at setting up the tools needed to capture information and those who are savvy enough to create resources that convince visitors to provide their personal information.
Adapt your website to the current situation
Many parts of the world have the general population advised to stay inside. This has killed most of the traditional foot traffic that businesses with physical locations have enjoyed throughout human history. Now is the time for you to beef up your Digital footprint. More folks are on various social media platforms, the goal should be to get them off of those platforms and to your tuned website, the website needs to be ready to handle the increased traffic, be responsive, and be error-free. Also, it is a good time to evaluate the flow of your website. How easy is it for a new visitor to find and purchase your product or service from your current website? If it is more than 3 or 4 clicks, then you need to evaluate how to get that number down. The same is with the checkout workflow for your site. If it takes too long to get to the payment screen, then you are losing customers. Setting up a solid A/B testing plan will help you slowly optimize the site to provide the best possible results.
Be Mindful of COVID when Marketing Your Solutions
Before you click publish on your next marketing campaign, ask yourself if your product or service could be used in some sort of additional way or could it be seen as more relevant in light of the current pandemic. Then adapt the marketing for this, also keep in mind to not fall astray of any of the platform rules for places like Youtube, Facebook, Linkedin, or other platforms. Having an experienced team that is familiar with those platform rules is critical to keep your accounts safe and in good standing. Once you have that marketing campaign in place, you need to make sure the place you are sending them to can handle the traffic and can engage with the audience. One way we have found to be extremely useful is to leverage Chatbots, or Exit-Intent popups to recapture the attention of a user who is about to leave.
Keep Relevant throughout the Crisis
It is important to keep your products, services, and website relevant during the pandemic, keep an eye on the news and trends, and quickly update content and marketing as needed. This requires having a website and other tools that allow you to easily update and syndicate your changes across various networks. If you have to post across all of your networks, it can become tedious and time-consuming for your team, this can cause strain on your staff resources.
Identify your website's weak points
If you are looking to effectively strategize your online marketing and service efforts, you need to start somewhere, the best place is to create a list of all of the pain points with regards to creating / updating content, processing orders from clients, and syndicating content across various social media platforms. Make a note of the tasks that are repetitive and take the most time, these are things that are prime for automation. Automating as much of the items as you can, this will lead to you saving money and increasing the impact your team can have with limited resources.
Planning for the future
Now that you have a list of challenges and weak points, you can now create a list of solutions to those challenges and a timeline to implement them. It can be hard to predict what will happen in the future but ensuring that you have a plan in place to improve will help you address and adapt to many of the things that can be in our future.
Leverage OpenSource to Reduce costs
Learn about the various open source solutions that you can use to replace existing tools/SaaS subscriptions in order to minimize your tech fees. If you already have your own server, then you are already on the road to having control of all of the tools you need to operate online. There are several replacements available for things like Shopify, Clickfunnels, and InfusionSoft/Salesforce that come with no monthly subscription fee and take just an afternoon or two to implement. If this is something you are interested in and need an OpenSource guru to guide you, contact one of our team members so we can get started on that process with you.
Train your team to use Communication tools
One of the biggest challenges is having team members be unable to quickly and effectively use the numerous communication tools available. To streamline this process take the time to preselect the tools for each situation, and create training videos for the team. Store the videos on a private Facebook group/youtube/ or your own server where they can easily be watched by your team.