Due to the spread of coronavirus, we are all experiencing slow downs in our businesses.

As people pull back from social contact and work from home their thoughts also turn to their families. New business is not top of mind these days and may not be for a while. Social distancing has limited face to face meetings and creative brainstorming sessions in the office. If you’re feeling a bit uninspired and lacking drive, we get it. But, there are some critical marketing tactics you can undertake to maintain contact with your customers.

Fine-tune your business now when you have the time

 If you have extra time on your hands, what can you do now that you haven’t been doing? What can you do to enhance your marketing? There are probably tasks which you’ve put off due to lack of time in the prior hectic months. Now is the time to get that list of “round to its’ out and dust it off and get to work accomplishing a whole array of tasks that will fine tune your customer outreach and improve your top of mind awareness.

Here are a number of projects you can work on now to enhance your marketing and business management.

1. Work on your newsletter. People have more time on their hands right now and have time to  read and respond to your newsletters. If you have not told your clients what you are doing during this time of social distancing to support your staff, your vendors, and your customers your newsletter is a good vehicle for that. Have you changed your opening hours? Cut back on offerings? Changed your menu? Be sure your customers know.
2. Survey the content on your website. When was the last time you reviewed your content with an eye to cleaning it up? How about the last time you reviewed which content was most consumed? Take this time to weed out low-performing content and observe your higher-performing content with an eye toward comprehending how you can replicate success for a related topic. Perhaps you’ve never created the content that you’ve always wanted to create for your website. Now is the time to do the research to find out what people search for when they’re seeking to solve a problem or issue for which your product or service is the perfect solution.
3. Hold a Facebook Live event. Or InstagramTV event or post a video story on either Facebook or Instagram. People are spending more time on Facebook and other social media. Your followers get notification when you go live on Facebook and they might like to see and hear from you and get the news of what’s going on in your company. Since casual contacts at lunch or cocktails are curtailed for now, use the means you have to contact and connect with your clients.
4. Create the YouTube video that you’ve always meant to create. Do you have a longer issue that you want to talk through? Or the solution for your customers most important issues? Create a video that can go on YouTube on your Channel. If you don’t have a channel now is the time to consider how people search for support and assistance on YouTube related to the products and services you sell. 
5. Review your Google analytics data. Do you know what people consume when they visit your website? Do you know what order they go through your pages? How about what is your most important landing page? If you use the tools available to you with Google analytics you will get greater insights as to what content on your website is most helpful to your customers. 
6. Review your search console data. Every website we build is connected to Google search console. Is yours? Within this tool you can find out exactly how people visit your website via search. You can find out what queries they use, what keywords they use, and where you rank for those. Maybe you’ve never taken a look at it before but now is the time to get familiar with it and learn more about this insightful data. 
7. Add e-commerce to your website.  Now that people aren’t going shopping as much, what can you sell or offer on your website that people need and which you can deliver digitally or shop directly to them? In some cases you can simply embed an easy to use PayPal button to sell a single product. Or you might ask us to help you implement WooCommerce.
8. Analyze your non-essential expenditures and cut back. With revenues slowing, it might be important for you to decide what expenditures your business can cut back on. It’s important to save money now.
9. Revise your sales projections. Hopefully every quarter you review your expected income for the next quarter. Because none of us have a magic crystal ball, we can use our insights and our past experience to predict how the current situation may affect us.
10.  Hold regular virtual staff meetings. In the absence of information people make up thoughts. Therefore, regular communication becomes vitally important in these times. Ensure your staff is continually well-informed.There are so many tools to allow you to hold online meetings but have you actually used them? If you have relied on face-to-face meetings to this point in time, now is the time to learn how to use virtual meeting platforms. From Zoom to Google Meet to GoToMeeting to join.me there’s a platform that will work for you. Some are free and some come at minimal cost. Test them out and figure which ones work best for you.

What else have you tried to keep on top of things during the coronavirus pandemic? Share your tactics and tasks so we may  learn from each other.

 

Photo by BRUNO CERVERA on Unsplash