If your business is shut down fully or partially as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay busy. Use the downtime productively by taking steps to prepare your business for potential growth after the national emergency is over.

If you are a small business owner, you can’t afford to stay home during the crisis even if your doors are temporarily closed. There are still plenty of things you can do to keep in touch with customers, reorganize or restructure your business, or even prepare a complete overhaul of your branding and marketing.

7 Things to Do During Coronavirus Downtime – Here are 7 things to keep you productively busy until the crisis has past and business can return to normal.

1. Conduct a Deep Cleaning of Your Business

Lots of business owners plan someday to give their store, warehouse, or office a complete top to bottom cleaning. Well, that someday has arrived.

Take advantage of having no customers, no employees, and no people in your business to give it the deep cleaning you have always dreamed of doing. You now have plenty of time (and no excuses) to roll up your sleeves and get to work scrubbing, organizing, and preparing your business for its eventual reopening.

Online businesses may not have physical spaces to clean, but owners can still clean out files, reorganize customer lists, and even scroll through all of their old smartphone contacts to find new leads and opportunities.

2. Stop Doing Normal Marketing

If you haven’t done it already, now is the time to stop your routine marketing. You can’t effectively promote sales or look for new prospects if your doors are shuttered. Pause your scheduled Tweets and Facebook posts. They could be confusing or even offensive to readers dealing with life and death issues.

Instead, pivot to crisis-era marketing. For example, if you are in a travel-related industry you can focus on helping people reschedule their plans or get refunds for cancellations of bookings. Look for ways to connect with customers in meaningful, helpful ways. Let people know what you are doing to help.

Because you have more downtime, now is also the time to focus on developing those marketing or branding projects that you have filed away for later.

3. Revisit and Rework Existing Content

Go back and make all the content you have out there already work harder for you. For example, if you have been posting blogs about your business and industry, go back and rewrite them so that they have better SEO optimization.

Change keywords in all of your postings so they attract more Google hits and position those better keywords so they are more attractive to search engines.

You can also recycle old Tweets and Facebook posts by giving them updated art or a quick rewrite. File them away for future use after the crisis is over.

4. Redo Your Marketing Materials

If you have brochures, catalogues, or other materials related to your products or services, now might be a good time to take a fresh look at them – especially if you haven’t updated them in years. This includes both physical and digital marketing materials.

For example, revisit your business description on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Update your LinkedIn bio. Refresh the fact sheet you normally pass out at conventions or trade shows. Use your downtime to make your old marketing materials new and fresh again.

5. 7 Things to Do During Coronavirus Downtime – Revamp Your Website

For any business, keeping your website up and running is literally money in the bank. So, doing anything disruptive like routine maintenance or scheduled updates can be costly during peak business times. But not right now.

Take advantage of this time by doing all the scheduled updates, maintenance, and rewrites to your website that you have planned for the next year. It could even be a great time to rethink your business website altogether so that when customers return in the future, they find a refreshed, reworked, and completely redone website for your business.

6. 7 Things to Do During Coronavirus Downtime – Organize Your Resources

Use the time you have now to do all the time-consuming, boring tasks you (hopefully) won’t have time for late. This includes things like going through all the photos in your phone or on your laptop and organizing them into categories. Or adding descriptive tags to all your blog posts so they can be easily accessed by category.

7.  Rebrand Your Business

For some businesses, a shutdown that lasts weeks or even months can be the end of the line. For others, it can be a time of rebirth and renewal.

Make use of this unexpected opportunity to completely rebrand your business. Develop new approaches for attracting customers. Enlist the help of seasoned experts to position your business for success once the crisis is over. Draw up new strategies for growing your customer base, market share, and even product offerings.

The worst thing you can do for your business during this global health crisis is to do nothing. Use the time productively to support your business, inform your customers, and restructure your brand so that your business can emerge healthier, stronger, and better.