South Florida Web Design, Brand Management, SEO and Digital Marketing Agency

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.

Many businesses have been closed for weeks. There have been no customers, no sales, and in many communities there’s no end in sight.

Keeping your business running during the COVID-19 global pandemic is probably a moot point at this point. Unless you are in an industry that has been designated an “essential business” – such as a doctor’s office, a grocery store, or even an auto mechanic – you probably are planning for the future rather than focusing on the present.

The problem is that your customers have short attention spans. When business returns to normal in a few weeks or possibly months, inevitably their habits will have changed. Maybe they have turned to other providers for the products or services you offer. Or perhaps they have grown accustomed to doing without altogether, especially in these uncertain economic times.

So, what can you do to keep connected with your customers throughout this downtime and gently remind them that your business exists and serves an essential need in their lives? Here are a few ideas.

In the Midst of Crisis Check in with Customers – Be Empathetic

If you have been avoiding the TV or radio in recent days – and, honestly, who could blame you? – you probably haven’t noticed that advertisers have shifted gears. Gone are the blaring, pushy ads that urge viewers to visit stores or buy products or services.

Instead, the airwaves are filled with gentle, sympathetic commercials that let viewers know that the advertiser understands what their customers are going through and want to help in any way they can. Usually, they end with a statement such as “We’re all in this together” or “When this is all over, we will be stronger”.

It’s time for your business to share a similar message of support and empathy with your customers. Even if your doors are closed and you aren’t planning on offering products or services in the short-term future, you can still build trust bonds with your customers by letting them know that you are thinking of them, that you sympathize with their plight, and that you are even sharing in their pain.

In the Midst of Crisis Check in with Customers – Share Your Actions

People want good news right now. In fact, they need it. With the news filled with stories about illness, death, and an uncertain future, most people simply want to be reassured that everything eventually is going to be all right. And that in the meantime, the community is rallying together to take care of each other

Right now, it’s a good idea to get on social media and share accounts of what you are doing to help people – either your employees or people in the community, or both:

• Have you allowed your people to work from home?
• Did you break into your “rainy day fund” to offer financial support for workers who have been furloughed?
• Are you helping people you have had to lay off to find local resources where they can file for unemployment, get needed food and supplies, and seek health care if they need it?
• Have you donated much-needed supplies such as masks or gloves to health care workers on the front line of the battle?

It’s important to help your employees and people in your community, but it’s equally critical that you let people know what you are doing.

Informing your customer that you are helping people during this crisis reinforces your reputation as a positive influence in your community. And it offers a glimmer of hope and good news that people are so desperately seeking.

In the Midst of Crisis Check in with Customers -Be Available

Finally, your customers are going to have questions: When will you reopen? Can they still get your products or services now even on a limited basis? Do you have a timetable to return to normal operations?

If you have sent everybody home, there’s probably nobody left to answer the phone. Yet the worst thing that can happen to a business that is struggling to stay relevant is to be completely inaccessible to its customers. An unanswered phone or answering machine sends the wrong message to people actively seeking to connect with your business.

If you can’t go into the office, forward the phones to your home or your smartphone so you can take whatever calls are still coming in. Divert online text messages and emails to your personal accounts so you can instantly respond to inquiries. Visit your social media sites such as your business’s Facebook page or Instagram account frequently – at least a couple of times per day — so you can personally respond to postings quickly.

This crisis won’t last forever. Eventually life will return to normal. Your job as a business owner right now is to keep engaging with your customers so they remain loyal to your business.

The coronavirus crisis has profoundly affected businesses worldwide. From the smallest one-person digital startup to the biggest corporations in the world, business leaders right now are making make-or-break decisions to ensure their survival.

In many places, businesses are shut down by government order. Even those that remain open are dealing with the fallout from the crisis. People are starting to realize that the global effects of coronavirus are long-term, not short-term. Many have stopped buying things they don’t need and instead are panic-buying essentials like canned food, toilet paper, and medicine.

At this point, serious questions need to be considered by business owners:

• Can you afford to wait out the crisis even if it lasts two months or longer with dramatically reduced income?
• Should you continue to pay vendors, landlords, and bank loans or risk having your credit damaged through late payments or even defaults?
• What can you do to protect your employees while still making smart decision for your business?
• How can you effectively market your business in a global environment of anxiety, despair, and panic?

These are serious questions for serious times. And the answers you come up with are bound to affect your business for years to come.

Future Outlook

In times of crisis, business owners need to face the hard numbers:

• How much cash do they have on hand?
• How much income can they realistically expect?
• How long can they hold off creditors?
• What are their anticipated expenses and what can be cut?

Running the numbers offers a sober reality about how long you can expect to keep your business running.

The first thing many business owners need to do is to learn more about their options for maintaining their cash flow. Contact your bank, your landlord, and your loan manager to discuss options for temporarily suspending payments.

Look into what government programs are available to ease the pain of the COVID-19 drop off. In the US, lawmakers recently approved a $2 Trillion aid package that includes billions for low- or no-interest small business loans. Make sure you are the first in line for any aid for which your business qualifies.

If you do have cash on hand or other capital, consider stocking up on necessary items or investing while prices are still low. Sooner or later the market is going to rise and when it does, prices will too. If you can get ahead of the curve now, it might be a smart business decision.

COVID-19 – The Employee Dilemma

All business owners want to take care of their employees. But if there is no income, it’s difficult if not impossible to keep paying people.

The best thing you can do right now is to have a plan and communicate it to your workers as best you can.

If you haven’t already allowed people to work from home and it doesn’t disrupt the flow of your business, do it now. Protecting people’s health by limiting their exposure to each other and the virus must be your top priority.

If people must come into work, implement a plan to regularly clean and disinfect any surface people might touch. Allocate latex gloves, face masks, and any other personal protective equipment that you can get our hands on. Enforce social distancing recommendations.

Be transparent about what you are doing to protect people’s jobs. Your workers will be loyal to your business if they know you are doing everything in your power to take care of them.

If you must lay off workers, make sure to stay in touch with them regularly and provide updates on when they can expect to return to work. If you can afford to keep paying them, if only for a short time, the goodwill may be a good investment in your business’s future.

Make available information about unemployment benefits, food distribution, and other government and charitable aid that can help them get through until they can come back to work. And be human: Check in regularly with your people often to see how they are doing.

COVID-19 – Marketing Choices

Thanks to social distancing, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are enjoying some of their highest traffic volumes ever. But their ad revenues are shrinking because companies don’t want to advertise products people aren’t buying right now.

Spend your marketing dollars wisely. Rather than buying expensive ads, shift your focus to things like email blasts to customers that inform them what your business is doing to help the community. Stay active on social media, providing updates about things like business hour changes, store closures, and product availability.

Take steps to make your business as accessible as possible to customers, even if you have to shut down temporarily.

A lot of Main Street small businesses that have shut down have posted signs in their windows informing customers that they are closed but don’t offer any way of contacting them to find out when they are reopening. Get your phone number email address, and social media contacts out there so you can continue to interact with people.

Serve Your Community

Finally, do everything you can to take care of the people in your community, even if it doesn’t directly benefit your business’s bottom line. Crisis like this are a test of people’s character. So the choices you make now will affect the way people see you and your business once all of this is over.

Remember, for many people this literally is a fight for survival. We are all in this together. Be a good citizen, make the best decisions for people, and serve your community first. Be a good person and the rewards will follow later.