Without wanting to sound like an alarmist, the current pandemic has forced businesses to depend more than ever on a digital strategy. Overnight, the offline channels of live-events, conferences, trade fairs, and face to face interactions disappeared. The solution to the enormous challenge of social distancing is to mitigate this loss.
In the coming months, your clients will be less open to letting you walk into their offices or shake hands. No one knows how long this will last for, or the subsequent long-term changes that Covid-19 will bring in the way companies work and market themselves.
At the same time, it has become the reason for the huge leap in business strategies. The panic mode has set entrepreneurs thinking on the lines of digital strategies to survive the current situation, attract new customers and stay relevant to the existing ones.
Going digital is certainly the key to keeping your business alive. How early you make a move to meet the crisis is precisely the deciding factor for those who will scale the business when this ends.
Here are the top 7 ways that will help you scale your business post-COVID-19:
Although your customers and audience may be spending less, they are still spending. This means, instead of risking their pennies, they want to buy from businesses they trust.
The 7 ways you can prepare your marketing activities to scale your business during and beyond the Coronavirus pandemic are:
- Retain existing customers
- Forge a price increase
- Building visibility in front of potential clients
- Touch base with your clients proactively
- Customer support is the new marketing
- Analyze and measure
- Test, learn and tweak
Let’s learn about each of these strategies in detail.
#1. Retain the existing customers – The adage goes “out of sight means out of mind”. If you do not touch base with your customers, you risk losing them. Also, it is 5 times cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, as per Invespcro.
Marketing automation helps you stay in touch with your users at scale. Stay away from spamming them with cold emails or broadcasting promotional messages. Rather, send contextual and personalized messages to those who want to hear from you.
Deliver a creative and thoughtful marketing campaign to boost your ROI. Doing this systematically frees up your time and resources.
Think of using content as a means for a tactical digital marketing campaign, to retain existing customers. Share the innovations the pandemic led you to bring out. Promote what differentiates you from the competitors and the new clients you won.
Share case studies of how your product helped customers increase their business or productivity.
Don’t miss out on engaging with your audience on social media. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are some of the platforms where your audience is reviewing your business, talking about the purchase experience and exchanging their views. Use social media management tools such as SocialPilot to learn more about the market and what your customers are saying about your brand.
Takeaway – Your messaging has to be valuable and appropriate. Ditch advertising about your business or being salesy.
#2. Forgo Price Increase - The way you deal with customers in the current humanitarian crisis is going to last forever in their memories. Quickbooks, an accounting software made an impactful move by postponing payroll subscription changes to help with the cash flow and shared it with their customers via email.
Even if you are high in the demand product line in the current situation, consider delaying the price hike until the situation improves. This is the time to serve the community, not take advantage of the situation.
Takeaway: Plan a price hike strategy for the good times that should benefit the community, employees, customers, and the company. Map out customer preferences to add value to the product to back for the increased prices once everything is back to normal.
#3. Building visibility in front of potential clients - With social distancing and staying home becoming the new normal, people are spending more time online than ever before. Surprisingly the paid ads have become cheaper, and they are producing 71% more ROI than before.
Along with paid advertising, virtual events have helped businesses increase their visibility.
Necker’s Toyland, a toy store in the industry since 1984, in Connecticut, came up with the concept of virtual store round for kids to choose their preferred toys and free delivery and curbside pickup too.
Takeaway: Whether you are using paid marketing or leveraging organic channels of advertising, communicate your message with empathy to connect with the readers.
#4. Touch base with your clients proactively - The uncertainties of the current crisis have made it imperative to stay connected with your clients proactively. The working styles have undergone a massive transformation; the economy is shaken and the clients need to be updated about the every minute change for an unshakable bond.
While emails and calls are the handy means to convey important messages, you can resort to updating information on your website through banners.
Unpredictable being the new norm, flexibility with your availability can build a lasting impression with your clients. Update your working hours, opening and closing times across all the online platforms to keep customers informed about the changes.
Google came up with a complete guide to help businesses update their information conveniently:
Source:
Takeaway: Create a “resource hub” on your website or social media that can act as a one-stop-solution for an audience looking for regular industry updates. You can either create the content yourself or curate the available information.
#5. Customer support is the new marketing - Customer support reps are rapidly adapting to the constantly changing customer scenarios since the impact of Covid-19.
The customer support tickets have been the highest during these times, which has allowed businesses to delight the customers by offering outstanding customer experience. Average weekly tickets have gone up by 24% as compared to 2019.
Train your support executives to practice empathy when dealing with customers as someone who would have reached out might be impacted by the situation personally.
You can’t leave any opportunity of telling the customers how you are there to help them and others in need by personalizing your customer support.
Apparel brand Alala uses SMS marketing to get in touch with their customers to communicate and engage with them immediately. JookSMS helps you automate your SMS marketing to ease off some burden from the support and marketing teams.
Takeaway: Offering cross-platform support on live chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, calls, video calling and social media is a good way to exceed customer expectations in the current scenario.
#6. Analyze and Measure - While being creative and innovative is the key, it is equally important to keep track of what is working for you. Analyze the customer response to your content, support experience, communication strategies, and use these analytics to alter your strategies.
Use Google analytics, and your social media ROI to understand what is keeping you afloat in the market. Instead of assuming what your customers want, use an online form builder such as 123FormBuilder to receive their perspective on your business and analyze your offerings.
Takeaway: Conversion Rate Optimization helps to identify the minutest changes that can prove to be the game-changer for you.
#7. Test, learn, tweak - While few things might work for everyone, most of the process is unique to every business.
Try new strategies, analyze the results, and implement the changes to come up with a tailor-made approach for your business. Keep a keen eye on the latest government updates on the new policies and tweak your strategies accordingly. You can even seek inputs from customer behavior on social media to understand their preferences and offer them customized services.
Takeaway: The market being fluid doesn’t give you much time to adjust your strategies. The need of the hour is the speed to market at a scale never witnessed before. It’s time to make quick decisions, quick experiments, and if something fails, move on!
The challenges that followed Covid-19 have raised the bar for every business. Digital marketing is no more an emergency fit-in. It carries a long-term value even as the world gets back to functioning normally.
These digital marketing strategies will make your business more resilient to deal with the pandemic and beyond.