Strategic Consulting Agency. Fort Lauderdale Web Design, Branding, Digital Ad Marketing Agency, CRM Software

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.

After the COVID-19 global pandemic is over, businesses will be judged by what actions they took in the time of crisis to help other people.

Did they take care of their employees who were suddenly left without a regular income? Did they contribute to the welfare of their customers who were filled with anxiety and uncertainty? Did they give back to their community, especially the first responders, medical professionals, and others on the front lines of the crisis?

The actions you as a business owner take now will likely determine whether your business makes it or not after the crisis is over. A national emergency is a test of character for individuals and organizations alike.

It also offers you a rare opportunity to step up and do something heroic.

Fight for Survival

People’s instinctive, natural first response to any type of danger is to hide and wait until it is passed. During this crisis, this may be acceptable and even recommended for individuals, but not for small business owners.

Instead, people who own their own businesses find themselves in a fight for survival. Nobody could have anticipated that the coronavirus crisis was going to essentially shut down most non-essential businesses for an extended, undetermined amount of time. Even if you had known, would it have been possible to take steps to do anything to keep your business going? Probably not.

Instead, business owners are now charged with finding long-term solutions to what hopefully will be a short-term shut down. Here are a couple of suggestions.

Be an Essential Business

In California, New York, Illinois, and other places hit hardest by the virus, officials have ordered that any non-essential business be shut down until the crisis has passed. For the owners of these businesses, this likely will be disastrous. Most small business owners don’t have the capital to keep going with little or no income for even a few weeks, let alone an open-ended period that possibly could last months.

That’s why it’s important that you get your business declared an essential business by any means necessary. Right now, there is no clear definition and much confusion about what does and does not constitute an essential business. Governments have never had to make these determinations before. And there is no consistency from one jurisdiction to the next.

In Pennsylvania, for example, all liquor stores were ordered closed by the state governor. But in Illinois, they remain open. In some states were cannabis has been legalized, dispensaries were ordered closed. But in others, recreational marijuana is considered an essential business.

Where there is confusion lies opportunity. Get on the phone with whoever the decision maker is and explain why your business is essential. Call your attorney and ask what suggestions they have. Contact competitors and bond together to save your industry. Find out if similar businesses are remaining open in other states or jurisdictions and use that as justification for keeping yours open.

Staying in business even with limited sales and possibly no staff is better than closing your business altogether because you may never be able to reopen.

Publicize Your Actions

News organizations always have huge news holes to fill. But since the COVID-19 crisis began, there has been a profound lack of good news to report. So news outlets are desperate for something, anything, that is positive.

Newspapers, TV station, even national news organizations see it as part of their mission to their viewers and readers hope. They literally need news to balance out all the bad news. So, give it to them.

The first step is figuring out what you can do to help your community.:

• Can you afford to keep paying your employees even for a few weeks?
• Do you have supplies you can contribute to medical caregivers such as masks or equipment?
• Can you temporarily retool your production line to accommodate the most urgent needs?
• Can you coordinate volunteers to sew masks or deliver food to people trapped in quarantine?

Do something, anything that will help people. Then tell people about it.

Nobody is going to criticize you for helping other people. In fact, it will frame your business as heroic in a time of crisis. Not only will this help your community in the short run, but it will improve your business’s reputation and possibly help you survive in the long run.

Pay Attention to Recovery Programs

Finally, local, state and federal governments are scrambling to find ways to rescue the economy. This likely will take the form of direct payments to taxpayers, bailouts to big industries like airlines or banks, and low-interest or interest-free loans to small businesses.

This type of funding likely will be critical to saving your business. So, it’s imperative that you pay attention to what’s available and be the first in line for what you qualify for.

There won’t be a never-ending flow of free money. It almost certainly will be short-lived and on a first-come, first-served basis. So be diligent and take advantage of what is available.

For small businesses, the coming weeks and months are going to be a fight for survival. The steps you take now will determine whether or not your business is going to make it.

All across America, many businesses are temporarily closed. For small business owners, the challenge today is maintaining their connections with their customers even if they don’t have products or services they can offer currently or in the short-term future.

It is imperative that businesses continue to communicate with their customers throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Although nobody knows when life will return to normal, eventually it will. And when it does, you want to make sure people still feel connected to your business.

Digital Marketing

One benefit of the coronavirus crisis is that many businesses have a captive audience. Most people are stuck at home. And for the time being, at least, they have little else to do but look at their social media, read their emails, and scroll through their text messages.

That creates the ideal opportunity for small businesses to remind their customers that they exist. If you are still offering products and services – even if it is in a modified form – tell people about it.

Many retail businesses including restaurants and even bars have pivoted to pickup and delivery as a way of keeping their cash flow alive. But people aren’t going to order from you if they don’t know you are open.

And if you are temporarily shuttered, it’s still valuable to keep communicating with your customers.

Most small businesses need to be communicating with both existing and potential customers on a daily or near-daily basis through Facebook posts, Instagram stories, Twitter Tweets, emails blasts, text strings, and any other digital marketing opportunity that exists.

Have Something to Say

Before the crisis, you probably used your digital marketing platforms to let customers know about offers and promotions, special pricing, sales items, and other information.

For many small businesses today, however, this information is no longer relevant. For the next few weeks, instead you need to come up with something else to say about your business.

One of the best things you can do is to let people know what you are doing to contribute to the fight against the virus.

• Have you made contributions of supplies or equipment to local hospitals or medical centers?
• Are you continuing to pay your employees?
• Have you volunteered your services to local government or relief efforst?
• Are you volunteering at a local food bank or making cash contributions to the Red Cross or other charities?

All of these things will have the dual benefit of creating a point of contact with your customers while simultaneously letting people know that you genuinely care about your community and are engaged with the efforts to help people affected by the crisis.

Remaining Actively Engaged

Another type of information you can promote through digital marketing is what you are doing while your business is closed. Are you bringing some employees back to do deep cleaning? Are you reorganizing your inventory? Are you drawing up plans for reopening?

Let people know what you are doing during the crisis. Parcel the information out so you have something to communicate daily. Look for new opportunities to share news and information that people can use.

Try to find ways to remain relevant to both your customers and the community at large so when things do return to normal people will feel as if you never went away.

Blog Posts and eBooks

If you haven’t already started a blog for your business, now might be a good time to start. Blogs are a fast, easy and affordable way to provide high-value content, something that is especially important to people who are temporarily trapped indoors and don’t have a lot else to do.

eBooks are another way to keep your business relevant. They are brief yet informative books containing relevant information about your business or topics related to your industry that can be distributed for free or given away as a way of drawing in new leads. And once they are written, you can use them again and again to build your business’s credibility and boost its reputation.

However you do it, it’s important that you keep giving your customers something that reminds them that your business exists. Sooner or later this crisis will end. And when it does, continual communication will help ease the seamless transition from crisis to normalcy.