Halfway through 2020, the world is still in turmoil as we continue to deal with the fallout from the ongoing pandemic. Slowly, bit by bit, we’re trying to get our lives back to normal — at least in some respects.
Throughout the lockdowns, online shopping has seen a surge as customers try to stay out of brick and mortar stores. Whether you already provided services and products through an online portal prior to the pandemic, or whether you’re turning to online marketplaces in order to keep
your business afloat during this time, there are ways even now that you can start to prepare your business for growth, post-coronavirus.
Here are four tips that will help you to give your company a boost, as we wade through troubled waters.
Leverage Your Marketing
Marketing is always an important part of what makes a business grow. But there’s more to it than just letting your customers know that you have a new product for offer, or that there’s a sale going on. Good marketing keeps a finger on the pulse of the target audience, recognizing what their major concerns are, and addressing them.
This is ideal in two areas:
● A personal standpoint. Your business needs to take responsibility for what they offer and
how they make it available.
A more general standpoint. Good marketing acknowledges world conditions, recent
occurrences, and upcoming events. An example of this, in these days, would be acknowledging the need to stay as safe as possible, and then highlighting your company’s focus on customer safety. These are great points to include in marketing messages because online shopping is already the method of choice in a world undoing a pandemic and observing social distancing guidelines.
To do: Include safety messages in your marketing, both on your website and off, and make sure
you communicate to your customers that their safety is important to your business.
Consider Rebranding
Your branding reflects the personality of your company. As time goes on, goals change, and your company moves forward, that personality may change somewhat. It can also change in response to world events.
This means that the recent pandemic may have altered your company’s focus, goals, mission statement, and communication style to some degree. If that’s the case, you may want to consider rebranding in order to adjust what your company presents to your audience. Remember, how you brand influences how your audience responds to you and often changes their level of engagement.
So adjusting your branding to reflect your concern for your customers in these difficult times can actually deepen their engagement and heighten their interest. It can also reflect your company’s expanded online services. You probably don’t need an extensive rebrand, or a complete overhaul. But updating certain parts of your branding, like getting a business logo redesigned, is a good way to acknowledge the way things have changed, and reassure your customers that your company is keeping up with events.
To do: Think about updating, altering, or creating specialized versions of branding elements
such as:
● Company logo
● Website pages, perhaps including extra information or visual elements
● Email blasts
● Social media platforms
Focus On Customer Service
Even before the lockdown started, poor customer service was a big problem for companies. Some data indicates that companies in the United States lose as much as 62 billion dollars every year because their customer service isn’t up to par. So hopefully your company was already aware of how important this is. But now that the world has gone crazy, good customer service is more important than ever to make sure that you retain your customers. The world of online shopping is seeing more and more competition. If your company isn’t responsive, friendly, professional, and willing to go the extra mile, you could easily lose your target audience to your competitors.
To do: Put more time, effort, and money as needed into your customer service. Conduct surveys on customer satisfaction to get feedback, and send follow-up emails. Make sure to interact with customers as much as possible, and if they reach out, respond ASAP. Streamline purchases and returns.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
There are billions of internet users worldwide, spending trillions of hours using the web. For the past few years, the amount of internet traffic that is conducted on mobile devices has accounted for about half of those hours. In other words, about fifty percent of your potential customers are looking at your website on their phone.
This really highlights the importance of making sure that your website is mobile-friendly, and responsive to different technology platforms. Viewing a non-responsive site on a smartphone is frustrating, and accounts for a significant portion of the high bounce rates that some sites see.
Surprisingly, however, a fairly low percentage of company sites are actually optimized for mobile use.
If you want to continue to see growth in your numbers and your business skyrocket as we emerge from lockdown, adjusting your site to make it responsive is one of the best things you can do. Regardless of what’s going on in the world, people aren’t about to stop shopping. And increasingly, in larger numbers, they are turning to online shopping options. This is the time to make sure that your site is ready to go, because as the pandemic slows down, business is about to speed up.
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Michelle Richards loves to chew on words, graphic design and bubble gum. Her writing reflect
all this combination – practical, aesthetical, and fun. She also likes to explore technical topics
such as web development, and gadget reviews.
