Whether or not you are an essential business, the economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic has been substantial. Grocery stores and similar businesses are thriving, while gas stations and other auto services are essential and open for business, but have seen business plummet because people are not driving. Caterers used to feeding hundreds at a time are reinventing their business models completely to offer boxed meal and family-sized order services. Sit-down restaurants are making do with take-out and delivery, while missing out on the bigger-ticket dine-in business.
How to Generate Business from Your Core Customer Groups?
Stay Active in Marketing Channels!
The small business instinct has been to pull back on marketing whenever recessions hit, because it is the easiest expense to turn off. This presents an opportunity, though, for companies that can stick with their marketing plan. You can likely grab greater visibility at a lower cost.
You do need to know, during this tight economic period, the impact of each marketing dollar. What is it costing to gain a new or renewed customer? That key metric drives your marketing decisions. With digital marketing, the availability of metrics and the speed with which you can ramp up or scale back programs makes smart spending much more achievable.
How to budget? This doesn’t change during an economic crisis. Let’s say the average value of a typical customer is $500 annually to your organization. If that is a repeating annual value, you can spend up to $500 to acquire that customer without triggering negative cash flow in year 1, with the knowledge that higher margins starting in Year Two earn you profit. Work backwards up through your sales funnel using conversion ratios to arrive at a starting marketing budget. Metrics can help you build this sales funnel logic.
Adapting to Social Distancing as the New Normal
You have likely already embedded strict, safe social distancing and hygiene behavior in your workplace and out in public interacting with customers. Whether or not you think cautions are fully merited, adopt the strictest social behaviors to meet the needs of your most cautious customers. And expect these healthful measures to become a long-term part of your operations.
Office Staff Working In and Out of Office
Who can continue to work at home after the all-clear sounds? Can you split work into home-based and office-based assignments, even for the same employee? With more space needed within stores and offices for both employees and clients to interact (the new Six-Foot Office), striking that balance will be important.
Work With an SEO Agency That Understands our Post-COVID Normal
At KO Websites, we have been migrating to a high percentage of remote work for a couple of years, so riding through the COVID-19 crisis has been bearable, and we understand how to keep the communication flowing to customers virtually, even as we emphasize meeting our Bay Area digital marketing clients in person, which has always been a competitive advantage over typical digital marketing firms. So, we will be conducting in more virtual meetings until clients are comfortable meeting in person once again.
KO Websites is committed to doing whatever we can to help your business grow.
We hope that this information will help you maintain the right forward-thinking mindset as you lead your company through this ever-evolving economic crisis. We also hope it will help you make decisions that protect the health, safety, and welfare of your employees and your customers. Contact us to share your thoughts or ply us with questions!