The impact COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown has had on businesses and families across the globe has been immeasurable.
Many businesses have had to make desperate sacrifices and cutbacks to keep themselves afloat. With further potential threats on the horizon, the UK economy is battening down the hatches and preparing for an extended period of hardship.
However, as some businesses start to re-open, restaurants in operation again and with some lockdown rules being lifted, many businesses across the UK are looking to recover.
Creative, innovative and efficient marketing strategies and tactics will be the key to helping your business recovery post lockdown.
Protect Your Stakeholders
First and foremost, protect your employees, customers and all other stakeholders by ensuring you adhere to local guidelines around COVID.
Safety and good health are paramount to every business so encouraging adherence is key. This includes mental health too.
Many have struggled not only with being stuck inside for the past 4 months but also with the anxiety of contracting coronavirus. If you can, seek professional advice to help with creating a focus on wellness and mental health within your business.
Focus On Your Current Customers
Businesses must focus on their current customer base. Not only more efficient and cost effective than targeting new prospects, your current customer base will begin to require your products or services again as things return to relative "normality".
Getting in touch with your current or previous customers, letting them know you are operational again with maybe new offers or products, can quickly provide a boost that your business may need.
Email marketing is a great tool to directly contact your customer base whilst also being cost effective and relatively low effort.
Alternatively, you can reach out through social media and engage with your fans and followers. Another cost effective and relatively direct form of marketing that can help drum up extra business quickly.
Focus On Your Best Performing Channel
It is very easy for businesses to send their messages out through every channel because it is free and a quick copy and paste job for each.
Not only can you give the wrong perception of your business to your audience but you could be wasting time and resource by focussing on the wrong channels.
Find the channels that give you the biggest bang for your buck. If your Instagram channel drives the most leads or biggest sales numbers, thats where you should focus your time. Alternatively, if you haven't made any leads or sales from Instagram for years, you may need to reconsider why you are even on that platform.
Use your analytics or channel reports to identify your most effective channels and focus your spend, time or resource on the highest performing. Many businesses throughout the COVID lockdown have hired freelancers or agencies to look after their channels. This may keep the cost down in the short term, if businesses cannot afford to un-furlough workers at this time.
Little Wins
For many small businesses, COVID lockdown has proved incredibly hard. Many having to make redundancies or worse, close down completely.
It is important to celebrate the little wins in times such as this. This may include encouraging more followers to subscribe to your email newsletters, to offer smaller contracts to other businesses where this previously was not an option or even promoting any charitable actions you have undertaken during lockdown.
Set yourself small targets and celebrate when you achieve them. Creating an encouraging environment within your workplace is another great tool for growth.
Get Creative If You Can
Attract your audiences attention with creative and innovative campaigns to help generate a buzz around your business.
Whether you create new video content, a new email newsletter, new COVID recovery product/service or even a social media campaign, try and think outside of the box and make sure to engage with your audience.
Reach out to other similar businesses for other advice and support too. Many industries encourage partnerships and cooperative operations which provide valuable support networks that can especially help smaller businesses.
If you need help managing your social media, creating an email campaign or drawing up a new marketing strategy to cope with COVID recovery, please do get in touch.