Times are tough. I remember, they shut us down for two weeks, then it was two months, now it is going on a year, and already more than half of our businesses are lost and gone forever. What have we learned? Here are the Top 10 Things You Can Do to Destroy Your Business Forever during the pandemic.
Top 10 Things You Can Do to Destroy Your Business Forever
1. Don’t Change the Way You Do Business
The worst thing you could do is to just go about business day-to-day as you always did pre-pandemic. The world is changing. Your customers are changing the way they go about reaching out for your products and services from the convenience of their homes while under lockdown. You can adapt to this new method of doing business, or not.
2. Don’t Convert Old Customers into Digital Prospects
If you have previous client contact information, now is the time to convert them into digital prospects. If you don’t have their email addresses, reach out to them, and reward them to get it to you. Reward them with discounts, incentives, and access to proprietary information that people who are not on your preferred customer list never get access to. Or disregard.
3. Don’t Find New Ways to Deliver Your Products of Services to Homes
Getting your products or services to your customers wherever they may be by any means is a priority if you are to continue to do business in the new economy. Figure this out, and you can continue to operate during the lockdown. Take advantage of shipping and other delivery methods, electronic, if possible. Or not.
4. Don’t Communicate with Your Clients
Communicate regularly (but not so often as to be interruptive or too imposing) via any method possible. Utilize electronic communication, and consider direct mail campaigns, if you are not already doing so. Incentivize them for listening and tell them what they want to hear… not so much about you, but about how their lives will be so much better with you. Be humble and empathetic or disregard them and they will walk away (you are already losing them, anyway).
5. Don’t Strengthen Your Online Presence
You need to have the name-of-your-business-dot-com so that your customers can find you, with daily updates to give them reasons to check-in (and to attract new clients to what you are doing). Be found as active on social media platforms with consistent branding, message, and tone of voice. Or not.
6. Don’t Engage in Targeted Digital Marketing
Face it. Your clients are online, you must get their attention there. Your previous customers are there, and potential new prospects are there, you have no choice but to reach out to them where they are. Or hope to God they find you some other way.
7. Don’t Invite Your Customers to Buy from You Online
Your clients are using the Internet and their credit cards or PayPal to make their online purchases. If you intend to continue doing business with them, you will need to deploy an online marketing platform and allow them to Buy Now with the push of a button to access your products and services, or else, they go elsewhere.
8. Do Decrease Your Ad Budget Because Revenues are Down
This was the first thing we saw those failing businesses do, but the survivors increased their ad budgets and expanded their market reach, spending more in digital mediums. Those businesses that are gone and never to be heard from again? They cut back on advertising due to decreased revenues.
9. Close Your Doors and Wait for Normal to Return
Then, there were the businesses who shut down their operations altogether, hoping to be able to hibernate until the dust of the pandemic settled. But how long can you sustain an inoperable business? Paying the freight (overhead) with no new income? Unsustainable for long, and this pandemic has lingered much longer than we had initially imagined it would.
10. Don’t Fight to Survive in the New Economy
Giving up and not fighting for any way to sustain your business no matter what the circumstances is the death blow to any business or organization. Not fighting for yourself, your business, what you believe in, does not give you the right to represent well in the post-pandemic world.
Times are changing and you must change with it, or not.