Tag: covid 19

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How Are Small Businesses Surviving the Pandemic?

Times are tough and business consultants are frantically teamed-up with their clients to make the adjustments necessary to save failing businesses that are disintegrating due to the current pandemic restrictions. For those small businesses surviving the pandemic, their success is attributed to being flexible, adaptive, and acting quickly for sustainability.

But coming up with a plan to transition to this new economy is not a one-size-fits-all strategy as every business, every market, and the surrounding socio-political environment is unique, and therefore, the solutions are just as unique to each business.

Digital Marketing

Short of hiring a Certified Digital Marketing Specialist, there are many digital marketing opportunities that can be effective in maintaining connection and public relations active but this is an activity that, if not managed well, can run away with the potential profits which are sorely needed in these unprecedented times.

Certainly, there are many free digital marketing tools available to the pandemic-bound business and organization, but they take time for your digital staff to deploy. When your business is hanging in the balance, one wrong move in your digital marketing effort could do more harm than good.

Businesses need to embrace the digital connection methods but must closely monitor what is working and what is not and be able to make the necessary adjustments as quickly as possible.

It is About Them

When reaching out to your client base remember, they are more considered about “what’s in it for me.” They are turned into WIIFM, and if you are not speaking to them about them, they will be listening and responding to someone else who is talking to them.

You must be able to identify your target market and get to know them better than ever so that you can reach out via your digital marketing efforts to connect to them. If you know exactly who your market is, what they like, what they do, how do they make decisions, where they hang out, what they do for fun, you will have more ways to target your marketing to them and build relationships with them.

Stop making your message about you and make it about them. Use the word “you” as often as possible in all your digital marketing efforts. This makes them feel like you are talking to them, and make your message all about them, and yes, what you can do for them and how they will benefit from your product or service.

Selling Online

Transactions made over the Internet are different from transactions made face to face, in brick-and-mortar retail establishments, or within office spaces. You must be able to plug into the digital economy, enable clients to interact with you and/or your staff, to order and pay online quickly and easily.

Connect to your clients using technologies such as Skype or Zoom, and make sure your appearance and presentation represent how you want to be seen by your audience. Wear appropriate attire, have good lighting, audio, and a nice backdrop for your videoconferencing.

Selling online will also mean re-evaluating your delivery systems to deploy your products and services to reach your customers at home.

Increased Value

In the digital marketplace, you need to provide your clientele with as much value as possible. So, creating and supplying workbooks for virtual presentations, providing tools and guides that they can use and will make their lives better, these are things they are looking for. Plus, anything you can give them to download, view, or print, means more potential for connection, and building that invaluable relationship after the online exposure has taken place.

Lead with your most valuable information first. The rule of thumb is to

Tell them what

But don’t tell them how

Leave “the how” specifics for a more detailed and intimate conversation at a later date (and higher price point).

Do not worry about not making the sale immediately. Business is conducted differently online. Take your time building the relationship in the selling process and let them come to you in the instant they are ready to press your Buy Now button.

Conduct Webinars

Online webinars appear to be the most effective way to bridge the gap between your pre-pandemic and pandemic clientele. Live presentations in public are considered too dangerous during the pandemic, so conducting virtual events is the answer. And you will be pleasantly pleased to discover that virtual seminars are far less expensive than their live counterparts but must be conducted completely differently.

These online events will increase your exposure and increases your credibility and connection with new and existing clients. Remember to provide value and educate your audience via your webinars.

Communicate Communicate Communicate

You must regularly communicate with your target audience to maintain connection and relationship. Enroll them in drip campaigns, let them opt into your mailing list, and provide them with regular updates. Let them know what you are doing, and how you are doing.

Increase your connection, not only with your target market but also with others in your field who are also trying to survive the pandemic. Together we can weather the storm and make it to the other side.

We are all in this together.

Exercise empathy, compassion, and humility in your communications, but be careful not to overdo it. This applies to all communication with clients, potential clients, employees, business associates, and peers. You do not want your audience to unsubscribe, delete your messages, or even worse, mark your messages as spam.

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The COVID Work from Home Experiment

There has been a great deal of anticipation about the COVID work from home experiment, and it appears that the upside is the many benefits of remote work which has generally improved the performance of office workers by nearly 30% in productivity with very low overhead costs. A huge win in the workforce in the United States of America.

Even with the overwhelmingly positive results and huge benefits to the bottom lines of companies and organizations who have successfully embraced (and cashed-in on) the telecommute work-from-home model has not without its challenges.

At the very least, Internet connectivity, having the basic electronic devices required, being able to have an effective workspace within the home, and managing family around the home office are the basic requirements to have nailed down in the beginning.

The first real concern to show up was paranoia among management. “How can we be expected to trust employees working from home?” The first wave of response was to attempt to initiate surveillance efforts to micromanage remote workers. The results appear to indicate counterproductivity as initial increases in productivity began to decline.

In the new world of the telecommuter, a reasonable degree of trust must be part of the foundation of the teleworking agreement. Employers must find other ways and means of tracking individual employee productivity over time, besides looking over the shoulder of staff members.

After all, they are working from home, which means they could be doing practically anything from drinking on the job to working naked for all we know (and they are).

Nevertheless, for the companies and organizations who fully embrace the idea of staff working from home, their number are up, and expenses are down.

While all the numbers are looking good, it appears that telecommuters in the $150,000-range (and up) are seeing the greatest increase in productivity and value to the employers during this period of time when we are testing the waters of sending workers home to work.

At the same time, other industries that do not translate as well to the telework atmosphere, are barely staying alive, and some of them are closing their doors forever. Channels such as manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, and hospitality, are experiencing the greatest challenges and struggle for survivability during these unprecedented times.

Telecommuters are facing their own set of challenges, such as a general decline of overall mental health, while family viability in workers’ households is declining at an alarming rate, causing some parents to have to make a choice between work and family.

One of the biggest issues for remote workers to tackle is how to manage work tasks amid the various distractions that might vie for one’s attention in a work from home environment. This is in huge contrast to being secluded in a safe and sane corporate office setting, where very little effort need be exerted to focus on tasks at hand.

Instead of the brief interactions that may distract you briefly at the office, home office interruptions may include anything from doorbells, phones ringing, dishes in the sink, impatient children and/or pets desiring attention, and the list goes on and on.

Kids at home who are attending schools remotely online are also a growing concern for telecommuters.

Being able to set up a home office space that has separations from the rest of the household and establishing boundaries seems to help remote workers manage distractions that might otherwise negatively affect their overall performance.

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New Telecommute World of Jobs Online

To ready yourself for the new world that is developing before our very eyes, it will require a major readjustment in the way you think about your work, job, and career. In the last 100 years, work was all about finding a way to get from your home to your work establishment to earn an income and return to your home, where you may enjoy some rest and relaxation.

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If you were like the growing majority of us, you may have found yourself shuttling between to or more jobs just to make the ends meet. Even with the raising of minimum wages across the USA, the minimum wage was not keeping up with inflation.

This meant we were working harder for less, and were exerting time, effort, and absorbing the expense of traveling to and from one or more work destinations to support our families.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which changed the way we do business in America. To survive the worst part of the pandemic those who lost their jobs due to the coronavirus lock-downs, they were granted unemployment wages, plus a government stipend to help mitigate the damages of the shutdown.

During the period of the lock-down, essential workers were allowed to continue to travel to and from work, while others were permitted to continue to work if they could transform their work into a telecommuting job, which meant they would have to find ways to perform their duties from home in order to retain their jobs.

Telecommuting or working from home is not as easy as it sounds it means having to adopt a new state of mind when it comes to how you think about “being home.” You must set aside some separate workspace where you conduct your work activities without being interrupted. If you live alone, no problem, you may be comfortable kicking back on the couch and working in your pajamas (if your work does not include some videoconferencing).

Otherwise, you need to set aside a dedicated space to conduct your work, which could be in a spare room if you have one, otherwise, you can carve space out of an existing space, like a corner of the living room or bedroom, where you can set up a pseudo-office space to work at from home.

This is the future:

Most of the American work will be done from home.

The biggest fear of businesses in the United States is that without the constant overseeing of employees, production numbers would drop. Employers feared that left to their own devices, without supervision, employees would goof off, watch TV, or spend hours surfing the Internet instead of working.

This is what held back most employers from even considering making the shift from the office to telecommuting. When the coronavirus threat all but shut down American business, the only hope for survival was to hope that being able to telecommute and work from home would potentially save the non-essential businesses.

And what they discovered was that productivity for the work-from-home staff was increased by nearly 20 percent. As time went on and the COVID lock-down lingered, business owners and employers started to see the new future of business unfold before them.

They could imagine embracing this new methodology of conducting business as a positive way to greatly reduce expenses and expand their bottom line.