Coronavirus: What Small Businesses Must Do To Survive Covid-19

It is tough right now, which means you can ask how you can be of help. Be helpful, be supportive, provide value, nurture your leads and delight your customers, share knowledge, share resources, make certain content available for free, and keep on engaging in the conversation with your audience. The struggle is what connects you. Right now, it's something that you have in common. Now is the time to show that you are a personal brand and a personable company. Struggling together is what binds you together. And when you're helpful to people right now, it has to potential to result in the biggest customer loyalty ever. Embrace the transformation. Investing in and focusing on digital marketing is not just an emergency fill-in. It is the future. The future is digital. This is the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Get ready for the digital marketing strategies and tactics that attract great customer relationships to your business. Here is your host Monique Idemudia. Hi there. This is Monique and you're listening to episode number six of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Thanks for joining me again. In the last episode, I have been talking about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) from a more positive perspective, and I have shared some thoughts and actionable tips with you, on how you can save your business from the crash, and showed you ways how you can use the recession to grow your business. You can go check that out, if you haven't already. That's episode number five. Because today, I'm going to build on that and share even more actionable tips with you, and show you things that you can do right now as a small business owner. Your business will become more reliant than ever on your digital marketing strategy in the upcoming months. In many cases, your digital marketing strategy will be the deciding factor in whether your business will make it through the tough times that lie ahead of us, or not. Everything related to live events and conferences, in person meetings, and all other forms of face-to-face business will now take place online, in the digital world. And this is going to be like that for the next months to come. If you are a B2B business, in particular, you rely on the annual circuit of trade shows and exhibitions to network and build your customer relationships. And if you're in an industry that is not as digital native, you may have a less sophisticated digital marketing strategy. And I also know, a lot of you fellow small business owners out there still rely on word of mouth referrals a lot to get new customers. You're stuck in the hustle and referral loop, and haven't had a chance to pursue other lead generation strategies yet. Digital clearly is the way to go right now. Now is not the time to stop communicating with your customers. It's the opposite. They want to hear from you. You just shouldn't be salesy the right now. Don't ask for a payment, not even if they are late to pay. Be understanding. It is tough right now, which means you can ask how you can be of help. Be helpful, be supportive, provide value, nurture your leads and delight your customers, share knowledge, share resources, make certain content available for free, and keep on engaging in the conversation with your audience. The struggle is what connects you right now. It's something that you have in common. Now is the time to show that you are a personal brand and a personable company. Struggling together is what binds you together. And when you're helpful to people right now, it has to potential to result in the biggest customer loyalty ever. This is your opportunity not only to retain this one customer, but they'll love you so much for being a reliable partner during this time, and always remember that, and pass that brand loyalty on to potentially their children, their grandchildren, all of their other family members and friends, their business partners, and everyone they know. There are a number of things that you can do right now to connect with your audience and build that strong online presence that you need. And those are things that you can do yourself. You don't need to hire anyone to do those things for you. Get ready because I'm gonna share with you three powerful digital marketing practices, that you can do right now to connect with your audience in this challenging time. Number one. Connect with your audience through social media marketing. You don't have to be a professional social media marketer to connect with the audience through social media. You most likely have a Facebook business page and you have followers that follow your business on Facebook. If you're like most businesses, you at least have a Facebook page. And if not, you can create one right now. It only takes one minute and it's free. If you have other social media accounts too, that's even better. Because now is the time to interact with you audience more than ever, and ask how you can be of help to them. And also become active again on the platforms that you've neglected for so long and haven't posted any updates in months. Get active and engage in the exchange. Marketing really is a conversation. Number two. Connect with your audience through email marketing. Every business uses emails as one method of communication. You can start an email marketing campaign today. Most people check their emails everyday. Send out original messages and show that you care, and don't send the same "How the Coronavirus affects us"-emails that everybody sends out right now. Make it about your audience, not about you. Most companies only talk about how the Coronavirus infects them and their business, and how they will be available now, and then include a discount code or something. Not that that is completely irrelevant, but you can stand out from the crowd by making it about your audience, by asking how you can help, how you can be of help, and support them. Number three. Connect with your audience through content marketing. There is this great, free graphic design tool called Canva. You can go ahead and sign up on canva.com because Canva makes it really easy to come up with amazing and beautiful pieces of content. They also have plenty of free templates you can use, if you're not that confident in your artistic skills yet. And then you can create useful and helpful content and share it with your audience. You can simply write a checklist for something relevant in your industry right now, for example "Things to consider when so many of your employees now work from home", and make it look pretty and share it with your audience. Those are the three digital marketing tactics that you can do right now as a beginner. For the more advanced things that you also gonna want to take care of like SEO and automation, you can still get help from a digital marketing specialist. The key to survive as a small business in any environment and under any circumstances is resilience and adaptability. You need to have a stable organizational structure and be quick to adapt to changes, and you will be successful and persist, and be able to grow your business over time. This is not the first challenge, and it won't be the last one that you have to master. Embrace the transformation! Investing in and focusing on digital marketing is not just an emergency fill in. It is the future. The future is digital. There most likely won't be a "back to normal". This will have a lasting effect on the world, and there are many benefits. Companies will find that it is much more efficient and practical to have digital processes and have digitalized the reporting, and love the fact that you can analyze and track everything digital, and get all of those metrics that you can then use as reference points to improve. And I'm sure many companies will find that their employees also have been a lot more efficient working from home. This can really kick off a home office and remote work culture, which is what so many companies have been shying away from for so long. It also saves costs and space, and there will be less traffic out in the streets. And many people are so much happier to be able to work in the comfort of their own home. There are all of those positive effects and new opportunities that come along with the changes that we experience right now. Summing up. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Now is the time to communicate with your audience. They want to hear from you. You just can't be salesy. Instead, be helpful. Provide value, giveaway useful content, show yourself as a personal brand, and just be human. You can use the opportunity to educate your audience and share knowledge, and establish yourself as a trustworthy expert. You can be entertaining and motivating and inspiring. You need to embrace the digital transformation and use it as an opportunity to get started with digitalizing your business. And I really want your business to make it. That's why I'm recording this episode. I'm rooting for all small businesses. We are an important part of the economy and we have the advantages of being flexible and dynamic. We have the ability to adapt to changes in the environment more quickly, and we're not held back by stiff routines and bureaucracy like big corporations. And when you make use of the advantages that you have as a small business owner, you can and will make it through these challenging times. You can get started today and do basic social media marketing, email marketing, and content marketing, today. And when you need help with your digital marketing, check out our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing. We offer a free consultation, and you can schedule your free consultation on our website. That's dragon-digital-marketing.com. There you can also find the shownotes of this episode and further resources. And if you're interested in joining a community where we share helpful resources, and exchange our thoughts and feelings, and swap ideas, join our Small Business Survivors Facebook Group. I really hope that this helps you out, and that's all I got for you today. Until next time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. You can visit us at dragon-digital-marketing.com for more resources and for more episodes. Let us know how you like the show and write us a review. We are grateful when you like, share, and subscribe. We appreciate you.